Agile Project Management with Kanban and Jira Training Course

Target group:

IT Director, Project Manager, Technical Team Leader, Analyst, Software Developer, Tester

Learning objective:

The purpose of this training is to build knowledge and practical skills in the workshop aspects of Kanban and Agile foundations.

This course is designed for professionals seeking to integrate Agile methodologies (particularly SCRUM) with Lean and Kanban to effectively manage their projects.

It bridges the worlds of product design and software development.

This instructor-led, live training in New Zealand (available online or on-site) guides participants through the deployment of a JIRA instance. Participants will gain hands-on experience with advanced JIRA usage, including installation, configuration, upgrading, and migration. They will learn how to tailor JIRA to their specific project needs, manage users, groups, and project roles, configure and maintain dashboards, set up email notifications, implement JIRA security schemes, manage permissions, perform troubleshooting, and install and customise JIRA Service Desk. Additionally, they will learn to establish a knowledge base, manage Service Desk users, and collaboratively handle service requests.

By the end of this training, participants will be able to:

• Possess a thorough understanding of JIRA administration.
• Customise JIRA to align with their business requirements.
• Configure JIRA email settings and notification rules.
• Manage and assign users, groups, and project roles effectively.
• Administer JIRA permissions and security schemes.
• Carry out JIRA troubleshooting procedures.
• Deploy and customise JIRA Service Desk.

Upon completing this training, participants will be equipped to independently manage, optimise, and customise JIRA within a corporate environment.

This instructor-led, live training in New Zealand introduces the advanced capabilities of JIRA, including creating and managing various types of JIRA projects, leveraging JIRA for agile initiatives, configuring agile boards, managing both built-in and custom fields, creating and maintaining screens and filters, performing basic and advanced issue searches, applying screen schemes, managing and updating workflows, configuring and applying workflow schemes, conducting analysis, and generating reports.

By the end of this training, participants will be able to:

• Manage issues efficiently.
• Create and execute Scrum and Kanban projects.
• Administer built-in and custom fields.
• Comprehend and oversee business processes, workflows, and workflow schemes.
• Conduct both basic and advanced searches and analysis.
• Produce and evaluate reports.

This instructor-led, live training in New Zealand introduces JIRA’s approach to software planning, tracking, and releasing, guiding participants through the creation and management of a JIRA project.

By the end of this training, participants will be able to:

• Understand the concepts and functionality behind JIRA's user interface and workflows.
• Add, modify, clone, link, and prioritise issues.
• Progress issues through the entire workflow.
• Perform searches.
• Manage and customise screens and filters.

JIRA Software is a powerful tool for project management, yet people often focus more on the tool itself than on the underlying methodology.

This instructor-led, live training introduces participants to the combined strengths of Jira and Confluence, demonstrating how they work together to serve one essential purpose: helping teams successfully deliver their products and projects. Participants will learn how to use these tools effectively to manage user requirements, testing, and communication—all centralised in one place.

The course covers Jira projects, Confluence spaces, workflows, boards (Kanban and Scrum), planning and dependencies, the integration between Jira and Confluence, reporting, key and custom fields, issue types, screen configuration, and filtering.

By the end of this training, participants will be able to:

• Create a Scrum or Kanban project
• Configure Jira to manage the project effectively
• Manage issues efficiently
• Build the necessary screens to handle different issue types
• Create workflows and boards, and understand how they interact
• Perform basic and advanced searches and analysis
• Generate and review reports required by both the team and management

This instructor-led, live training in New Zealand (delivered online or on-site) is designed for intermediate-level project managers who want to effectively create, execute, and manage forms in Jira.

By the end of this training, participants will be able to:

• Understand Jira's core concepts, including issue types, workflows, and projects.
• Develop and manage custom fields to collect and organise data efficiently.
• Optimise form-related processes for a variety of project types and teams.

This instructor-led, live training in New Zealand (online or on-site) is aimed at intermediate-level Jira administrators who wish to learn how to use Jira Service Management efficiently.

By the end of this training, participants will be able to:

• Learn and understand the fundamentals of Jira Service Management.
• Set up and configure a service desk and manage requests.
• Manage the Jira Service Management backend and integrations.

This instructor-led, live training in New Zealand (online or onsite) is aimed at beginner-level to intermediate-level professionals who wish to enhance their Jira skills by learning how to integrate and utilise the Xray plugin, manage user roles and permissions, optimise data imports, and effectively handle storage management.

By the end of this training, participants will be able to:

• Integrate and configure the Xray plugin for test management.
• Manage Jira user profiles and assign appropriate roles and permissions.
• Efficiently import data into Jira following best practices.
• Optimise Jira storage usage and implement data management strategies.

Kanban Management Professional 1 (KMP1) is a highly interactive two-day course that blends teaching, group discussions and a fully immersive simulation to demonstrate how the Kanban Method helps individuals, teams and organisations manage and enhance the delivery of products and services to their customers.

The Kanban Method offers practical, actionable, evidence-based guidance for successful evolutionary change. It begins with what you currently do and pursues incremental change while respecting existing roles, responsibilities and job titles, and encouraging leadership at all levels. This enables organisations to gradually evolve business processes, define and apply relevant metrics to measure progress, and significantly reduce the risks associated with complex change initiatives.

Upon completing this course, you will gain a solid understanding of the Kanban principles and general practices, along with the skills needed to confidently apply Kanban within your organisation.

What Will You Learn?
- Identify internal and external sources of dissatisfaction
- Analyse demand versus capability
- Model the knowledge discovery process
- Design kanban systems and their visualisations
- Identify and prioritise improvements
- Select appropriate cadences for activities
- Identify classes of service

Who Is This Course For?
Anyone involved in product development or knowledge work. This includes, but is not limited to:
Programme and delivery managers
Product and project managers
Product developers, software developers and testers
People working in operations or support
Business analysts
Senior management
Anyone interested in implementing Agile within their organisation

Kanban is a workflow management method.

This instructor-led, live training (online or onsite) is designed for both beginner and advanced participants. The knowledge and tools provided can be applied in your daily work to optimise workflow efficiency.

By the end of this training, participants will be able to:

• Increase the number of work items completed per unit of time.
• Reduce the time required to complete work items.
• Improve work predictability (providing better answers to "When will it be done?").
• Manage flow metrics (throughput, lead time, work in progress, work item age).
• Use flow charts (Cumulative Flow Diagram, Lead Time Histogram, Work Ageing Chart).
• Utilise statistical forecasting methods, such as Monte Carlo simulations and Service Level Agreement.
• Design a Kanban System in a methodological way (STATIK).
• Understand Little's Law, which describes the nature of value flow.

This two-day course is designed to help teams that are part of an Agile Release Train (ART) operate effectively within an Agile environment by applying frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban, and XP. Participants will learn how to function as Agile Teams, create and manage their backlogs, and successfully plan and execute iterations. The course also emphasises understanding the team's role within the ART and how to collaborate, plan, execute, and continuously improve alongside other teams.

The training prepares teams to participate in a Program Increment (PI), covering both Team-level and Program-level events, with a particular focus on upcoming PI planning sessions. Completion of the course also prepares participants for the certification exam to become a SAFe® Practitioner (SP).

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

• Apply SAFe principles to scale Lean and Agile practices across the organisation.

• Understand their team's role within the Agile Release Train and how it contributes to overall objectives.

• Recognise other teams within the train, including their roles and interdependencies.

• Plan and execute iterations effectively.

• Demonstrate delivered value and continuously improve processes.

• Participate in and contribute to Program Increment planning.

• Collaborate and integrate work with other teams within the Agile Release Train.

Are you finding it challenging to implement Agile within your organisation? Is the change too prescriptive? Are your teams overburdened, less productive, yet still too resistant for a revolutionary shift?

Choose the "Alternative Path to Agility" and implement an evolutionary and humane Change Management Method that doesn't overhaul your process but improves it.

The Kanban Method offers pragmatic, actionable, evidence-based guidance for successful evolutionary change. It begins with what you are doing now and respects current roles, responsibilities, and job titles. This enables organisations to evolve business processes gradually, define and use relevant metrics to measure progress, and significantly reduce the risks associated with complex change programmes.

If your team is overwhelmed, Kanban can help you regain control of your work. Kanban is a new technique for dynamically managing your process and revealing bottlenecks.

This training provides the skills and knowledge you need to apply Kanban in your work and learn how to determine what to focus on now, what to defer for later, and what to remove from your to-do list for good.

Learning Outcomes

This one-day course covers the fundamentals of the Kanban Method® and serves as the entry point and starting place on the alternative path to agility.

Attendees will become familiar with the Kanban Method. They will be able to design and implement a basic Kanban board, understand work item types and the risks associated with specific items, and recognise a variety of team Kanban board designs and styles. They will also know how to choose a design best suited to their context. Additionally, they will gain awareness of the training roadmap and the value and benefits to be gained at each step along the "alternative path to agility."

Who Should Attend

This course is designed for any professional working in a product development or knowledge-work environment who is interested in discovering how Kanban can help improve working environments. Kanban works across multiple functions within an organisation, from senior staff looking to adopt Lean Management to delivery teams eager to improve their working practices. Previous attendees have included professionals in roles such as:

• Senior Management Positions (CxO)
• Program and Project Managers
• Product Managers, Product Owners, and Business Analysts
• Scrum Team Members
• Scrum Masters, Team Leads, and Change Agents
• Product & Software Developers & Testers
• Agile Coaches & Practitioners (Scrum, XP, DSDM, AgilePM, etc.)
• Other roles, including HR and Finance professionals