Fairway Sessions | Agile & Project Management Consulting

About This Workshop

Agile is not a methodology. It is a mindset, expressed through a set of values and principles that fundamentally change how teams organise their work and how organisations relate to uncertainty. The frameworks — Scrum, Kanban, XP, and the many others — are means to that end, not the end itself.

This two-day workshop builds a genuine agile foundation: understanding why agile exists, what problems it was designed to solve, and how different frameworks apply to different contexts. Participants work through real scenarios, not abstract theory, and leave with the ability to evaluate agile practices critically rather than implement them by rote.

The workshop covers Scrum and Kanban in depth, with a practical introduction to agile metrics, retrospective facilitation, and the most common failure modes that undermine teams in their first six months of agile adoption.

Best For

For teams beginning their agile journey, teams that have been "doing agile" for a while but suspect they are missing the point, or mixed groups of engineering, product, and business stakeholders who need to build a shared vocabulary and set of expectations.

Learning Objectives

Understand the Agile Manifesto, its values and principles, and why they matter in practice

Distinguish between the Scrum and Kanban frameworks and know when to apply each

Define and work with agile roles: Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Development Team

Plan, execute, and review a sprint using all Scrum ceremonies correctly

Use a Kanban board to visualise work, identify flow issues, and apply WIP limits

Measure agile delivery using velocity, cycle time, and throughput without becoming obsessed with metrics

Identify and respond to the most common agile adoption failure patterns

Run an effective retrospective that produces real team improvement

Common Challenges This Addresses

—

Teams going through the motions of agile ceremonies without understanding their purpose

—

Engineers and product managers using the same words to mean completely different things

—

Leadership expecting agile to mean "faster" without understanding the trade-offs involved

—

Retrospectives devolving into complaints sessions with no structural improvement

—

Sprint planning producing commitments based on optimism rather than empirical capacity

—

Mixed-experience teams where some members have deep knowledge and others have none

—

Organisations that have implemented Scrum but never experienced what good actually looks like

Workshop Agenda

Agile Foundations & Manifesto

The origin of agile, the Manifesto values and principles, and the specific problems agile was designed to solve. We explore what agile is not, and discuss the environments where it thrives versus where it struggles.

The Scrum Framework in Depth

Roles, events, artefacts, and the commitments. Participants work through a simulated sprint — planning, execution, and review — experiencing the framework as a complete system rather than a set of isolated ceremonies.

Agile Estimation & Planning

Story points, planning poker, capacity planning, and the relationship between velocity and sprint commitment. We address the most common planning dysfunctions and how to avoid them.

Kanban Essentials

Visualisation, WIP limits, flow metrics, and the class of service model. Participants design a Kanban system for a real scenario and practise identifying and resolving flow issues.

Metrics, Retrospectives & Failure Modes

Which metrics to track and which to ignore, how to run retrospectives that produce genuine improvement, and the 10 most common agile adoption failure modes with specific countermeasures.