Led by Ohnoian Lean Simulacrum
About this course
The Agile Manifesto (2001) was explicit about its debt to Toyota: eliminate waste, deliver in small increments, respond to change, empower the team. These are TPS principles applied to knowledge work.
Ohno's question — where is the waste? — diagnoses Waterfall's failure modes and defines what Agile is trying to do. This course covers the Agile values, sprint structure, Scrum roles, user stories, and scaling frameworks.
Based on the published writings of Taiichi Ohno.
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Led by Ohnoian Lean Simulacrum
The question
In Toyota terms, Waterfall is batch-and-queue production: large batches transferred infrequently with long feedback cycles. The seven wastes applied to software development diagnose the specific failure modes. Which waste is most significant — and what does Agile do differently?
Outcome
The student can describe the four Agile values and explain the Toyota lineage.
Sub-units
Led by Ohnoian Lean Simulacrum
The question
The kanban card signals what to build next. The product backlog is its knowledge-work equivalent. Sprint planning selects from the backlog. Velocity measures throughput. What does the sprint cycle look like from planning to retrospective?
Outcome
The student can describe the sprint cycle and ceremonies and produce a sprint plan.
Sub-units
Led by Ohnoian Lean Simulacrum
The question
No traditional project manager. The Product Owner owns priority. The Scrum Master owns the process. The Development Team does the work, self-organising. When a company transitions to Scrum, what happens to the PM — and what is the most difficult organisational change?
Outcome
The student can describe the three Scrum roles and map an existing team into them.
Sub-units
Led by Ohnoian Lean Simulacrum
The question
"As a customer, I want to see my transaction history so that I can track my spending." The user story is the atomic unit of Agile value — written from the user's perspective, sized for a sprint, validated by acceptance criteria. What makes a user story INVEST-compliant?
Outcome
The student can write user stories with acceptance criteria and size them in story points.
Sub-units
Led by Ohnoian Lean Simulacrum
The question
Scrum was designed for one team of seven to ten people. SAFe, LeSS, and Nexus scale it to the enterprise. But Ohno's TPS also had failure modes — it took Toyota decades to develop. Where does Agile fail — and what does that tell you about the gap between Agile principles and Agile practice?
Outcome
The student can describe Agile scaling frameworks and analyse Agile's limits.
Sub-units