E017 Agile Processes and Culture in Technology carries banner number ITEC 6200 and is worth 3 competency units. It examines the agile approaches that let technology leaders and their teams reduce the impact of change on projects and hold velocity despite uncertainty or shifting client requests. E017 and ITEC 6200 are one requirement. The word culture in the title is doing real work: this course is about what leaders have to change in themselves and their organizations, not about ceremonies.
Leadership behaviour is the variable that decides adoption
Organizations adopt agile practices constantly and see very different results, and the difference is rarely the practices. It is whether leaders behave consistently with what the practices assume. If a leader asks a team to commit to a fixed scope and a fixed date and then also asks them to absorb changes, the team learns that estimates are negotiations and stops giving honest ones. If a leader treats a missed forecast as a failure rather than as information, forecasts become optimistic. This course is largely about noticing those loops.
Absorbing change is the technical problem behind the cultural one. Change costs less when work is broken small, when integration happens continuously, when there is a prioritised backlog someone owns, and when the cost of changing direction is visible. Change costs enormously when a team is eleven weeks into a fourteen week block of work with no integration. Practices that reduce the cost of change are what make responsiveness affordable rather than heroic.
Velocity is the most misunderstood measure in the field and graduate work is expected to handle it correctly. It is a planning aid for a specific team, useful for forecasting how much that team can take on next. It is not a productivity measure, it is not comparable between teams, and it degrades immediately when it is used as a target because the units are defined by the team being measured.
Scaling and hybrid reality deserve honest treatment. Most organizations run some work in an agile way and some in a planned way, and the boundary between them is where friction lives: budgeting cycles, procurement, compliance gates and dependencies on teams that do not work the same way. A submission that ignores that boundary is describing an organization that does not exist.
The record shows Competent or Not Competent, since WGU issues no letter grades and holds no ordinary grade point average, while the 3 competency units simply size the course inside a flat-priced six month term.
Turning aspects into a leadership analysis
If your version of E017 uses a performance assessment, the aspects usually combine process analysis with cultural and leadership recommendations. WGU requires a score of 2 in each aspect for a task to pass and judges each aspect alone, so a strong process design will not carry an unaddressed culture or leadership aspect.
Budget before drafting. Take a rubric with six scored aspects and a target near 2,200 words. Reserve 150 words for the organization and the change pressure it faces, and 110 for the close, leaving 1,940 across six aspects, or roughly 323 each. Weight by demand: two aspects requiring recommendation and justification take 440 each, which is 880; the four remaining aspects, covering current state, practices, culture and measurement, take 265 each, which is 1,060. Together that is 1,940.
Every cultural recommendation should name a leader behaviour rather than a value. "Leadership should value transparency" is unactionable. "The technology director stops asking for revised dates in status meetings and instead asks what has been learned since the last forecast" is a behaviour someone can adopt on Monday, and it is what the aspects want.
Reserve budget for the boundary with the rest of the organization. Naming the annual budget cycle, the procurement process or the compliance gate that constrains responsiveness, and saying what you would negotiate with it, is the paragraph that makes a leadership analysis credible.
Shape for an agile leadership analysis
E017 deliverables usually analyse an organization and recommend leadership and process change. These proportions fit that document.
| Section | Content | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Organization and pressure | What the technology function does and what kind of change keeps disrupting it. | 12 percent |
| Current behaviour | How work is committed, changed and reported today, described without judgement first. | 16 percent |
| Process recommendations | Practices that reduce the cost of change, with what each one requires to work. | 19 percent |
| Leadership behaviour | Specific behaviours to start and stop, with the loop each one currently creates. | 20 percent |
| Organizational boundary | Budgeting, procurement, compliance and dependent teams, and what you would negotiate. | 15 percent |
| Measurement | What you would track, what you deliberately would not, and how velocity is used properly. | 13 percent |
| Close | First change, expected effect, and the review point where you would reassess. | 5 percent |
Sourcing leadership and culture claims
Practice definitions belong to the recognised framework guides and to the original published statements of principle. Claims about culture, motivation and team performance belong to organizational research, which exists in quantity and is far stronger evidence than consultancy commentary restating it.
Be careful with transformation success stories. They are almost always published by a party with an interest, they describe the organization at a favourable moment, and they omit the conditions that made the outcome possible. Use them as illustrations, name them as such, and keep the weight of the argument on criteria applied to your scenario.
Where you claim a leadership behaviour produces an effect, distinguish between evidence and mechanism. Research may show that psychological safety correlates with team performance; your claim that a specific meeting change would improve safety in this organization is reasoning, and marking that distinction is what graduate writing does.
Measurement claims deserve precision. If you propose tracking something, define how it is calculated, who sees it and what decision it informs. Measures introduced without those three things become targets, and targets in this domain reliably distort the thing they measure.
Apply whichever citation style the task specifies and cite at the point of claim.
Competent leadership work and returned work
Competent submissions describe current behaviour honestly, propose practices with their prerequisites, translate culture into specific leadership behaviours, acknowledge the organizational boundary and handle velocity correctly.
Returns follow four shapes. Culture is addressed with values rather than behaviours. Practices are recommended with no account of what they require to function. Velocity is proposed as a productivity or comparison measure. Or the analysis treats the technology function as though it existed independently of budgeting, procurement and compliance.
Sequencing matters in cultural change more than in process change, because trust is built in order. Asking a team to be honest about problems before leaders have demonstrated that honesty is safe produces silence, not candour. Naming which changes have to come from leadership first, and which can only follow once the earlier ones have been seen to hold, is a sophistication that distinguishes strong submissions in this course from ones that simply list good practices.
A useful test: for each recommendation, name the person who has to change what they do. If a recommendation has no such person, it is an aspiration, and converting it into a behaviour is usually a matter of one more sentence.
A returned performance assessment costs nothing in grade terms to rework, so send it in the moment each aspect is genuinely addressed, rather than holding it back for another pass. If your section also carries an objective assessment, WGU objective assessments are proctored and our boundary is fixed: preparation only, with framework drills, scenario practice and a candid read on your preassessment result. We do not sit exams for anyone, give no help from the moment it starts, and portal credentials are never requested or handled.
Culture section full of values?
Send the E017 rubric and scenario. We convert values into named leader behaviours and map the organizational boundary, with word targets per aspect.
Eight mistakes that cost time in E017
- Values instead of behaviours. Name what a specific leader stops doing and starts doing. Values cannot be adopted on Monday.
- Velocity as productivity. It is a per-team forecasting aid. Used as a target or a comparison it stops meaning anything.
- Practices without prerequisites. Continuous integration needs tests; a prioritised backlog needs someone with authority to prioritise.
- Ignoring the budget cycle. Annual funding and quarterly reprioritisation pull against each other, and that tension is real work.
- Transformation stories as evidence. They are published by interested parties and omit the enabling conditions.
- No account of dependent teams. Responsiveness stops at the boundary of the team that cannot move at the same pace.
- Measures with no decision attached. If nothing changes based on a number, it will become a target and distort.
- Describing the ideal organization. Analyse the one in the scenario, with its constraints intact.
Three questions students ask about E017
How does E017 differ from the undergraduate agile course?
Do I need to have led a team?
Should I recommend a scaling framework?
Where E017 sits in WGU's programs
The July 2026 catalog places this code in 2 current WGU programs. Open a program page for the complete standard path and term positions. The live Degree Plan remains authoritative after transfer credit, substitutions, and mentor planning.
The assessments, one by one
The public catalog does not publish this course's PA/OA identity or task count. WGU Tutors publishes at most one PA manual per course and only from a WGU-controlled public rubric. Until that source exists, PA help begins from the student's real Course of Study and OA support remains preparation only.