Business Agility Foundations
with ICAgile (ICP-BAF) Certification

 “During this Business Agility Foundations course, I particularly liked how Pia Maria Thoren used different presenters and augmented the course materials with videos and blogs to learn further and explore. This approach kept all the modules interesting and relevant with fresh points of view. One of the most positive aspects of this course was the global nature of this class. Learning about people’s perspectives working in different cultures was eye-opening and intriguing, such as exploring giving and receiving feedback. I highly recommend this course.”

• I’m so happy that I found this course, and Pia-Maria, your passion for agile has inspired me to change my career and business content agenda. I want to spread the Agile mission!
• Fantastic!
• Great work, great instructor, great team! I loved the whole journey
• Awesome course
• Great experience, really enjoyed it!

This training can lead to Professional Certification in Business Agility Foundations.

People at every level and in practically every role in today’s organizations must focus on customer delight and bring innovation and continuous improvement into their work. This is a hard challenge requiring either building new muscles or limbering up muscles we may not use often. The ICAgile Certified Professional in Business Agility Foundations (ICP-BAF) is intended to jumpstart the organizational and individual transformation towards a more responsive, value-driven reality. This highly experiential set of learning outcomes equips participants with new knowledge, tools, and techniques to implement immediately.

Target Audiences

Anyone interested in the paradigm shifts necessary to enable organizational agility in today’s innovative business climate will find the Business Agility Foundations course compelling. Although this is a generalist certification and an entry point to several ICAgile tracks, it is not a direct substitution for the ICAgile Certified Professional credential. However, those already holding the ICP are likely to find this course compelling, especially if they are on a journey towards business agility outside of a software development context.

Training Program

For this training, you will take part in 5 online 3 hour sessions. If you miss a session, you can take it back in the next course round. All times below are in CEST.

Session B1-5 Agile People Foundation

Session B1: The Need for Business Agility

In today’s Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity (VUCA) environment, business agility is more and more critical for success. The new competitive edge is new values and principles and self-organizing teams with the right mix of cognitively diverse people close to the customer experience and empowered to make decisions.

Session B2: Emergent Strategy and Value Creation

Aligning teams around a strong purpose and generating a vision is essential to providing inspiration and creating high performance. In addition, it’s imperative to empathize with customers to maximize customer value and make it visible to focus on value creation.

Session B3: Frameworks Tools and Techniques

Agile is about adapting to change. You adapt to the customers’ changing needs and work according to priorities to deliver the biggest value for the customer first. Using a Lean StartUp approach, you can test your hypothesis with a Minimum Viable Product. Using Scrum, Kanban, Value Stream Mapping in the whole company is not different from using it for Software development. What are examples, and how can you design your processes using the agile ways of working?

Session B4: New Ways of Thinking and Behaving

The ability to recognize and understand complex adaptive system dynamics accelerates the path towards Business Agility. It is not only our organization’s dynamics that we should understand and manage with “Polarity Management” and “Cynefin Decision Making Model”; but also our personal thinking & behaving patterns by the concept of the “Ladder of Inference.”

Session B5: Business Agility as the New Normal

In today’s fast-moving and complex environments, we need to be more responsive and adaptable to navigate the complexity. To do that, we need to:

• Understand how to make sense of business challenges when things keep changing
• Be able to make decisions and act when we don’t have all the information we feel we need
• Create the conditions to allow the right culture to grow for everyone to perform at their best. In this session, we will recap the impact on business.

Due to our VUCA world, we will explore what is needed in the business to embrace agility, deepen understanding of the structure/culture misfit, and why transformation can fail.

After the training, you can subscribe to the training material and the exercises you can use in your own organization or with your clients. For example, maybe you work today in an HR role or have been a leader for a shorter or longer period. Or maybe you are an agile coach who feels ready for deeper challenges and understanding regarding people and how HR and leaders need to change so that you can support them in their future roles.

FAQ

Do I need any pre-competence?

You don’t need any pre-competence to attend the online course. We are tailoring the course for the participants and your level. As a bonus, you will learn to use modern digital tools, like digital Canvases, Video meeting platforms, Kanban boards, etc.

How does the process look for this training?

We will use virtual online tools to communicate, learn and interact. You will need a good internet connection and an undisturbed workplace where you can have a quiet background. We will work in break-out sessions in Zoom and use our community platform for communication between the instructor-led sessions. We will go through all practicalities during the first session.

Are the sessions scheduled on specific days at specific times?

Yes, the sessions take place according to a schedule for the year that has been predetermined. If you miss a session, you can always take it back at a later session.

After training completion, what is the process to become ICAgile Certified?

The certification process requires finalizing the certification assignment and answering several questions after each session. When the assignment is finalized (approved with feedback from us), you can buy your ICAgile certificate in our shop. In addition, we will make your certificate download available from ICAgile via a link. The Agile People Certificate is included in the training price after finalizing the course.

Course Leader

Your course leader and facilitator is Manfred van Veghel.

Manfred van Veghel has 30 years of training and consultancy experience from large Dutch and international companies for Agile, HR, Leadership and Organization. He is the founder of the Agile Caribbean Meetup Group and has a global network of Agile People.

As a consultant he has worked with Agile since 2001 at ABN AMRO (DSDM) with several frameworks, Agile Project Management, DevOps, Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, Agile HR, Lean Leadership & Kaizen, from the Healthcare sector to ICT and governmental organizations in Europe, US and on different Caribbean islands.

He was involved as Agile Coach for the Agile HR transition of ING HR from 2015 – 2017, one of the biggest Agile HR transitions of its kind. Currently he involved in Agile Transitions in the Caribbean.

Online Delivery

We are working with Zoom for interactive discussions and team exercises, Mural as the digital canvas, and our own community platform for communication between the sessions. In addition, you will get access to a Learning Management System (on agilepeople.com) that contains an overview and detailed information about videos, articles, documents, and case stories for all sessions, including links to all of the tools used in training. You will also get access to Pia-Maria’s 3 books in digital format.

There will be some work before every session, so add about 3 hours more every week. We will distribute course literature and material digitally. You will accomplish the certification assignment between the sessions to be ready on the last session’s day.

Events Cancellation Policy

If you should have to cancel your registration, a notification in writing should be sent to info@agilepeople.com. Would you please make sure you state the name of the conference/event in the subject line of your email?

• We will refund 85% for cancellations received 60 days before the start of the event.
• We will refund 50% for cancellations received between 59 days before 31 days to the event’s start.
• We will refund 25% for cancellations received between 30 days before 14 days to the event’s start.
• We will issue no refund for cancellations received within 14 days of the event.
• You are allowed to send a colleague.