Diagnose and Restart LearnLab's Stalled Math-Tutoring Sprint
Overview
What this challenge is about.
Calculate velocity, defect rates, and role breaches from sprint data and interviews. Design a two-sprint intervention to earn your verifiable certificate.
The scenario
LearnLab competes with adaptive-learning providers for Massachusetts public-school math contracts, where contract renewal depends on shipping accurate, classroom-ready features on a predictable cadence. A single flagship squad of eight engineers owns the adaptive-tutoring engine, so its delivery reliability directly drives the company's revenue and reputation.
The Brief
What you'll do, and what you'll demonstrate.
Why is a previously high-performing Scrum squad failing three consecutive sprint goals, and what specific interventions will restore predictable delivery?
Earning criteria — what you'll demonstrate
- Convert raw backlog and process records into agile metrics (velocity, scope-change rate, carryover, defect injection) and interpret their trends
- Triangulate quantitative and qualitative evidence so each diagnostic claim is supported by both data and human testimony
- Distinguish symptoms from root causes using a structured root-cause technique rather than reacting to surface complaints
- Design behaviorally specific, time-boxed Scrum interventions grounded in correct understanding of Scrum roles, events, and values
- Communicate a credible, prioritized improvement plan to an executive audience under real organizational pressure
Program Fit
Where this fits in your program.
Sharpens the same skills your degree expects you to demonstrate.
Aligned coursework coming soon.
Skills
Skills you'll demonstrate.
Each one shows up on your verified credential.
- Scrum
Facilitate scrum ceremonies and drive sprint-based delivery in cross-functional teams.
- Retrospective Facilitation
Apply retrospective facilitation to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Data Analysis
Analyze real datasets, build models, and communicate findings that drive decisions.
- Root Cause Analysis
Apply root cause analysis to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Agile Metrics
Apply agile metrics to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Coaching
Apply coaching to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
Careers
Career paths this challenge builds toward
Completing this challenge demonstrates skills that transfer directly to these roles:
Scrum Master
This challenge mirrors a Scrum Master's core job: reading a struggling team through its metrics and ceremonies, then facilitating concrete change. You leave able to diagnose delivery failure and run interventions that restore a predictable cadence.
This challenge sharpens
- scrum
- retrospective-facilitation
- coaching
Agile Delivery Lead
Delivery leads must defend a team's throughput with evidence. By turning raw backlog records into velocity, carryover, and defect-injection trends, you practice the data-driven oversight that keeps multi-squad delivery on track.
This challenge sharpens
- agile-metrics
- data-analysis
- root-cause-analysis
Agile Coach
Agile coaches diagnose organizational dysfunction and design adoptable behavior change. The role-boundary and retrospective redesign work here is exactly the coaching craft of converting friction into agreed, observable experiments.
This challenge sharpens
- coaching
- retrospective-facilitation
- root-cause-analysis