Agile Customized Training
Get rid of the ongoing need for external contract consultants. Through partnerships with agilityIRL and Lonnie Weaver Johnson, we offer a wide range of Agile and Scrum training experiences. From executive leadership to project leads to project team members, we provide the training and coaching your organization needs to build your own capacity to run successful Agile projects.
SCRUM
Scrum is the most widely-used framework for Agile. We can assist you with training a team of ScrumMasters or a team of Product Owners at your organization.
Our Scrum workshops are aligned with the Scrum Alliance and our instructor is a certified by Scrum Alliance. Use the following links to:
- Learn more about the ScrumMaster course that we can bring to your organization
- Learn more about the Product Owner course that we can bring to your organization
- Learn more our Scrum instructor
- Contact us about pricing to bring customized Scrum training to your organization.
AGILE
We also feature agile courses that are neutral on methodology execution. Understanding the “why” behind Agile assists your organization in choosing the best “how” to approach Agile. These customizable training courses can be packaged so that your organization can fully transition to Agile with training and coaching for executives/sponsors of Agile projects, Agile project leads, and Agile team members. Schedule a no-obligation meeting, where we can help you determine your Agile transition plan.
Intro to Agile
½ day
Do not just go through the process, but understand the “why” behind the “how” to truly embrace Agile theory. In this workshop, participants receive a broad overview of the Agile philosophy. The history of the Agile movement, along with its early influences, are examined. The workshop surveys the methods that comprise “Agile” including Scrum, Extreme Programming, and Kanban. Participants leave with the ability to differentiate between “Agile” and frameworks that fall within the philosophy as well as a high-level understanding of each of the main frameworks being used in the marketplace today.
Agile: A Leadership Overview
Ranges from ½ day to 2 full days depending on the needs of your organization
Bring together leaders from all levels of your organization to build a common understanding and approach to Agile. Calibrated for leaders at all levels from the front-line to the C-suite, this workshop teaches the “why”, the “what”, and most importantly, the “how” of leading the transformation of any organization—of any size, of any kind —into an Agile one. It is designed to open leaders’ minds, and steer them away from the dysfunctional assumptions, habits, and tendencies that are prevalent today and, instead, instill Agility at the organizational level (a.k.a., “Agile Management,” or “Organizational Agility”). Leaders will learn the following to support the Agile culture in their organization:
Agile: The “Why”
- 2×2 Reasons to Care About Agile
- How We Got to Now: A Brief History of Organizational Solutions
- Agile: The Organizational Solution for Today’s World
Agile: The “What”
- Agile’s Heritage
- The Agile Manifesto
- Agile Team Member Roles & Responsibilities
- Agile Myths
- Major Agile Product Development Frameworks
- Micro & Macro Agile
Agile: The “How”
- Myth Busting
- Definitions
- Culture is THE Key
- Culture Defined
- The First Step in any Organizational Transformation
- A Framework for Cultivating Organizational Agility
- Assessing Cultural Solution Alternatives
- Organizational Life Cycle Stages and Agility
Agile Bootcamp
3 full days
Facilitate discussions on the best Agile framework for your organization’s culture and projects. In this workshop, participants are exposed to the fundamentals of multiple Agile methods including Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrumban. Participants explore the roles, ceremonies, artifacts of each method through a series of exercises, case studies, simulations, and discussion. Participants leave with the ability to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each method and determine which one will best meet the needs of their current development efforts.
Contact us to add coaching to follow-up the training or to discover other ways to customize workshop for your organization.
Agile Testing
½ day
For your Agile team members who are interested increasing their skill in Agile testing, this workshop explores testing from an Agile perspective. Participants examine testing topics through a series of hands-on exercises and leave with a set of techniques that they can apply immediately to their current product development efforts regardless if they are using Scrum or Extreme Programming (XP). Provide a cohort training experience that allows participants to learn and support each other with:
- Explaining Agile’s view of testing
- Developing strong acceptance criteria
- Defining and articulating a number of Agile testing related practices including, but not limited to, Behavior Driven Development (BDD), Test Driven Development (TDD), Continuous Integration, etc.
- Managing Test Driven Development (TDD), test management and automation
Note: Participants should understand basic Agile philosophy and, at least, one framework method (e.g. Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), etc.)
We can customize this course to match your specific testing needs and Agile approach.
User Story
½ day
This hands-on workshop uses your product to teach good user story writing techniques. Participants with a good understanding of at least one Agile method, bring a project sample to the workshop for immediate application. Participants learn the crucial element to a good user story, its components, and how to split them in a way that allows them to be delivered in a single iteration or sprint.
Support your agile team members with this cohort experience to increase their skills in user story writing as used with frameworks like Scrum or Extreme Programming (XP). After taking this workshop, learners will be able to:
- Articulate the theory behind user stories
- Understand how to write good user stories
- Understand when and when not to use user stories
- How to split user stories to ensure the delivery of value
This training experience can be customized for the Agile methodology used in your organization. .
Maximize Agile Outcomes with Analysis
3 days + 6 months coaching
More and more organizations are moving to a model where business analysis is embedded into team and project work rather than being performed by a designated business analyst. Business need should not be an add-on piece; it should always be the main concern of any project. Prepare your team to perform business analysis without the business analyst.
Successful agile teams need great analysis, yet the role of who does the analysis is often undefined and varies from team to team. This workshop has been created to help Agile Teams and Team Members operate effectively on an agile team and in an agile environment doing great agile analysis.
We partner with Angela Wick of BA-Squared to offer this customizable experience that includes two components: classroom training and ongoing coaching.
During the 3-day classroom experience, participants will use a case study to look at and practice concepts and techniques for great analysis on agile projects, including:
- Defining vision, problems and results needed
- Identifying good and poorly written user stories
- Writing user stories
- Using the Gherkin Method for user story acceptance critera
- Splitting user stories
- Analyzing the backlog
- Prioritizing the backlog
- Relating analysis models to user stories
- Identifying what stories from case study need models
- Facilitating for better conversations and rich dialog
- Using facilitation techniques for innovation
- Creating a Story Map and using it to:
- Analyze for gaps
- Define MVP
- Organize releases
- Analyzing the user experience
The classroom experience is followed up with cohort coaching sessions. Every three weeks, participants join a 1-hour virtual session and bring work-related examples, questions, and challenges that match these topics:
- Product Owner and Analyst Collaboration
- A Healthy Backlog
- User Stories
- Acceptance Criteria
- Story Splitting
- Prioritization
- Analysis Models
- Collaborating for better dialog