Our experienced instructors have applied these concepts in numerous settings and take care to use practical examples and case studies along the way.

We teach remotely or in person to groups of up to 20 people. The training is interactive and leverages the elements of “Training from the Back of the Room”® to reinforce learning retention. Each training session is complemented by 30-60 minutes to discuss questions from the trainees.

_01.
Crazy little thing called Scrum
(4-5 hours)

Learning outcomes:

• Understand the difference between project and product management, and why Scrum might (not) be the right tool for you.

• Less guesswork and more evidence! How and why proper Scrum uses empiricism to create better products faster.

• Gain clarity about “who’s who” in the Scrum team and what their accountabilities are.

• Values to live by – 5 powerful Scrum Values that build effective teams and how to nurture them in practice.

• Thoroughly understand the Scrum Framework process, including events, artifacts, and accountabilities and the reasoning behind them.

• “Debug” typical daily situations the Scrum way.

• Learn how to safely extend, alter, or adjust your Scrum implementation through additional practices like Kanban, DevOps, etc.

• Try out 3 hand-picked complementary practices you can start using tomorrow.

_02.
Wing your estimations with Story points once and for all
(2-3 hours)

Story points are much trickier to get right than most people think. Using them blindly for predicting (or even committing!) without understanding their power and some ground rules is a very costly proposition. We’ll dispel the myths and finally learn how to use story points properly.

Learning outcomes:

• What story points are, and what they aren’t.

• Why is it important to choose the type of estimates you are using?

• What should be estimated and what definitely should not? (including all the tricky edge cases)

• How to properly estimate an item with story points?

• How do we agree on estimates?

• How to create more accurate release plans?

• How can we use historical data to measure how much we are innovating?

• Alternatives to story point estimating, do they exist? (They do.)

_03.
Great User Stories
(2-3 hours)

If your user stories look a lot like requirements, this one is for you. We’ll learn how User stories aim to upend lengthy documents while actually being much more useful. How can we save days of effort by creating great backlogs that aren’t full of dependencies or humongous items nobody wants to touch?

Learning outcomes:

• User stories are smaller, more flexible, and cheaper to produce than use cases. So where’s the catch?

• What is the right amount of detail a product owner should put into a User Story?

• Why are outcome-driven user story definitions so powerful? How do we start with those?

• My backlog is a mess - how can I untangle the dependencies effectively?

• My stories are huge - what five strategies can I use to split items like a charm?

• I still don’t know how to do this - what about spikes and research stories, eh?

_04.
Kanban is so much more than you think! (2-3 hours)

No, Kanban was never meant as just a board with columns. When done right, Kanban will help you optimize your development flow, increase predictability, and identify bottlenecks, idle work, and other areas of improvement in the waiting. Simple, powerful, and within reach. Learn how with us.

Learning outcomes:

• What are the core elements of Kanban (including the overlooked ones)?

• Your work is likely spending most of its time waiting – is there a way out?

• When will it be done? (Cycle Time)

• How much work can we finish by Christmas? (Throughput)

• How can we measure and improve our development predictability using flow metrics?

• Those JIRA graphs we had never clicked on actually tell wonderful stories! (CFD, Control Chart)

_05.
Topical on-demand micro-trainings (starting at 45 minutes)

Ever wanted to know how not to mess up this practice or that technique? Is your team struggling, and you struggle to find the right approach? We can help you identify a useful practice and go through the basics so that you can go and start improving things.