Practical Scrum

What is this training about?

Understanding Scrum is easy, but implementing and mastering it is extremely difficult. Getting certified training and passing exams helps to alleviate the Scrum implementation-pain to a certain degree. However, certification courses aim at teaching us the theory: Scrum’s perfection vision. And what we need are answers!

The goal of this training program is to answer the problems participants bring to the class. We do this in a practical way, so that you have realistic answers that you can work with when you go back to your working environment.

This training gives helpful answers to your Scrum questions.

Target audience

This training targets at everybody working in or with Scrum teams. The goal of this training is to solve the hard problems we all encounter when we work with Scrum. Especially people in Near- shore countries and Project companies will find this training useful. This is not a theoretical training but aims at finding the best compromise for the problems in your context.

Facilitation focus

The training style is not “sit and listen”. This is an interactive training where the majority of the time you will be working with games and Liberating Structure techniques to tackle your problems.

For every facilitation technique used in the class, there will be sufficient amount of time spent on debriefing the facilitation technique itself. The result is you will not only get answers to your questions, but you will be experiencing and learning many facilitation formats.

How do we approach the problems?

We have collected a large number of challenges from many scrum masters, managers and team members. We see there is a need for answering three categories of questions:

Questions that emerge because of an imperfect implementation of Scrum.

This category of problems is dealt with with a guided analyses (always the same structure, we work in groups):

1. Explore: how is the problem hindering to do proper Scrum? (what is the effect on Transparency, Inspection, Adaptation, Product, Backlog, Done, Values, etc)
2. Find strategies for minimizing the impact of this imperfection.

Questions that are common to Scrum implementations.

This category will be solved with teaching and by using collective intelligence of the group. There will be written guides delivered for these subjects.

Questions not necessarily related to Scrum.

People will bring all kinds of questions that might not be related to Scrum. There will be plenty of space for Q&A where any work related question or issue can be discussed.

Sign up and schedule

You can sign up for this class and find a training schedule by contacting AgileLeads on Facebook.

The Practical Scrum training (silver bullet edition) will be taking place online on Monday November 30 and December 1.

Price: 850 euro. 2 days, Online live class.

Sign up by sending an email to roland.flemm@gmail.com

What questions were studied before?

Examples of Imperfect scrum questions

• The team can’t be fully autonomous in situations when its managers could grab a dev team member from the team and put him/her on other duties out of this team. How to deal with that?
• The part-time scrum master: SM is also responsible for delivery (some kind of mix of Scrum Master and Project Manager).
• The company wants to work with Scrum, but when the customer puts pressure on the delivery, the management pushes on hard deadlines. How can a Scrum master coach the team and management without being fired?
• How can we optimize collaboration between teams if there is no scaling framework applied?
• How can a Scrum team in a project company work with a PM?
• How to deal with time reporting and Scrum?
• How to deal with team leads?
• You are SM for several teams. Every team has its own PO. How to align on the product?

Examples of regular Scrum questions

• How to deal with a Dev Team that doesn’t want to take any action items on them after Retrospectives or does not want to have those Retros at all?
• Usually, companies have different functional silos and each has its own director who sets KPIs for his subordinates (KPIs for QA, KPIs for devs, KPIs for POs, etc…). How to deal with that working with Scrum teams?
• How to work with scrum haters and how not to burn out yourself?
• How to measure the business value that a team provides?
• How to do Release planning?
• What about delivering on deadlines?
• How to Scale?
• More than one team develops a product: how to plan? How to sync? How to estimate?
• How to create a roadmap?
• How to establish a Sprint goal? How to formulate it?
• How to estimate bugs? Do we really need to try to do that?
• How to plan a Sprint when you don’t know how many bugs are going to come within this Sprint?

Examples non–Scrum questions

• Facilitation techniques (rotation schedules, Liberating structures, Refinements with large groups, Designing sessions).
• Stories slicing techniques.
• KPIs for SM’s: how to measure SM’s performance?