Fundamentals of the Continuous Improvement Process

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Coursera
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Paid Course
Languages

English
Certificate

Certificate Available
Effort

6 weeks, 1 hour a week
Sessions

Self-Paced
Level

Beginner
Subtitles

English

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Overview

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Improve how agile and hybrid teams deliver value with Disciplined Agile principles, Lean thinking, flow metrics, and Google Sheets. Replace process assumptions with evidence, make context-sensitive decisions, and sustain measurable improvement. Throughout the course, you’ll explore: Flow Metrics and Waste: Measure cycle time, work in progress, throughput, and flow efficiency, then identify delays, handoffs, and rework. Disciplined Agile Decisions: Assess your team against the seven promises and create a decision playbook for context-dependent choices. Way of Working: Tailor process goals and decision points, recording selected options, trade-offs, and signals for evolution. Value Stream Management: Map delivery from request to released value, locate the constraint, and set targets with baselines and review dates. Life Cycles and Experiments: Select a life cycle for your context and build a ninety-day roadmap of testable improvement experiments. By the end of the course, you’ll be able to create practical improvement artifacts, including prioritized backlog, a tailored way-of-working canvas, a value stream map, a life-cycle decision record, and a measured improvement roadmap.

Syllabus

How to diagnose your team's way of working with Lean and flow metrics
- Which part of your team's workflow should you fix first, and how do you know you are right? This module answers that question by having you produce a prioritized improvement backlog for one real workflow, built on evidence rather than opinion. You will start by measuring how work actually moves: cycle time, work in progress, throughput, and flow efficiency, calculated from a sample data set that mirrors a typical team board. You will then run a waste walk using Lean's eight categories of waste, tracing a single piece of delivered work from request to release and marking every delay, handoff, and rework loop along the way. The methods come from Lean thinking, flow analytics, and the Disciplined Agile principle of optimizing flow, supported by a spreadsheet template, a sample data set, and a waste checklist you can reuse. This module is written for Scrum Masters, agile team leads, coaches, and delivery managers working in agile or hybrid environments. No prior Disciplined Agile knowledge is required, and no access to your own team's data is needed, because every exercise ships with sample data you can substitute later. You will finish with a prioritized improvement backlog naming at least three candidate changes, each tied to a metric and a bottleneck you identified, ready to feed the tailoring and experiment work that follows.
How to apply the Disciplined Agile mindset to sharpen team decisions
- What makes one agile team decide consistently better than another team running the same ceremonies? This module answers that by having you build a team decision playbook that records how your team will choose between competing options. You will work through the Disciplined Agile mindset in three layers: the principles that set direction, the promises that define how team members treat each other, and the guidelines that shape leadership behaviour. You will then score your own team against the seven promises to find the two weakest, and work three realistic scenarios where context changes which option is correct, so that Context Counts stops being a slogan and becomes a decision test you can apply. The module draws on the Disciplined Agile mindset published on PMI's public knowledge base, along with a scoring template and a scenario set you can rerun in a team workshop. It is written for Scrum Masters, agile team leads, coaches, and delivery managers in agile or hybrid environments, and assumes no previous Disciplined Agile study. Basic familiarity with any agile method is helpful but not required. You will finish with a completed promise assessment and a one-page decision playbook that records which principles your team will apply, which promises need attention, and how the team will handle situations where the standard answer does not fit.
How to tailor your way of working with DA process goal diagrams
- Your team was told to follow a method, and parts of it clearly do not fit your context. What do you change, and how do you defend the change? This module has you produce a tailored way of working canvas that records your team's process decisions and the reasoning behind each one. You will learn why process tailoring is necessary rather than a sign of immaturity, and how Disciplined Agile represents choice through process goals, decision points, and rated options. You will then tailor a real goal diagram, working through Improve Quality decision point by decision point to mark what your team does today and what it will try next, and document those choices using the Evolve Way of Working goal. The work uses the process goal diagrams published openly on PMI's Disciplined Agile knowledge base, plus a canvas template and a tailoring worksheet. It is intended for Scrum Masters, agile team leads, coaches, and delivery managers in agile or hybrid environments, and requires no Disciplined Agile certification or prior toolkit experience. You will finish with a tailored way of working canvas covering at least four decision points, showing your current option, your chosen next option, and the trade-off you accepted, which gives you something concrete to review with your team and revisit as your context changes.
How to optimize value delivery with value stream mapping
- Your team's sprints look healthy, yet customers still wait weeks for anything to arrive. Where does the time actually go? This module has you build a value stream map of your delivery process and set measurable flow improvement targets from it. You will learn what value stream management adds to team-level agility, why local optimization inside a single team rarely shortens end-to-end delivery, and how to separate touch time from wait time so that flow efficiency becomes visible rather than assumed. You will then map your own delivery steps from request to released value, mark every queue, handoff, and approval, and calculate lead time and flow efficiency for the stream as a whole. From that map you will choose the constraint worth attacking and write improvement targets stating a current number, a target number, and a review date. The module uses value stream mapping, flow metrics, basic queue behaviour, and the Disciplined Agile view of optimizing the whole, supported by a mapping template and a fully worked example. It suits Scrum Masters, agile team leads, coaches, and delivery managers in agile or hybrid environments and assumes no Lean background. You will finish with a value stream map and three improvement targets that can be tracked, reported, and defended to stakeholders who want evidence rather than enthusiasm.
How to choose a DA life cycle for continuous delivery
- Should your team run Scrum-style sprints, a Kanban-style flow, or release continuously, and what happens when half the organization still works to a plan? This module has you produce a documented life cycle decision for one team, with the reasoning and the review trigger written down. You will compare the Disciplined Agile life cycles, including the Agile and Lean life cycles, the two Continuous Delivery variants, the Exploratory life cycle, and the Program life cycle, and learn what each one demands in practice before it can work. You will then apply selection criteria to several team profiles, matching each profile to a life cycle and justifying the match, and work through a hybrid scenario where an agile team must coordinate with stage-gated partners without pretending the difference away. The module draws on Disciplined Agile life cycle guidance, continuous delivery readiness criteria, and coordination patterns for mixed environments, supported by a selection matrix and scenario cards. It is designed for Scrum Masters, agile team leads, coaches, and delivery managers, and needs no prior Disciplined Agile knowledge. You will finish with a life cycle decision record stating the life cycle chosen, the evidence behind the choice, the practices the team must add to support it, and the conditions that would trigger a change.
How to sustain a continuous improvement culture with guided experiments
- Most improvement efforts survive two retrospectives and then quietly stop. How do you make improvement something your team keeps doing? This module has you build a ninety-day improvement roadmap that sequences real experiments and names how each one will be measured. You will learn how Guided Continuous Improvement combines a short experiment loop with the Disciplined Agile toolkit, so that teams choose from proven options instead of guessing, and why psychological safety and honest measurement decide whether improvement work survives contact with delivery pressure. You will then write a testable improvement hypothesis complete with a measure, a sample size, and a review date, and rewrite vague retrospective actions such as communicate better into changes that can actually be verified. Finally you will practise the conversation that most often kills improvement, defending a proposed change to a skeptical team lead who has tried something similar before. The module uses Guided Continuous Improvement, experiment design, retrospective facilitation, and outcome-based measurement, supported by an experiment card template and a roadmap planner. It fits Scrum Masters, agile team leads, coaches, and delivery managers in agile or hybrid environments, with no prerequisites. You will finish with a ninety-day improvement roadmap containing at least three sequenced experiments, each with an owner, a measure, and a decision point for keeping or dropping the change.