EXIN Agile Business Professional cheat sheet

Agile mindset = a set of beliefs and values that guide behaviour; the four values of the Agile Manifesto are the reference point, not a process template.

The four Manifesto values are preferences, not absolutes: individuals and interactions over processes and tools; working software over comprehensive documentation; customer collaboration over contract negotiation; responding to change over following a plan.

The twelve Agile principles operationalize the values; the first principle is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

Fixed vs. growth mindset (Dweck): a growth mindset treats ability as developable, which is the precondition for empirical process control and retrospectives.

Empirical process control rests on three pillars: transparency, inspection, adaptation; without transparency, inspection is misleading and adaptation is harmful.

Agile is a mindset first, then a set of practices; adopting ceremonies without changing beliefs produces 'cargo cult' Agile with no measurable change in outcomes.

Lean thinking contributes value definition, value-stream mapping, flow, pull, and perfection; waste (muda) is anything that does not add customer value.

Complexity framing: in the Cynefin 'complex' domain, cause and effect are only visible in hindsight, so probe-sense-respond replaces plan-then-execute.

Mindset indicators observable in behaviour: willingness to expose bad news early, tolerance for emergent design, and decisions made by the people closest to the work.

Psychological safety (Edmondson) is the shared belief that interpersonal risk-taking is safe; it predicts learning behaviour and is a prerequisite for honest retrospectives.

Culture is shaped by what leaders measure, reward, and tolerate; a single contradictory KPI (e.g., individual utilization) can override a stated Agile value.

Servant leadership inverts the hierarchy: the leader's job is to remove impediments and grow capability, not to assign tasks.

Self-organizing teams choose how to do the work; the Scrum Guide's self-managing teams also choose what to work on within the sprint goal.

Facilitation stance: the facilitator manages process and participation, not content; the decision belongs to the team.

Conflict handling modes (Thomas-Kilmann): competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, accommodating; collaborating is the default for value-creating decisions.

Retrospective structure follows set-the-stage, gather data, generate insights, decide what to do, close; skipping the decision step converts the ritual into a complaint session.

Working agreements and team charters make implicit norms explicit and are revisited when behaviour drifts from the agreement.

Distributed teams need explicit communication protocols (channels, response times, decision records) because informal osmotic communication is lost.

Business value is the worth delivered to the organization and customer; it is not identical to story points, velocity, or output volume.

Prioritization by cost of delay and duration: WSJF = cost of delay / job duration; the highest WSJF item goes first.

Cost of delay combines value, time criticality, and risk reduction or opportunity enablement; each is estimated on the same relative scale.

Value stream mapping measures process efficiency = value-adding time / total lead time; most delivery systems sit in single-digit percentages.

Little's Law: average items in progress = arrival rate × average time in system; reducing work in progress reduces cycle time when throughput is stable.

Cumulative flow diagrams expose bottlenecks: a widening band in one column means that stage is the constraint.

Definition of Done is the quality gate that keeps 'done' from meaning 'code complete'; undelivered increments carry zero realized value.

Outcome over output: measure change in customer or business behaviour (adoption, revenue, satisfaction), not features shipped.

Value is realized only when the increment reaches the customer; lead time from decision to delivery is the lever that most affects realized value.

Scaling frameworks (SAFe, LeSS, Scrum@Scale, Nexus) coordinate multiple teams; they are not substitutes for team-level competence.

A change curve (skepticism, resistance, acceptance, commitment) is normal; resistance is information about the system, not disloyalty.

Kotter-style change sequence: urgency, coalition, vision, communication, removing obstacles, short-term wins, consolidating, anchoring in culture.

Structural coupling: team boundaries and reporting lines should follow the value stream; a functional silo structure forces handoffs that recreate delay.

Metrics for scaling must stay team-owned; using velocity to compare teams destroys the honesty the data depends on.

An Agile PMO shifts from gatekeeping to enabling: it publishes flow metrics, funds value streams, and removes policy constraints.

Sustaining change requires embedding it in onboarding, promotion criteria, budgeting cadence, and performance review, not only in training events.

Communities of practice spread craft knowledge horizontally and survive reorganizations better than project teams do.

De-scaling is a valid decision: if coordination overhead exceeds the value of added teams, reduce scope rather than add process.