Teaching agile by simulating real-world delivery
Summary
The California Health and Human Services (CHHS) Office of Innovation understood the individual elements of agile but couldn’t connect them into a working delivery approach. We designed and delivered an immersive, two-day training workshop — in partnership with CivicActions — that simulated five full sprints against a real product, helping teams experience agile as a complete system rather than a set of isolated practices.
The challenge
The CHHS Office of Innovation had invested in agile training, and the team understood the individual pieces — planning, testing, iteration, estimation. But knowing the parts and knowing how they fit together in real delivery turned out to be two very different things.
We had been training on agile for some time, and before, we understood all the ingredients. But this workshop brought all the ingredients together and showed us how to bake a cake.
Tamara Srzentic, Deputy Director, Office of Innovation at CHHS
The gap wasn’t knowledge — it was experience. Without having worked through a full delivery cycle using agile practices end to end, teams struggled to apply what they’d learned to real projects. Previous trainings had taught concepts in isolation, but none had shown how planning, estimation, velocity tracking, and testing reinforce each other as a system. The Office of Innovation needed something fundamentally different: not another lecture, but a way to practice agile as it actually works.
The solution
We partnered with CivicActions to design something most agile trainings don’t attempt: a full delivery simulation against a real product.
Over two days, participants worked through five compressed sprints — not on a hypothetical exercise, but on the Office of Innovation’s actual website. Each sprint cycled through the complete Scrum workflow: story writing, estimation, planning, building, testing, and velocity tracking. By the third sprint, teams weren’t just following instructions — they were making their own tradeoffs, adjusting estimates based on real velocity data, and experiencing the feedback loops that make agile work.
The design was deliberate. Rather than teaching practices one at a time, we structured the workshop so participants experienced how each practice reinforced the others. Estimation became meaningful once teams could compare it against actual velocity. Testing felt purposeful once it was connected to a real user experience. And planning improved naturally as teams built intuition for what they could deliver in a sprint.
The result was both a learning experience and a tangible product improvement — participants shipped a redesigned version of the Office of Innovation’s website by the end of the second day.
The results
- Delivered a redesigned version of the Office of Innovation’s website through hands-on sprint work over two days
- Simulated five full sprints covering the complete Scrum workflow — from story writing through testing and velocity tracking
- Equipped teams to adapt agile practices to fit their own projects and departmental culture
- Rated as the most valuable and practical agile training participants had experienced
My staff said they have been through multiple agile trainings, but none were as valuable and practical as this. They’re now comfortable adjusting the process to fit their needs and the culture of the department they’re helping.
Chaeny Emanavin, Director, Office of Innovation at CHHS