Public Courses:  Click on date or course name for event details.

Certified Scrum Master Course:

This is the basic Scrum course that most people hear about. It covers the basics of Scrum, with the hope that you will be interested enough, motivated enough, and now smart enough to go out and use these ideas effectively. Not perfectly, but effectively.

Unlike others, we almost always combine a 1 or 2 day workshop with this course. The workshop is described further below.

Summary of the Course:

Through a combination of immersive team-based learning, exercises, and real-world case studies, you will learn:

• To plan, initiate and lead a Scrum project
• To establish a shared vision for the entire team
• To generate an agile release plan utilizing user stories and story point estimation
• To lead your Scrum team through planning, review, and retrospective sessions
• To create an environment in which self-managing teams can flourish
• To identify and remove impediments
• To identify, engage and involve business stakeholders in your project
• How to take most existing teams to the next level
• Practical suggestions purchased expensively from the school of hard knocks

ScrumMaster training provides an applied understanding of the Scrum process and helps participants begin to develop the tools, insights, and skills required to apply Scrum on their projects and across their organizations.

Who Should Attend:

This course is for all people interested in Scrum and Agile. It was originally created to train ScrumMasters, but is now used to train teams and to train the managers around teams. It is particularly useful if a whole team (or team group) takes the course together. In any case, all team roles (coder, tester, analyst, Product Owner, ScrumMaster, etc) and managers and other interested parties can attend. For example, the CEO of a 50-person firm attended with benefit for all.

While it is a beginner level course, this course includes the practical knowledge to immediately start doing Scrum with a team. You will also learn not just the how, but also the why. This course is immersive and intensive, including practical, hands-on exercises and small-group discussions.

PMPs: You can receive 14 Professional Development Units (PDUs) for this 2-day course and another 7 PDUs for a 1-day workshop.

Course Material:

Participants will receive a copy of the slide deck at the course. In addition, participants should obtain (at their own expense) Agile Project Management with Scrum, by Ken Schwaber, which is required reading for the course. You may also wish to obtain the first Scrum book, Agile Software Development with Scrum by Schwaber and Beedle, on which the course is also based. Of course, there will be updated material and training exercises in the course which you cannot get from books. 

Intermediate Certified Scrum Product Owner Course:

This is an intermediate course that assumes all attendees have the CSM certification or equivalent in experience doing Scrum "pretty well."

The focus is on the Product Owner and the flow of business information into the team. And on what it means to deliver higher and higher business value.

Summary of the Course:

This is an intermediate course, for people with some knowledge and experience.  We will spend some time reviewing the basic principles of Scrum to ensure a clear and unified understanding.  Experience shows that practitioners frequently need to explain the principles to co-workers, so you will get practice in the course explaining the basics.

Overall, we use a combination of immersive team-based learning, exercises, and real-world case studies, to help you learn how to be a better Product Owner.

Topics and/or exercises include:

• Plan, initiate and lead a Scrum project
• Release Planning: what & how & why
• Develop the initial Product Backlog
• Breaking down user stories (epics)
• The different sources of PBIs in the Product Backlog
• Improving the identification of Business Value
• Story point estimation: how the PO plays, why he cares
• Managing the Gap between customer expectations and the Team's ability to deliver
• Improving business value engineering: theory, tools, exercises
• Balancing new features against digging out of technical debt
• Refactoring the Release Plan continuously
• Leading the Team and yet have the Team remain self-managing
• Working with Business Stakeholders to make them more effective
• Using the 80-20 rule
• Fixing Product Owner impediments
• Scaling & the Chief Product Owner role
• Managing urgent items
• You have to slow down to go fast
• "Things aren't perfect at my place; what do I do when...?"
• The PO's goals and actions in the basic Scrum meetings
• Managing the flow of business information into the Team
• Using the Release Burndown and other reporting

We will also get questions and issues from the group, prioritize them, and cover them as much as possible. We have ready far more material than can be covered in the 2 days, in part to be prepared for the different questions. We find that for half the questions at least, another attendee is thinking "oh, I should have asked that."

This CSPO course is unique in that we are moving beyond theory, and applying the Scrum framework in the course and the workshop in more real-world circumstances. It is designed to bring attendees to a level where they feel comfortable experimenting and improvising in Scrum. Thus, you can help the team be more creative and release more business value.

Who Should Attend:

The CSPO course is for managers, analysts, product managers, business stakeholders, business analysts, and ScrumMasters. And many project managers. In fact, since the Product Owner is integral to the Team, we recommend that the Team also attend, at least the Workshop.

You will leave with solid knowledge of how and why Scrum works. Through practical, hands-on exercises and small-group discussion you will be prepared to plan your first (or next) sprint immediately after this class. ScrumMasters need this course, because they must coach Product Owners in these skills.

PMPs: You can receive 14 Professional Development Units (PDUs) for this 2-day course plus an additional 7 PDUs for a 1-day Workshop.

Course Material:

Participants will receive a copy of the slide deck at the course. In addition, participants should obtain (at their own expense) Agile Project Management with Scrum, by Ken Schwaber, which is required reading for the course. You may also wish to obtain the primary Scrum book, Agile Software Development with Scrum by Schwaber and Beedle, on which the course is also based. Of course, there will be updated material and training exercises in the course which you cannot get from books.

Workshop:

We lead Workshops in two contexts.  The first context is as a 1 or 2 day 'add-on' to a course.  We really look at these as required as part of the CSM course or the CSPO course.  The second context is as a stand-alone Workshop, usually in-house for one company or organization.

We have organized workshops with many different kinds of content, but typically favor a workshop doing Release Planning and Sprint Planning.  (This is the usual content of the workshops added onto the Certification Courses.)

Release Planning means that the team does the following with a real set of work:

• Agree on the Vision
• Develop the Product Backlog
• Estimate Business Value
• Estimate Effort
• Discuss Risks, Dependencies, Learning and other factors
• Order the Work
• Finalize the Release Plan

Working with a real team on their real work is an excellent way start using Scrum.  It brings out the team's real issues, and some of the concerns (which often turn out to be insubstantial) start to go away.  They are then prepared to really start "on Monday."

After Release Planning, we discuss the impact upon Sprint Planning.  We review details of how Sprint Planning should be done. And usually the team does part of Sprint Planning.   

The Workshop can be done in 1 day or in 2 days. 

More details about the Workshop are available in this blog post.  And a customer describing why the Workshop is valuable is available in this blog post.

 

Business Value Engineering:

In this workshop we will discuss many basic concepts of Business Value Engineering. Please see this article for more detail.

We think the key benefit of this workshop is clear:  the creation of an action plan to increase the BV delivered by each team, without having the team work harder.

We will group into teams of 4-6 at tables and do the following:

•Develop a definition of business value for a specific project
•Develop a BV model (a way of calculating expected business value)
•Map out the current BVE process (see below)
•Identify the theories and assumptions underlying the current BVE process
•Make a plan or Business Case to improve the current BVE process

With feedback between the teams and additional discussions, those exercises will fill the 2 day workshop.

By BVE process, we mean those explicit or tacit things that you or your firm does to address the following kinds of questions.

• How do we:
  • determine what the customers want?
  • innovate?
  • focus on 'the vital few'? (the Pareto Rule)
  • communicate requirements to the development team?
  • allocate people to work?
  • manage the projects?
  • deliver a 'finished' product to the customer? (Frequency, delay, quality level, test harness, training, etc etc)
  • integrate other things with the Product to form the Solution?
  • determine if we were successful?
  • learn?
  • adapt to change in all its dimensions?
• Do we have feedback loops?
• Is there a P-D-C-A cycle in there?
• The attempt is to get as close to an end-to-end 'flow' as we can. (We do not wish to locally optimize, and then hurt the overall flow.)

The workshop and BVE is about things that happen outside the Scrum team. (We generally assume you have one or more Scrum teams, but that is not an essential assumption, we find.)

For the "product owner" of each team in the Workshop, we must be working on his real situation.  For others in each team, this should ideally also be a real situation (be similar to something in their real world), but may not be.

We will also get questions and issues from the group, prioritize them, and cover them as much as possible. 

Who Should Attend:

This Workshop is for Product Owners, managers, analysts, product managers, Business Stakeholders, business analysts, and ScrumMasters. And many project managers.  ScrumMasters need this workshop, because they must coach Product Owners in these skills.

PMPs: You can receive 14 Professional Development Units (PDUs) for this workshop. 

Course Material :

Participants will receive course materials (not books) at the course.  Of course, there will be updated material and training exercises in the course which you cannot get from books.

Additional Information :

The workshop will run from 8:30am-5:10pm each day. A continental breakfast, breaks and lunch will be provided.

 

Custom Workshops:

We have done many custom workshops, and generally find these very useful.  Please tell us if you would like a custom workshop based on an existing Workshop, or if you would like to design a different kind of workshop than anything mentioned here. 

 

Scrum Team Training:

We strongly recommend that the full Scrum team (Product Owner, ScrumMaster and Implementors) all learn Scrum at the same time, to see each other asking questions, doing the same exercises, and taking it in.  This is extremely helpful later.  Perhaps most obviously for the beginning ScrumMaster.

We recommend the CSM course + workshop for this "Introduction to Agile-Scrum."

Other courses also can be taken together as a Team.

 

Payment Issues:

There are many ways to pay for courses.  These include: PayPal (credit card), Google Checkout (credit card), Phone (credit card), Intuit Payment Network (money transfer), check, bank money transfer, and cash.

We can of course provide an invoice and/or a receipt.

The general understanding is the payment will be received before the course or workshop starts.