Course Content
Learn the 'buzz-words' and the terminology that Scrum uses. During this 2-day course, you will learn effective ways to include your customer in the process to ensure they are satisfied with the outcome. You will acquire the knowledge to produce metrics, such as Burndown charts. You will understand how to better estimate a release and help your customer understand what they will get and when they will get it.
This 2-day Scrum Master training course gives you hands-on experience with best practices for incorporating the customer into your daily plan, establish a cadence for the team, the importance that the team plays in the plan, and how much it means to commit to a goal. Lively lectures combined with insightful demonstrations and realistic practice exercises provide you with the competence and confidence to improve the quality of your product. You'll gain a thorough understanding of the challenges faced everyday by the technology team and how you, as a Scrum Master, can help overcome those obstacles. If you want to help your team be successful and use your coaching and facilitating skills to good use, you just have to take this course!
Attendees who successfully complete this course will receive the ICP designation after course completion, based on their exposure to the Agile Fundamentals learning objectives, which is covered in this course.
Who should attend
- Project Managers
- Team Leaders
- Systems Architects or Designers
- IT Managers/Directors
- Systems or Application Developers
- Anyone wishing to use their facilitation skills to make their team a success
Prerequisites
Although it is not mandatory, students who have completed the self-paced Foundations of Agile eLearning course have found it very helpful when completing this course.
Course Objectives
- What really works to help business customers clarify the current state of their business
- How to engage your customer for their benefit
- How to bridge gaps between business customers and designers, developers, and testers
- Learn the process in which your work and your project exists
- Get practical, real-world methods for initiating conversations with users to identify and solve business problems
- Enhance your relationships with stakeholders and increase their satisfaction
- Tips and tricks that have helped other ScrumMasters be successful with their real-world projects
- Learn how important empirical process is for your success
Outline: The Role of The Scrum Master: ICP Fundamentals Certification (SCRUMNC)
Part 1: The Necessity for Change
Gain an overall understanding of why effective focus on dealing with change is important. Topics covered:
- VUCA: Volatility, Uncertainly, Complexity, and Ambiguity
- Leading Change - Your role as a change agent
- The Cynefin Model of Complexity – Urgency for change
- Deming’s 14 Points
- Agile and Waterfall comparison
Part 2: Mindset and Manifesto
Learn why mindset change is needed and how the Agile Manifesto is the shift needed. Topics covered:
- How an Agile transformation starts with a mindset change
- Explaining the Agile Values
- The 3 focus areas represented by the Agile Principles
Part 3: Agile Frameworks
Where Lean and Kanban fit in the Agile spectrum which leads to the Scrum framework and XP practices. Topics covered:
- Principles of Lean and the 8 wastes of software development
- Mapping your Value Stream
- Key ideas in Kanban
Part 4: Team Concepts
Identifying high performance in teams and different kinds of organizational teams, including distributed ones. Topics covered:
- What are the characteristics of high performance
- Five kinds of organizational teams
- Distributed teams and challenges with distribution
Part 5: Scrum and Its Roles
Learn where Scrum came from and the key roles on a Scrum team. Topics covered:
- Agile/Scrum history and the essence of Scrum
- The Scrum framework
- The stakeholder/customer
- Role of the Product Owner
- The Development team – Structure, Responsibilities
- The role of QA
- The Management role
- Scrum Master’s key responsibilities
- Scrum Master “Roles” and Challenges
- Team Interaction Models – The Tuckman Model
- Agile Leadership
Part 6: Facilitation Techniques
Key ways Scrum Master’s help facilitate their teams. Topics covered:
- Embracing and facilitating (healthy) conflict
- What is “facilitation”?
- Effective Meetings
- Facilitation characteristics, techniques, & “tools”
- Decision-making
- Dealing with “Group Think”
- The Use of Powerful Questions
- Coaching – internal and external
Part 7: Agile Project Planning
Understanding the Agile planning approach, key ways to convey project vision, and the use of user roles and personas. Topics covered:
- The levels of Agile Planning
- Elevator Pitches, Themes and Roadmaps
- User Roles and Personas
Part 8: User Stories
Understanding the use of stories and approaches to defining story maps and story splitting. Topics Covered:
- Critical documentation concepts
- User Stories and Story Patterns
- Epics and their breakdown
- “DEEP” Backlogs & Story “INVEST”
- Story “Smells”
- Story Mapping and Splitting
Part 9: Acceptance Criteria and Prioritization
Writing good acceptance criteria and using them for story decomposition. Understanding technical stories and technical debt in support of Development teams. Using various prioritization approaches and risk management approaches. Topics Covered:
- Why Acceptance Criteria are important and writing them.
- Technical Stories and Technical Debt
- Prioritization approaches and Cost of Delay considerations
Part 10: Estimation
How traditional estimation can go wrong and the relative estimation approach used in Agile, including estimation approach such as Poker Planning and Affinity Estimation. How story estimation can lead to release planning. Topics Covered:
- What are challenges with Traditional Estimation?
- Agile’s Relative Estimation approach
- Poker Planning
- Affinity Estimation
- Agile Release Planning
Part 11: Sprint Execution
The Product owner roles in Sprint Planning, Daily Meetings, Sprint Reviews and the Sprint Retrospective. Topics Covered:
- Sprint planning & Sprint commitments
- Adding Work & Dependencies
- Conditions of Satisfaction and Definition of Done
- Story Review/Backlog Refinement
- Sprint execution
- The daily meeting and XP practices
- Basic Sprint metrics tools
- Metrics implementation advice
- Detecting and fixing defects
- Dealing with Interruptions
- Sprint Review for product improvement and evolution
- Presenting the Team’s Work
- Getting Useful Feedback
- Sprint Retrospective for team/process improvement and evolution
- The “Prime Directive”
- Retrospective challenges and revitalization
- The “5 Whys”
Part 12: Agile Scaling Methods
A look at three key scaling approaches: Scrum of Scrums, SAFe and LeSS. Topics Covered:
- Basic Scrum scaling with Scrum of Scrums
- Comprehensive scaling using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
- Large Scale Scrum as a scaling approach