Training

If you’re a senior leader or business partner, how should you engage with Agile teams? What should you change in terms of management systems and human systems for real Agility? How can you get your objectives met, especially if the Agile transformation has resulted in a wide spectrum of understanding, buy-in, and implementation?

Most senior leaders struggle with these questions, often due to assumptions they make. Mistakenly, they think Agile is “better, cheaper, faster”, a process with a set of best practices, or a framework they can “install” for managing technical work. With little change in the organization’s middle (or higher), little agility is gained.

It gets worse. Even when technology managers learn the answers, their business counterparts are usually left guessing.

This one-day experiential training, “The Leader’s Guide to the Agile Mind-Set”, is a transformation game-changer. It:

• gives you everything you need to know for healthy engagement with Agile teams that deliver reliably
• is a scalable solution for large organizations due to its brevity (only one day)
• builds partnership and mutual understanding due to its design, which is neither process-heavy nor technology-focused

“If you want to avoid the typical pitfalls of a surface-level Agile ‘transformation,’ it’s essential to get your entire leadership team bought in and thinking about it the same way. Gil’s The Leader’s Guide to the Agile Mindset course is a great way to do that. Gil’s understanding goes well beyond practices, and his exceptional skill as an instructor allows him to help others develop an understanding of what it means to be Agile. I highly recommend this course.” — John Healy, VP Technology

Ask us for the data sheet.

What does Agile mean to you as an executive? What are Agile management systems and human systems, and what’s your part in enabling them? With the advent of Agile, what is changing for you, what isn’t, and how do you steer a system inhabited by semi-autonomous teams?

Too many organizations get little out of their attempts at Agile, because they only apply Agile frameworks in teams. Organizations do much better when they also train and support their middle management in being Agile. Yet even that is limited, if the top of the house still conducts business as usual.

This half-day conversational training is tailored to executives. It is not based on any specific method (Scrum, SAFe, Kanban), nor is it software- or IT-specific. These four hours will help your Agile transformation take healthy roots. Ask us for the data sheet.

If your team has been doing Agile for a few months, are they also being Agile? That is, do they truly put people before process, deliver value frequently, respond to change economically and without drama, and collaborate with their customer?

Many teams start their Agile journey doing Agile: going through Scrum/SAFe/Kanban motions and trying “best practices.” But without a solid grasp of the Agile mindset — values, beliefs, and principles — those motions will not make them agile. People cannot get great at Agile by following recipes and imitating moves, as if they’re learning to drive; the concepts that make Agility work must permeate their actions.

This workshop is perfect both for teams that need to level up with Agile and for teams that are struggling to get Agile (and perhaps take a dim view of it, for the wrong reasons).

Class size: 12-20 participants.

Ask us for the data sheet.

While the word “team” is everywhere, few groups are real teams. Sure, most have some conceptually shared objective, and their members are helpful and professional with each other, but they don’t really experience teamwork and collaboration. In most cases, team members and leaders genuinely promote teamwork, but nothing changes.

Bring this experiential workshop to your team to create shared understanding and motivation, and reduce fear and resistance, regarding collaboration and teamwork. It delivers on its objectives whether the team is planning to eventually be an Agile team or not. Gil (the facilitator) has a track record of 20 years helping teams become collaborative; he will tie the concepts to Agile teamwork if required, or leave them squarely within the realm of general teamwork.

Workshop size: 8-20 participants.

Ask us for more information about the workshop.

In a healthy Agile environment, people communicate, collaborate, and decide together all the time. The big idea is that the group can be smarter than the individuals, which means it will do better work and produce better results.

However, too many teams do not experience this synergy:

• Rather than have valuable interactions, they complain, “Agile has too many meetings!”
• Instead of determining work together, they wait for someone to assign them tasks.
• They default to working on tasks individually “because that would be faster”.

These patterns rule out group wisdom, but that’s not the only problem. When the team doesn’t act as a team, the non-collaborative power structure (“command & control”) fills the vacuum. This is especially evident in team events (“ceremonies”), which are frequent in Agile. Soon enough, team members get disillusioned about empowerment and disenchanted toward Agile.

It’s actually quite easy to turn this situation around. In this one-day training with Gil Broza, you will:

• Identify the elements of your Agile setup that discourage collaboration.
• Practice powerful, simple techniques to make every meeting collaborative, worth having, and a welcome experience for its participants.
• Discover what it takes to move from a group of busy individuals to a healthy, thriving team.

Class size: 8-20 participants.

Ask us for more information about the course.

Almost every month, we receive an inquiry from an organizational department that wants Agile, but they don’t do software. Recent examples include HR, data operations and compliance, marketing and branding, medical research, corporate real estate, media digitization, and TV show development. They don’t quite know how to start, and correctly sense that Scrum training isn’t quite what they need.

All of these clients required custom implementations of the Agile mind-set; some were charting new territory, as their work context was too far removed from what the popular methods have been designed for. Their teams and managers all took our “Agile for Non-Software Teams” training to learn the ins and outs of the Agile way of working without being attached to any particular practice or process framework. What they learned enabled them to start on the right foot. Interested? Talk to Gil.

Class size: 8-20 participants.

This course is designed for teams that realize that simplistic Scrum mechanics, roles, and artifacts won’t make them Agile.

With this course, teams learn the Agile values, beliefs, and principles (= the mindset), what Agile is and isn’t, how to perform good practices correctly and usefully, and what Agile behaviours look like. It also includes critical components that are missing from certified Scrum.

This experiential training makes use of powerful simulations, activities, and interactions not found in the hundreds of publicly available Scrum courses. We evolve the material continuously based on the best knowledge the Agile community has to offer. The instructor, Gil Broza, has been coaching organizations since before Agile had its name, and has authored books on the most commonly neglected aspects of Agile — the mindset and the human side. Interested? Let’s talk.

Class Size: Up to 20 participants

You’re using Agile ways of working for certain benefits: adaptation, better customer-product fit, and frequent value delivery. Do your software developers exhibit the necessary Technical Agility to support all that, both short term and long term?

It might feel that way if you have developers talking with POs a lot, backlogs full of detailed stories with acceptance criteria, a CI environment, some unit- and end-to-end automated tests, and lots of DevOps. But if you look closely, you might discover — this is painfully common — that developers overbuild, write ineffectual tests, wade in messy code, or create designs that will make later changes very costly. They don’t have sufficient Technical Agility to support the desired Business Agility. What’s worse, some of those teams also do continuous delivery (CD), and their behaviours are really too unsafe for CD!

In this Agile Engineering course, programmers learn reliable, sustainable, and enjoyable software development attitudes and practices. They’ll be poised to become true Agile developers, collaborators that POs may rely on to consistently produce easily changeable code. They can immediately put to use everything they learn in this course to reduce time to market, increase quality, and contain technical debt.

Participants’ learning objectives:

• evolve well-designed software with minimal cost of change
• develop simple, clear, and proven code faster than ever
• keep their code shippable at all times
• take on legacy code confidently
• make continuous delivery possible and safe

Note: While sample code snippets and demonstrations are given using Java, the learning exercises (labs) are available in Java, JavaScript, C#, and PHP. This course is carefully designed to impart principles and techniques independently of the programming language, therefore the exercises use only basic language constructs.

Class Size: Up to 20 participants

Would you like to learn more about it? Let’s talk.

Product managers, UX/UI designers, business analysts, and domain architects are all Agile Customers. (One of these roles is typically designated as the lead, or Product Owner.) This role comes with great responsibility, far beyond merely writing user stories and prioritizing a backlog.

To be successful their role, the Agile mindset must permeate everything Agile customers do: choosing the work, engaging with delivery teams, working better. They need to know how to make commitments while eschewing predictions, how to thin-slice work items, and how to chart meaningful evolutionary paths. The tools and techniques are secondary, yet somehow they are the focus of most PO courses out there.

Participants’ learning objectives:

• Decide (easily) what to work on… and what not to work on
• Perform useful customer practices
• Structure your daily activities well (and stay sane)
• Feel confident about carrying out your role effectively
• Work collaboratively and effectively with delivery teams

Class Size: Up to 20 participants

To learn more, talk to us.