Agile and Scrum Methodologies in Project Management Training Course

Course overview

Scrum is short to describe and hard to run well. The whole framework fits in the Scrum Guide, which Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland keep deliberately brief, yet many teams drop the parts that create accountability: a real sprint goal, a definition of done that means releasable, an empowered product owner. The course teaches the framework as written, so participants can tell Scrum apart from a status meeting wearing its vocabulary.

The course opens with the 2001 Agile Manifesto, its four values and twelve principles, then moves through every Scrum element: three accountabilities, five events, three artifacts and their commitments. Participants study backlog refinement, user stories and story points, timeboxing, velocity and burndown charts, Kanban boards with WIP limits, and the SAFe and LeSS routes to scaling, all through documented sprint records.

Why so many Scrum adoptions stall

Surveys keep finding organizations that report using Scrum while their teams cannot name the current sprint goal. Renamed meetings are the usual culprit: a weekly status call becomes a daily scrum, a demo becomes a sprint review, and the inspect-and-adapt loop never forms. Escaping it means treating the events as decision points and clearing the clerical work that crowds them out. Automating routine tracking reclaims much of that time; our course on enhancing productivity through project automation shows how.

Course objectives

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

• Tie Agile Manifesto principles to delivery decisions
• Assign accountabilities across the three Scrum roles
• Build and order a backlog using story points and acceptance criteria
• Apply a definition of done to judge releasability
• Read velocity trends and burndown charts as planning inputs
• Limit work in progress to expose flow bottlenecks
• Compare SAFe and LeSS scaling approaches for large programs
• Diagnose a struggling Scrum implementation from sprint records

Course outline

Unit 1: Introduction to Agile in project management

• The 2001 Agile Manifesto: four values, twelve principles
• Empirical process control against plan-driven prediction
• Short feedback cycles versus sequential phases
• Documented case: iteration reviews replacing milestones

Unit 2: Scrum framework essentials

• Product owner, scrum master, and developers: boundaries
• Five events, three artifacts, and their commitments
• Frequent failures: absent owners and fractional teams
• Analysis of a sprint record from a faithful Scrum team

Unit 3: Backlog management and refinement

• Writing user stories with testable acceptance criteria
• Ordering by value, risk, dependency, and cost of delay
• Ongoing refinement: splitting items and estimating points
• Tracing backlog order to the product goal and strategy

Unit 4: Sprint planning and execution

• Sprint goal, selected items, and the sprint backlog
• Timeboxing and sizing the sprint against measured capacity
• The sprint backlog as a live artifact developers update
• Worked example: planning a sprint from an ordered backlog

Unit 5: Daily scrum and collaboration

• The daily scrum: a fifteen-minute inspection of progress
• Keeping the event owned by developers, not a status report
• Kanban boards with WIP limits exposing bottlenecks
• Paired transcripts: daily scrum versus a status meeting

Unit 6: Sprint review and retrospective

• Sprint review: inspect the increment, adjust the backlog
• Applying the definition of done, including undone work
• Retrospective formats and committing one improvement
• Transcripts of a retrospective that changed behavior

Unit 7: Agile risk and change management

• Risk reduction via frequent increments, early integration
• Mid-sprint change: protecting the sprint goal first
• Spikes and rolling-wave forecasting for uncertainty
• Worked example: reforecasting a release from velocity data

Unit 8: Scaling agile for large projects

• SAFe: Agile Release Trains, PI planning, and added layers
• LeSS: one backlog, one product owner, and many teams
• Cross-team coordination through shared refinement
• When to scale, when to descale, and hybrid governance

Unit 9: Agile tools and digital platforms

• Tracking platforms configured around the sprint backlog
• Burndown, burnup, and cumulative flow views
• Linking delivery tools to reporting without double entry
• Anti-patterns: ticket bureaucracy and phantom estimates

Unit 10: Stakeholder engagement in agile projects

• The sprint review as the engagement rhythm for sponsors
• Forecasts as velocity ranges, not single-date promises
• Transparency via visible backlogs, inspectable increments
• Case discussion: a sponsor demanding fixed scope and dates

Unit 11: Global best practices in agile and Scrum

• Documented cases in banking, manufacturing, and media
• Benchmarking with care: which delivery metrics transfer
• Adapting practices without breaking inspect-and-adapt
• Facilitated discussion of survey findings on maturity

Unit 12: Capstone case study

• A multi-sprint record from backlog to released increments
• Evaluating order, sprint goals, and definition of done
• Diagnosing drift from the Scrum Guide and its cost
• Drafting corrections participants can adapt at work

How the course is delivered

Expect to spend most of each session inside real project evidence. Facilitators bring documented sprint records, ceremony transcripts, and backlog snapshots, which participants analyze through guided walkthroughs and facilitated discussion. Worked examples show each technique end to end before the group applies the reasoning to a fresh case. There are no acted exercises; everything stays anchored in what teams actually did.

Who should attend

It suits anyone who plans, leads, or contributes to iterative delivery.

• Project managers moving from predictive planning into iterative delivery
• Current and aspiring scrum masters and agile coaches
• Product owners, product managers, and business analysts who shape backlogs
• Delivery and operations managers overseeing Scrum teams
• Consultants advising clients on agile ways of working

About EuroQuest International Training

The provider behind this course, EuroQuest International Training, was founded in 2015 in Bratislava, Slovakia. It delivers a catalog of 1,000-plus courses that more than 15,000 participants have completed, with venues in Istanbul, Dubai, Vienna, London, Geneva, Barcelona, and Paris available across the year.

Frequently asked questions

Is this course only for software teams?

No. Scrum grew up in software, but the course treats it as a general approach to complex work. Cases include marketing campaigns, product development outside software, and internal change projects.

Will I receive a Scrum certification such as CSM, PSM, or PMI-ACP?

You will receive a EuroQuest certificate of completion, and nothing beyond that. The course awards no CSM, PSM, PMI-ACP, or other third-party credential, and EuroQuest holds no affiliation with Scrum Alliance, Scrum.org, or PMI; the framework is taught as subject matter from public sources, chiefly the Scrum Guide.

Do we practice the Scrum ceremonies during the course?

Not as acted exercises. The course instead examines documented sprint cycles: participants read real transcripts of daily scrums, reviews, and retrospectives, then discuss how each event should run and how a facilitator would fix what went wrong. Dissecting a genuine failed retrospective teaches more than staging an artificial one.

Related courses

These EuroQuest courses extend the ground covered here in different directions.

• Hybrid Project Management Approaches, for blending agile delivery with predictive planning
• Fundamentals of Project Management, for the core discipline before specializing in a framework
• The Future of Project Management, covering the trends and tools reshaping how projects are run
• Six Sigma and Lean Project Management, which shares agile's roots in lean thinking and continuous improvement

Register for this course

Seats are confirmed in registration order, so reserve yours early via the EuroQuest registration form or by emailing your preferred city to info@euroqst.com.