Training

Being Agile (1 day)

Who it’s for: Agile team members, team/technical leads, Scrum Masters, product owners and close business partners

Objective for participants: Gain a deep understanding of the Agile mind-set and thinking tools for adopting it

If your team has been doing Agile for some time, 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, because it’s not just a skill (like driving); the concepts that make Agility work must permeate their behaviours.

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

If you’re looking to improve results from Agile by strengthening the teams’ implementations of it, this course is for you!

Group size: 8-20 participants (16 if online).

“We were looking for training that would go beyond the textbook approach, which could help people figure out how to effectively apply agile principles in the real, messy world… Our teams responded enthusiastically to the ideas that Gil presented in the ‘Being Agile’ workshop. Many teams immediately began re-examining how they were working, with a new sense of freedom and empowerment. With an Agile mind-set they had a clearer understanding of the value of some of the things that they were doing as well as ideas for other things that they could do differently and better.”
– Philip Whitcombe, Director, Digital Operations at CBC (the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)

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Teamwork and Collaboration Kickstarter (half day)

Who it’s for: Groups of peers (whether front-line workers or managers) who work toward a shared objective or purpose

Objective for participants: Explore different forms of teamwork and collaboration in a safe environment, and identify the conditions for enabling and sustaining them back at work

Few teams are real teams, despite being called that. Instead, most teams have some conceptually shared objective, and their members are helpful and professional with each other, but they don’t really experience teamwork and collaboration; they are groups. Even when leaders genuinely promote teamwork, little changes.

Bring this experiential workshop to your team and you’ll see an immediate improvement. The workshop 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.

If you’re looking to create shared understanding and motivation (and reduce fear and resistance) regarding collaboration and teamwork, this workshop is for you!

Group size: 8-25 participants

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Amplifying Collaboration and Agile Teamwork (1 day)

Who it’s for: Scrum Masters, team/tech leads, product owners, managers, project/delivery leads

Objective for participants: Establish the conditions and master powerful techniques to get your whole team talking, collaborating, and making better shared decisions

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’ actual reality is different:

• 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 preclude 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, 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

If you’re looking to improve team effectiveness, innovation, and outcomes, this course is for you!

Group size: 8-20 participants (16 if online).

“Gil very much revolutionized the way we look at both Agile specifically, and communication, in general. Every day, I see benefits as we work as an organization to re-emphasize the principles that he shared. We’re also making major shifts in our project structures, reporting, and mentorship/goal-setting initiatives.”
– Michael Goitein, Principal Project Manager at Mobiquity, Inc.

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Agile for Non-Software Teams (2 days)

Who it’s for: Intact teams who are about to adopt an Agile way of working, together with their leads and managers

Objective for participants: Start on the right foot with Agile by first learning just enough about its mind-set and helpful tactics, and then customizing them for your work context

To benefit from agility, your non-software department needs a different process than what other departments need – particularly your tech colleagues. It’s usually not helpful to adopt tech’s popular frameworks or to copy-paste their practices and artifacts. The world of work is full of examples of disenchantment from going those routes.

Instead, you need to customize: to implement Agile values, beliefs, and principles in a process that respects your context and constraints.

Examples where we’ve helped our clients do that (and yes, they all came out different): marketing, finance, HR, plastics R&D, architecture & design, media digitization, and TV show development.

This two-day service has two parts: an experiential course to teach Agile thinking, and a facilitated workshop in which the participants design their initial way of working, based on the concepts studied earlier, to fit their context.

If you’re looking to improve team and stakeholder outcomes, and reduce risk, by starting a non-software Agile implementation on the right foot, this course is for you!

Group size: 8-16 participants.

“I had a working understanding of Agile before I met Gil. My company brought him in to do some training/coaching and that’s when my mind exploded with a new way of thinking. Gil’s ability to teach, facilitate and coach is outstanding. My working understanding of Agile was transformed into an eye-opening new approach to my work and my everyday life.”
– Greg Weir, Lead Agilist at PrismHR

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Pragmatic Scrum (2 days)

Who it’s for: Cross-functional teams including managers and close business partners

Objective for participants: Develop the necessary understanding, skills, and mindset to operate effectively in Agile ways

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

In 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. We include several components, which are critical for modern development, 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.

Note: This is not a certification class. We teach holistically, and empower participants to think about their choices so they can achieve their objectives.

If you’re looking to increase customer delight and improve product development, this course is for you!

Group size: 8-20 participants (16 if online).

“As somebody with decent experience with Agile from both a product and engineering perspective, I could not have been more pleased and satisfied with the two days Gil spent with us. His emphasis on the ‘why’ behind Agile was thought provoking, and his interactive exercises (no death by PowerPoint!) were insightful and fun. We are so glad we flew in people from all over the world to attend this training – definitely worth it 10x over.”
– Albert Tsai, SVP Product at Catapult Sports

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Agile Engineering: Programming Techniques and Mind-Set for Sustained, High-Throughput Agility (2 days)

Who it’s for: Software developers, architects, database developers, test automation engineers, and their respective managers

Objective for participants: Master the strategies and practices of evolving high-quality code and reining in legacy

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 automated tests, and lots of DevOps.

However, 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!

Course attendees will grow as Agile developers, who:

• 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

They will learn – by doing – reliable, sustainable, and enjoyable attitudes and practices. They’ll be poised to become true partners 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.

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

If you’re looking to improve technical Agility and to ensure long-term business Agility, this course is for you!

Group size: 8-20 participants (16 if online).

“I found the information Gil provided invaluable and very well presented. The insights gained in that seminar will change my approach to software development forever.”
– Alon Sabi, VP Technology at Function Point Software

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Product Ownership (2 days)

Who it’s for: Product managers/owners, business analysts, UX designers, and other stakeholders who shape products

Objective for participants: Adopt mindset and techniques for discovering, shaping, and evolving valuable products the Agile way

Product managers/owners, UX/UI designers, business analysts, and domain architects are all Agile Customers. This role comes with great responsibility, far beyond writing user stories, specifying acceptance criteria, and prioritizing a backlog.

For Agile Customers to be successful in their role, the Agile mindset must permeate everything they do: identifying outcomes, choosing the next work, engaging with delivery teams, and so on. 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, artifacts, and techniques are secondary to all that, yet somehow they are the focus of most PO courses out there.

Participants learn how to create and manage higher-value products with less risk. They come away feeling confident about performing their role effectively, both strategically and day-to-day. Importantly, they also see a holistic picture of teams being Agile: what their development counterparts do, and how to collaborate effectively with them.

Note: This is not a certification class. We teach holistically, and empower participants to think about their choices so they can achieve their objectives.

If you’re looking to increase customer delight and improve business outcomes, this course is for you!

Group size: 10-20 participants (16 if online).

“Gil’s explanations, examples, and simulations were engaging and clear. What impressed me most, however, was how attuned he was to our culture and practices. The conversations he seeded around working effectively across teams and stakeholder groups were invaluable in helping me understand my role in driving change both within my team and throughout our organization.”
– Sandra Earl, Senior Usability Specialist at D2L

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