Recommended Courses for Agile Leaders
Being an agile organization requires senior leaders, middle managers, and agile team members to change the way that they organize their work, manage that work, and measure the results of the work. Agile teams cannot do this on their own, they need help from the entire organization. Changes in the way that people think and work are required, driving improved results by having everyone's goals and ways of working aligned.
As a leader in an organization that whether you are moving to an agile way of working or one that has been working in an agile way for years, it is important that you understand how the teams are working and have the skills and mindset to support them. We have put together a series of courses to help you as an agile leader be more effective in supporting your teams.
Core Courses for Agile Leaders
In the Applying Professional Scrum™ course, work together with other students as a team in a series of Sprints to solve complex problems, facing similar challenges that they face outside of class and learning how to use Scrum to address them. As an Agile Leader, you will learn Scrum by doing Scrum in order to appreciate what your Scrum Teams are going through so that you can better support them while also empowering them to be self-managing. You will learn new skills as well as experience common missteps and misunderstandings often seen while using Scrum. This allows you to develop an awareness of the associated symptoms and how they may be corrected. This is a great class to bring your entire organization to join together for a shared learning experience.
In the Professional Agile Leadership Essentials™ course you will be joined by other Agile Leaders where together you gain a practical understanding of how to best support, guide and coach your team(s) to create conditions for greater agility. You will develop a deep understanding of the role that you play as a leader in creating the conditions for a successful agile environment. This workshop uses a combination of instruction and team-based exercises to help you learn how to form and support your organization to achieve better results, and how to lead the cultural and behavioral changes that your organization must make to reap the benefits of an agile product delivery approach.
In the Professional Agile Leadership™ - Evidence-Based Management™ course Agile Leaders are often joined by others including Scrum Masters, Product Owners, coaches and consultants where you will experience how to guide your teams toward continuously improving customer outcomes, organizational capabilities and business results. You will learn what EBM is and how to apply the framework to set clear goals and measures through a series of exercises. You will learn techniques that support a more agile mindset by shifting the conversation away from measuring progress purely through team performance metrics, toward a focus on customer-centricity and improving customer outcomes.
Improving Leadership Skills
In the Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills™ course, Agile Leaders will develop a facilitator’s mindset, increase proficiency in facilitation skills, and learn when and how to select effective techniques for various circumstances to better solve problems, create a shared understanding and foster transparency. The course addresses a series of common Scrum-related scenarios while you learn to apply several facilitation techniques that you can add to your collection of agile practices. You will create and leave with your own facilitation “plan” to improve how you work with your teams and organization by becoming a better facilitator.
Supporting the Organization
In the Scaled Professional Scrum™ course, Agile Leaders learn a collection of skills that can be applied to help overcome challenges when you or your teams are working on a product that spans beyond a single Scrum Team, while learning about and using the Nexus framework. Throughout the course you will work together in a Nexus to organize and simulate a scaled product development project. In this case study based class, common challenges that are encountered when scaling are presented and more than fifty practices for overcoming them are revealed. Some of these practices rely on what you already know about Scrum and some are complementary techniques.
Supporting the Product Owner
In the Professional Scrum Product Owner™ course, you will explore and learn the accountabilities of the Product Owner to better support them and others in your organization. During class, you will gain an understanding of the pivotal role the Product Owner plays in bridging strategy and agile product management in order to create valuable products. Throughout the class, you will learn a number of Product Ownership practices that you can use when supporting your Product Owner and helping them improve.
In the Professional Scrum Product Backlog Management Skills™ course, participants will learn techniques and methods to effectively manage a Product Backlog that clearly expresses the future vision of the product and brings transparency to what is most valuable for the Scrum Team to work on to delight stakeholders and customers. Students will get hands-on experience with refinement techniques such as decomposing and slicing Product Backlog items, while learning how simplicity can cure complicated and complex Product Backlogs.