Participants will learn advanced teamwork techniques, including ways to subtly guide a self-organizing team and how to ensure that all team members (including designers, architects, and testers) are busy on each day of the sprint. They will discover ways to effectively scale Scrum, in one location or on a globally distributed team. The course will explore what it means to be agile while meeting regulatory compliance requirements, how to overcome common problems, and tools for measuring the benefits of agile.

Agile isn't a final destination; it's something you grow towards each day. Learn how to iterate towards a higher level of agility, no matter where you are on your journey.  

PMPs: This course counts for 15 Professional Development Units (PDUs).

What You Will Learn

• How the same process used during transition can help spread agile or Scrum across the enterprise.
• How the roles of project managers, functional managers, programmers, testers, data professionals, architects, analysts, and others change in an agile process
• Ways in which a leader can influence a self-organizing team
• How to incorporate technical design, interaction design, and architecture into agile projects
• How improvement communities can drive the hard work of organizational change.
• How to effectively structure teams, including how to make proper use of specialists.

Who Should Attend?

This advanced course is suited for anyone who has previously attended an introductory agile or Scrum training course, such as a Certified ScrumMaster or Certified Scrum Product Owner class. It is also appropriate for anyone with prior agile experience who is looking for answers to the hundreds of questions that arise during any agile adoption.

PMPs: This agile training class counts for 15 Professional Development Units (PDUs).

What You Get

• High quality training from an industry expert
• A continental breakfast buffet, fruit, a lunch buffet including soda, an afternoon snack, and continuously replenished coffee, tea and water
• A USB drive containing a PDF of the course materials, relevant articles by Mike Cohn and others, sample chapters from Mike's books, and other information
• A printed and bound copy of the course materials

Our first course is devoted to an Introduction to Scrum for Software Developers, in which you will explore the Scrum Framework and how it supports faster and simpler software development. The second course covers Design Pattern Developer Essentials, where you will discover a core set of design patterns that every developer should know. This training program concludes with the popular Scrum Software Developer Essentials course, in which you’ll learn how to write higher-quality code more quickly and with fewer defects using practices from Extreme Programming (XP) that include test-first development, refactoring, and emergent design, as well as a variety of Agile problem-solving techniques.

You’ll be taken on a guided tour through essential developer practices, such as story writing, sprint planning, pair programming and test driven development. You’ll learn how to discover patterns in problems and to implement designs as needed. You’ll also explore the principles behind the practices so you understand how to use them to make the best design choices, and you’ll gain a powerful framework for encapsulating and abstracting virtually any problem for maximum flexibility, without over-complicating the solution.

You’ll learn the secrets of high-performance, cross-functional development teams and gain a shared design vocabulary for dramatically improving inter-team communication that can be applied equally well to new development and to maintaining or extending existing systems. You’ll then put theory into practice and apply your new skills by building the core of an application using the expert-level techniques you’ve learned for rapidly writing quality software.

By the end of this training program you’ll be armed with several new, effective tools and techniques for Scrum development that will make your software more robust, manageable, and easier to extend.

Who Should Take This Course

This training is for all team members, and has the greatest impact when the entire team attends. This set of courses will benefit architects; designers and developers; development and product managers; software engineers/programmers; testers and QA engineers; and technical analysts, leads, and writers. Familiarity with basic Object-Oriented (OO) concepts and terminology is recommended. Participants who successfully complete the programming exercises in the Scrum Software Developer Essentials training are eligible to become a Certified Scrum Developer, and require the ability to write simple programs in Java or C Sharp.

Course Benefits

Completing this training curriculum will give you the knowledge and experience of using Scrum to rapidly build quality software, and enable you to:

• Accurately estimate development tasks
• Write stories and build features in sprints
• Participate in each type of Scrum meeting
• Use test-first development to drive design
• Work effectively with legacy code
• Employ techniques that reduce defects
• Quickly implement effective design alternatives
• Collaborate smoothly with other team members
• Understand the Scrum framework and its roles, artifacts and ceremonies
• Recognize the key differences between Scrum and traditional waterfall development
• Define an effective strategy for continuously integrating software as it is built
• Lead a Scrum team to plan, estimate, and prioritize their backlog
• Establish standards and practices for rapidly building quality software
• Avoid upfront overdesign and practice just-in-time development
• Identify and correct potential impediments to Scrum success
• Use object-oriented techniques to write more extensible software
• Support collaboration, pair programming, and cross-functional teams
• Write software that supports an iterative process without excessive rework
• Support collaborative code ownership and embrace a common aesthetic
• Implement better design alternatives and avoid upfront overdesign

Agenda

Introduction to Scrum for Software Developers — Covers essential elements of Scrum for software developers: Scrum principles, values, and framework; artifacts; story writing; collaboration; estimation and planning; coaching and facilitation. Hands-on exercises include story writing, defining acceptance tests, estimation and sprint planning. See the full course description for Introduction to Scrum for Software Developers.

Design Pattern Developer Essentials — Covers Agile principles and patterns: approaches to design; key principles; problem-solving techniques; seeing patterns by what they encapsulate; discovering patterns in problems; design exercise; what patterns teach us; emergent design and refactoring to patterns. Includes an in-depth design exercise and debrief. See the full course description for Design Pattern Essentials for Developers.

Scrum Software Developer Essentials — Covers essential practices from Scrum and XP: continuous integration; pair programming; coding standards; test-first development (TDD); red green refactor; using TDD to inform design, code qualities; OOAD revisited and revised; discovering design patterns; conducting code reviews; essential Scrum developer practices; writing testable code; advanced testing techniques; refactoring legacy code; emerging solutions. Includes six hands-on programming exercises in Java and C Sharp. See the full course description for Scrum Software Developer Essentials.

Your Instructor

David Bernstein’s continuing passion for software design and construction has led him to train more than 7,500 developers in the last 23 years for clients that have included Fortune 500 firms such as Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo!, Boeing, AT&T, Sprint, Medtronic, SunGard, State Farm, MetLife and Weyerhaeuser. As a longtime IBM consultant, David trained software engineers around the globe, giving them the skills to write the next generation of applications and operating system software while earning one of the highest satisfaction ratings in the history of IBM education. Since 2006, he has devoted his consulting practice to providing organizations with training and coaching for software developers and teams transitioning to Agile and Scrum.

Certification

The three courses of this forty-hour training (which together comprise Our Certified Scrum Developer Essentials Training Week) satisfy all the training requirements for becoming a Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) through the Scrum Alliance. These courses count for 40 Professional Development Units (PDUs). See http://ToBeAgile.com/faq for more details.

Praise for David's Training

“Have you ever felt the fear of starting a project, not knowing what design to start? Ever felt the fear of making a small change and having everything crash down? Take this class and learn a better way to live and develop without fear.” – D.J. Hagberg, Software Architect “Take the course. It will change how you approach software development.” – Eric Huber, Senior Software Developer “One of the most interesting and interactive trainings that I have ever taken part in.” – Brandon Whitaker, Software Engineer

Become a more proficient developer—Register for the next session of this training or contact me to arrange a private, on-site session for your team.

View a pdf version of this course description or the one-page flyer.

The following elements will be covered during the one day course
* Scrum in Practice: the course is designed to illustrate Scrum in action.
* Understanding of the Agile Manifesto and what it means to them.
* Essence of Scrum: values, foundations and a new way of thinking.
* Understanding how Scrum values and foundations are related to the practices.
* Get a sense of what self-organization is (and is not).
* Can draw a diagram of mechanics of Scrum: framework, roles, artifacts & flow.

About your Instructor:

Bachan Anand is an Agile Coach and the founder of Conscires Agile Practices. He brings the vision to support others building successful organizations through the empowerment of people and lightweight processes.
 

The SAFe Program Consultant certification program is for internal agile change agents and external consultants. It provides the tools to implement agile programs and validates their knowledge in agile programs, program portfolio management, agile architecture, and leadership so that they can launch Agile Release Trains as part of an enterprise Lean|Agile change initiative.

Certified Scrum Product Owner Training teaches you, the product owner, how to use the product backlog as a tool for success. As you watch the product take shape, iteration after iteration, you can restructure the Product Backlog to incorporate your insights or respond to changes in business conditions. You can also identify and cancel unsuccessful projects early, often within the first several months. The Certified Scrum Product Owner; course equips you with what you need to achieve success with Scrum.

Intuitive and lightweight, the Scrum process delivers completed increments of the product at rapid, regular intervals, usually from every two weeks to a month. Rather than the traditional system of turning a project over to a project manager while you then wait and hope for the best, Scrum offers an effective alternative, made even more attractive when considering the statistics of traditional product approaches in which over 50% of all projects fail and those that succeed deliver products in which 64% of the functionality is rarely or never used.

Let us help you avoid becoming one of these statistics.

Following successful completion of the course, each participant will be designated a Certified Scrum Product Owner. This certification includes a one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, where additional member-only material and information are available.

PMPs: This course counts for 15 Professional Development Units (PDUs). This course also counts as 15 of the 21 contact hours needed of Agile Project Management Training to be eligible for the PMI-ACP certification.

What You Will Learn

• Practical, project-proven practices
• How to write user stories for the product backlog
• Proven techniques for prioritizing the product backlog
• How to predict the delivery date of a project (or the features that will be complete by a given date) using velocity
• Tips for managing the key variables influencing project success
• Tips and tricks from the instructor's fifteen years of using Scrum in a wide variety of environments

Who Should Attend?

This course is ideal for product managers, analysts, testers, and others who represent and are expected to understand the desires of users and customers on agile projects. You will leave with solid knowledge of how and why Scrum works and of your role on the project. Through practical, hands-on exercises and small-group discussion you will leave prepared to guide a Scrum team to success.

PMPs: This course counts for 15 Professional Development Units (PDUs). This course also counts as 15 of the 21 contact hours needed of Agile Project Management Training to be eligible for the PMI-ACP certification.

What You Get

• High quality training from an industry expert
• Recognition by the Scrum Alliance as a Certified Scrum Product Owner®
• Fruit in the morning, sandwiches mid-morning, a lunch buffet, an afternoon snack, and drinks
• A 4 GB USB drive containing a PDF of the course materials, relevant articles by Mike Cohn and others, sample chapters from Mike's books, and other information
• A one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, a $50 value
• A printed and bound copy of the course materials
• Planning Poker® cards for use in estimating with your team

Location Details

Courses in Oslo are held in either the city itself or at the Fornebu offices of Mountain Goat Software's partner in Norway, ProgramUtvikling.

One of the most important aspects of agile development training is estimating and planning. Yes, these are important, even for agile software development. Although agile is a fluid and iterative process, that doesn’t mean that planning doesn’t have a place in its programming and project management.

Despite the many worthless plans that we’ve all seen—which may make us want to skip planning altogether—this Agile Estimating and Planning Training will demonstrate that it’s possible to create accurate project plans useful for programming testing—and projecting forward from 6-9 months. Our Agile Estimating and Planning Training will teach you how to create practical, useful and reliable plans for your software development projects.

If your teams view planning as something to be avoided, or your organization uses plans as something to hold against development teams, this popular estimating and planning course can help your company break both of those attitudes and cycles.

Attendees will leave with a solid understanding and experience of agile release and iteration planning. The course also looks at various approaches to estimating including unit-less points and ideal time. The class will present four specific techniques for deriving reliable estimates, including how to use the popular Planning Poker® technique and other techniques that dramatically improve a project's chances of on-time completion.

By using this approach to estimating, teams learn to answer the ever-challenging questions that plague every development team: “When will we be done?” and “How soon can we have all of these features?”

PMPs: This course counts for 7.5 Professional Development Units (PDUs).

What You Will Learn

• How to create an accurate and useful project plan
• The importance of estimating size and deriving duration
• The differences between story points and ideal time
• The advantages of an abstract measure of size
• Techniques for creating estimates
• When and how to re-estimate
• How and when to perform release and iteration planning
• Tips for communicating about estimates and plans

Who Should Attend

This course is equally suited for managers, programmers, testers, or anyone involved in estimating or planning a software development project. Participants will return to their jobs with specific recommendations and actions they can perform to improve their current plans and projects.

PMPs: This agile training class counts for 7.5 Professional Development Units (PDUs).

What You Get

• High quality training from an industry expert
• A continental breakfast buffet, fruit, a lunch buffet including soda, an afternoon snack, and continuously replenished coffee, tea, water
• A printed, color copy of the course materials
• A USB drive containing a PDF of the course materials, relevant articles by Mike Cohn and others, sample chapters from Mike's books, and other information
• Planning Poker® cards for use in estimating with your team

Learn from industry experts Mitch Lacey & Luke Hohmann with a combined 25+ years of Agile experience. The Certified Scrum Product Owner Course is a two-day course which introduces the concepts of agile product management using the Scrum methodology. Why does this matter? The 2008 Standish Chaos study showed that 32% Succeeded of all IT projects had a cost overrun. Further, 24% Failed and 44% were challenged. It’s no wonder our customers are unhappy! This course will provide you the tools, techniques and most importantly, the understanding needed to be an effective Scrum Product Owner. Students will learn tried & true methods for building, managing and prioritizing the Product Backlog and ways to build a product roadmap for release planning.Successful participants will be listed as Certified Scrum Product Owners on the Scrum Alliance website.

You will learn:

- Overview of Scrum - We will review the Scrum framework, expanding on all elements of the framework.

-The Product Backlog - The Product Backlog is the key to any successful Scrum team. We will explore what comprises a good Product Backlog, techniques for managing it and what happens when it goes unattended.

-Stocking the Product Backlog - What elements make a good Product Backlog? What do we do with our users, and how do we handle technical stories? We go deep with ways to build a great product backlog to ensure a successful project.

-Prioritizing the Product Backlog - Having a prioritized Product Backlog is key if the team is to ensure their project is not in the 52% of projects that fail objectives. We will look at steps that can be used to ensure a prioritized backlog.

-Prioritizing- Product Owner Responsibilities & Traits - Who can be Product Owner? Is it the Product or Project manager? We will expand on what the role of the Product Owner is and elements of great Product Owners worldwide.

-Release Planning & Management - Knowing when things should be done is key. Knowing how to figure this out is essential to a successful project. We explore estimation units and the various levels of planning used in agile projects. 

The course format consists of multiple lecture topics, group exercises and group discussion. Ample time will be devoted to analysis of the “real-world” industry experiences of the course instructor based on case study examples and experiences managing Agile projects and coaching Scrum teams.

Visit our website for more information: 

http://www.scrumalliance.org/courses/20130987-certified-scrum-product-owner

Our first course is devoted to an Introduction to Scrum for Software Developers, in which you will explore the Scrum Framework and how it supports faster and simpler software development. The second course covers Design Pattern Developer Essentials, where you will discover a core set of design patterns that every developer should know. This training program concludes with the popular Scrum Software Developer Essentials course, in which you’ll learn how to write higher-quality code more quickly and with fewer defects using practices from Extreme Programming (XP) that include test-first development, refactoring, and emergent design, as well as a variety of Agile problem-solving techniques.

You’ll be taken on a guided tour through essential developer practices, such as story writing, sprint planning, pair programming and test driven development. You’ll learn how to discover patterns in problems and to implement designs as needed. You’ll also explore the principles behind the practices so you understand how to use them to make the best design choices, and you’ll gain a powerful framework for encapsulating and abstracting virtually any problem for maximum flexibility, without over-complicating the solution.

You’ll learn the secrets of high-performance, cross-functional development teams and gain a shared design vocabulary for dramatically improving inter-team communication that can be applied equally well to new development and to maintaining or extending existing systems. You’ll then put theory into practice and apply your new skills by building the core of an application using the expert-level techniques you’ve learned for rapidly writing quality software.

By the end of this training program you’ll be armed with several new, effective tools and techniques for Scrum development that will make your software more robust, manageable, and easier to extend.

Who Should Take This Course

This training is for all team members, and has the greatest impact when the entire team attends. This set of courses will benefit architects; designers and developers; development and product managers; software engineers/programmers; testers and QA engineers; and technical analysts, leads, and writers. Familiarity with basic Object-Oriented (OO) concepts and terminology is recommended. Participants who successfully complete the programming exercises in the Scrum Software Developer Essentials training are eligible to become a Certified Scrum Developer, and require the ability to write simple programs in Java or C Sharp.

Course Benefits

Completing this training curriculum will give you the knowledge and experience of using Scrum to rapidly build quality software, and enable you to:

• Accurately estimate development tasks
• Write stories and build features in sprints
• Participate in each type of Scrum meeting
• Use test-first development to drive design
• Work effectively with legacy code
• Employ techniques that reduce defects
• Quickly implement effective design alternatives
• Collaborate smoothly with other team members
• Understand the Scrum framework and its roles, artifacts and ceremonies
• Recognize the key differences between Scrum and traditional waterfall development
• Define an effective strategy for continuously integrating software as it is built
• Lead a Scrum team to plan, estimate, and prioritize their backlog
• Establish standards and practices for rapidly building quality software
• Avoid upfront overdesign and practice just-in-time development
• Identify and correct potential impediments to Scrum success
• Use object-oriented techniques to write more extensible software
• Support collaboration, pair programming, and cross-functional teams
• Write software that supports an iterative process without excessive rework
• Support collaborative code ownership and embrace a common aesthetic
• Implement better design alternatives and avoid upfront overdesign

Agenda

Introduction to Scrum for Software Developers — Covers essential elements of Scrum for software developers: Scrum principles, values, and framework; artifacts; story writing; collaboration; estimation and planning; coaching and facilitation. Hands-on exercises include story writing, defining acceptance tests, estimation and sprint planning. See the full course description for Introduction to Scrum for Software Developers.

Design Pattern Developer Essentials — Covers Agile principles and patterns: approaches to design; key principles; problem-solving techniques; seeing patterns by what they encapsulate; discovering patterns in problems; design exercise; what patterns teach us; emergent design and refactoring to patterns. Includes an in-depth design exercise and debrief. See the full course description for Design Pattern Essentials for Developers.

Scrum Software Developer Essentials — Covers essential practices from Scrum and XP: continuous integration; pair programming; coding standards; test-first development (TDD); red green refactor; using TDD to inform design, code qualities; OOAD revisited and revised; discovering design patterns; conducting code reviews; essential Scrum developer practices; writing testable code; advanced testing techniques; refactoring legacy code; emerging solutions. Includes six hands-on programming exercises in Java and C Sharp. See the full course description for Scrum Software Developer Essentials.

Your Instructor

David Bernstein’s continuing passion for software design and construction has led him to train more than 7,500 developers in the last 23 years for clients that have included Fortune 500 firms such as Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo!, Boeing, AT&T, Sprint, Medtronic, SunGard, State Farm, MetLife and Weyerhaeuser. As a longtime IBM consultant, David trained software engineers around the globe, giving them the skills to write the next generation of applications and operating system software while earning one of the highest satisfaction ratings in the history of IBM education. Since 2006, he has devoted his consulting practice to providing organizations with training and coaching for software developers and teams transitioning to Agile and Scrum.

Certification

The three courses of this forty-hour training (which together comprise Our Certified Scrum Developer Essentials Training Week) satisfy all the training requirements for becoming a Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) through the Scrum Alliance. These courses count for 40 Professional Development Units (PDUs). See http://ToBeAgile.com/faq for more details.

Praise for David's Training

“Have you ever felt the fear of starting a project, not knowing what design to start? Ever felt the fear of making a small change and having everything crash down? Take this class and learn a better way to live and develop without fear.” – D.J. Hagberg, Software Architect “Take the course. It will change how you approach software development.” – Eric Huber, Senior Software Developer “One of the most interesting and interactive trainings that I have ever taken part in.” – Brandon Whitaker, Software Engineer

Become a more proficient developer—Register for the next session of this training or contact me to arrange a private, on-site session for your team.

View a pdf version of this course description or the one-page flyer.

• have an excellent understanding of the Scrum Basics (principles, roles and meetings)
• know how to go from Release Planning to Project Completion using Scrum
• know the value of User Stories and Relative Estimation
• understand how to build a high performance team
• know how to reduce time to market and increase quality
• know how to create a culture of learning and continuous improvement
• fulfill the requirements of the Certified ScrumMaster Program including preparation for the CSM Exam

Finally this is one of the few CSM courses where you’re likely to discuss the neuroscience and psychology of teams.

Join VersionOne for a two hour remote Agile eLearning metrics class. During this web-based training you will learn how to read, use and act upon agile metrics

• What Are Agile metrics
  • Review what agile metrics are
  • Explore what makes agile metrics different
  • Learn the benefits of using agile metrics
• Using Agile metrics
  • Learn how to correctly interpret velocity
  • Review how to properly use burndown charts
  • Explore burn up and cumulative flow charts
• Managing With Metrics
  • Prepare to use metrics
  • Inspect common mistakes
  • Analyze real world example

It was originally created to train ScrumMasters, but is now used to train teams and the managers around teams.  It is particularly useful if a whole team (or team group) takes the course together.  In any case, all team roles (programmer, tester, analyst, Product Owner, ScrumMaster, etc) and managers and other interested parties can attend.  For example, CEOs have attended with benefit.

While it is a beginner level course, this course includes the practical knowledge to immediately start doing Scrum with a team.   You will also learn not just the how, but also the why.

This course is immersive and intensive, including practical, hands-on exercises and small-group discussions.

Summary of the Course

Through a combination of immersive team-based learning, exercises, and real-world case studies, you will learn:

• To plan, initiate and lead a Scrum project
• To establish a shared vision for the entire team
• To generate an agile release plan utilizing user stories and story point estimation
• To lead your Scrum team through planning, review, and retrospective sessions
• To create an environment in which self-managing teams can flourish
• To identify and remove impediments
• To identify, engage and involve business stakeholders in your project
• To take most existing teams to the next level
• Practical suggestions purchased expensively from the school of hard knocks

This training provides an applied understanding of the Scrum process and helps participants begin to develop the tools, insights, and skills required to apply Scrum on their projects and across their organizations.

For more information about the course, click on the Register button. (You will not be “forced” to register.)

Additional Information: The course will run from 9am-5pm each day. A continental breakfast, breaks and lunch will be provided.

Following the course, each participant is enrolled as a Certified ScrumMaster, which includes a one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, where additional ScrumMaster-only material and information are available.  Participants will also get a hardcopy and a softcopy of the slide deck used (and more).

Course Leader: Joe Little is an Agile coach and Certified Scrum Trainer.  His goal is to use Lean-Agile principles and practices to help firms deliver more business value for customers, to make workers’ lives better and to benefit stakeholders.  Discovering business value is one of his passions.  And helping teams discover new avenues to greater productivity. He is proud for several people he has mentored, who now themselves are very strong in Agile.

Joe learned Scrum from Ken Schwaber and later mentored with Jeff Sutherland, with whom he continues to co-teach. He also works with several other CSTs (and friends).  He produces Lean Software training with the Poppendiecks.  His preference is to practice Agile as a combination of Scrum, XP and Lean principles and practices.  Joe was a speaker at Agile2007 and at Agile2008 and at AgileTour 2009.  He started Agile-Carolinas.

Best Two days of training I ever had – Sridhar Sept/11

Fantastic. Very personable and great delivery – Jennifer Nov/11

Great Actionable Content – Jason Sept/11

Wonderful Course Delivering both “How to do it” and “Why it works” in a fun and enlightened way. – Hugo Aug/11

----

In this two day course you will use Scrum to build a new application, learning how it feels to be part of Scrum team and how Scrum works. The two day course that is a mix of exercises, lecture and open discussion. Along with the exercises the course itself is run using a “Scrum” like process with a product backlog, estimates and even acceptance criteria giving students a chance to see how we handle changing requirements in Scrum.

After completing this course you will:

• have an excellent understanding of the Scrum Basics (principles, roles and meetings)
• know how to go from Release Planning to Project Completion using Scrum
• know the value of User Stories and Relative Estimation
• understand how to build a high performance team
• know how to reduce time to market and increase quality
• know how to create a culture of learning and continuous improvement
• fulfill the requirements of the Certified ScrumMaster Program including preparation for the CSM Exam

Finally this is one of the few CSM courses where you’re likely to discuss the neuroscience and psychology of teams.

This course qualifies for 14 PMI PDU’s for PMP renewal.

Our first course is devoted to an Introduction to Scrum for Software Developers, in which you will explore the Scrum Framework and how it supports faster and simpler software development. The second course covers Design Pattern Developer Essentials, where you will discover a core set of design patterns that every developer should know. This training program concludes with the popular Scrum Software Developer Essentials course, in which you’ll learn how to write higher-quality code more quickly and with fewer defects using practices from Extreme Programming (XP) that include test-first development, refactoring, and emergent design, as well as a variety of Agile problem-solving techniques.

You’ll be taken on a guided tour through essential developer practices, such as story writing, sprint planning, pair programming and test driven development. You’ll learn how to discover patterns in problems and to implement designs as needed. You’ll also explore the principles behind the practices so you understand how to use them to make the best design choices, and you’ll gain a powerful framework for encapsulating and abstracting virtually any problem for maximum flexibility, without over-complicating the solution.

You’ll learn the secrets of high-performance, cross-functional development teams and gain a shared design vocabulary for dramatically improving inter-team communication that can be applied equally well to new development and to maintaining or extending existing systems. You’ll then put theory into practice and apply your new skills by building the core of an application using the expert-level techniques you’ve learned for rapidly writing quality software.

By the end of this training program you’ll be armed with several new, effective tools and techniques for Scrum development that will make your software more robust, manageable, and easier to extend.

Who Should Take This Course

This training is for all team members, and has the greatest impact when the entire team attends. This set of courses will benefit architects; designers and developers; development and product managers; software engineers/programmers; testers and QA engineers; and technical analysts, leads, and writers. Familiarity with basic Object-Oriented (OO) concepts and terminology is recommended. Participants who successfully complete the programming exercises in the Scrum Software Developer Essentials training are eligible to become a Certified Scrum Developer, and require the ability to write simple programs in Java or C Sharp.

Course Benefits

Completing this training curriculum will give you the knowledge and experience of using Scrum to rapidly build quality software, and enable you to:

• Accurately estimate development tasks
• Write stories and build features in sprints
• Participate in each type of Scrum meeting
• Use test-first development to drive design
• Work effectively with legacy code
• Employ techniques that reduce defects
• Quickly implement effective design alternatives
• Collaborate smoothly with other team members
• Understand the Scrum framework and its roles, artifacts and ceremonies
• Recognize the key differences between Scrum and traditional waterfall development
• Define an effective strategy for continuously integrating software as it is built
• Lead a Scrum team to plan, estimate, and prioritize their backlog
• Establish standards and practices for rapidly building quality software
• Avoid upfront overdesign and practice just-in-time development
• Identify and correct potential impediments to Scrum success
• Use object-oriented techniques to write more extensible software
• Support collaboration, pair programming, and cross-functional teams
• Write software that supports an iterative process without excessive rework
• Support collaborative code ownership and embrace a common aesthetic
• Implement better design alternatives and avoid upfront overdesign

Agenda

Introduction to Scrum for Software Developers — Covers essential elements of Scrum for software developers: Scrum principles, values, and framework; artifacts; story writing; collaboration; estimation and planning; coaching and facilitation. Hands-on exercises include story writing, defining acceptance tests, estimation and sprint planning. See the full course description for Introduction to Scrum for Software Developers.

Design Pattern Developer Essentials — Covers Agile principles and patterns: approaches to design; key principles; problem-solving techniques; seeing patterns by what they encapsulate; discovering patterns in problems; design exercise; what patterns teach us; emergent design and refactoring to patterns. Includes an in-depth design exercise and debrief. See the full course description for Design Pattern Essentials for Developers.

Scrum Software Developer Essentials — Covers essential practices from Scrum and XP: continuous integration; pair programming; coding standards; test-first development (TDD); red green refactor; using TDD to inform design, code qualities; OOAD revisited and revised; discovering design patterns; conducting code reviews; essential Scrum developer practices; writing testable code; advanced testing techniques; refactoring legacy code; emerging solutions. Includes six hands-on programming exercises in Java and C Sharp. See the full course description for Scrum Software Developer Essentials.

Your Instructor

David Bernstein’s continuing passion for software design and construction has led him to train more than 7,500 developers in the last 23 years for clients that have included Fortune 500 firms such as Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo!, Boeing, AT&T, Sprint, Medtronic, SunGard, State Farm, MetLife and Weyerhaeuser. As a longtime IBM consultant, David trained software engineers around the globe, giving them the skills to write the next generation of applications and operating system software while earning one of the highest satisfaction ratings in the history of IBM education. Since 2006, he has devoted his consulting practice to providing organizations with training and coaching for software developers and teams transitioning to Agile and Scrum.

Certification

The three courses of this forty-hour training (which together comprise Our Certified Scrum Developer Essentials Training Week) satisfy all the training requirements for becoming a Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) through the Scrum Alliance. These courses count for 40 Professional Development Units (PDUs). See http://ToBeAgile.com/faq for more details.

Praise for David's Training

“Have you ever felt the fear of starting a project, not knowing what design to start? Ever felt the fear of making a small change and having everything crash down? Take this class and learn a better way to live and develop without fear.” – D.J. Hagberg, Software Architect “Take the course. It will change how you approach software development.” – Eric Huber, Senior Software Developer “One of the most interesting and interactive trainings that I have ever taken part in.” – Brandon Whitaker, Software Engineer

Become a more proficient developer—Register for the next session of this training or contact me to arrange a private, on-site session for your team.

View a pdf version of this course description or the one-page flyer.

During the course, attendees will learn why such a seemingly simple process such as Scrum can have such profound effects on an organization. Participants gain practical experience working with Scrum tools and activities such as the product backlog, sprint backlog, daily Scrum meetings, sprint planning meeting, and burndown charts. Participants leave knowing how to apply Scrum to all sizes of projects, from a single collocated team to a large, highly distributed team.

Following successful completion of the course, you will be qualified and ready to pass the Scrum Alliance assessment exam. This multiple-choice, online test is required to become a Certified ScrumMaster, which includes a one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, where additional ScrumMaster-only material and information are available. For more information on the certification exam, see this page about the CSM exam.

PMPs: This course counts for 15 Professional Development Units (PDUs). This course also counts as 15 of the 21 contact hours needed of Agile Project Management Training to be eligible for the PMI-ACP certification.

What You Will Learn

• Practical, project-proven practices
• The essentials of getting a project off on the right foot
• How to write user stories for the product backlog
• Why there's more to leading a self-organizing team than buying pizza and getting out of the way
• How to help both new and experienced teams be more successful
• How to successfully scale Scrum to large, multi-continent projects with team sizes in the hundreds
• Tips and tricks from the instructor's fifteen years of using Scrum in a wide variety of environments

Who Should Attend?

Whether you're a manager, programmer, tester, analyst, product manager, or someone interested in working on or with a Scrum team, this course is suited for you. You will leave with solid knowledge of how and why Scrum works. Through practical, hands-on exercises and small-group discussion you will be prepared to plan your first sprint immediately after this class.

PMPs: This agile training class counts for 15 Professional Development Units (PDUs). This course also counts as 15 of the 21 contact hours needed of Agile Project Management Training to be eligible for the PMI-ACP certification.

What You Get

• High quality training from an industry expert
• Recognition by the Scrum Alliance as a Certified ScrumMaster after passing a short certification exam
• A continental breakfast buffet, a hot lunch buffet, an afternoon snack, and continuously replenished drinks
• A 4 GB USB drive containing a PDF of the course materials, relevant articles by Mike Cohn and others, sample chapters from Mike's books, and other information
• A one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, a $50 value
• A printed, color copy of the course materials
• Planning Poker® cards for use in estimating with your team

Looking for a straight-forward explanation of Scrum and how to use it effectively? Searching for ways to tailor your current processes to effectively support Scrum? During this two-day dynamic, interactive Certified ScrumMaster class, renowned consultants Carlton Nettleton and Jason Tanner will share their proven, real-world experiences and techniques implementing Scrum and show you how you can be successful with Scrum.

Through short, focused lectures that simplify each piece of the Scrum framework,the class will include lots of peer-to-peer discussions and small group activities, which reinforce each topic and will help you maximize your understanding and retention of Scrum. You will learn from Carlton and Jason's experiences, and the experiences of the other attendees, what works and what does not work with Scrum. Most importantly, you will have a blast learning as there is absolutely NO PowerPoint in this class.

The learning objectives for this course are:

List the five values of Scrum and the eight essential Scrum principles.

Discuss each piece of the Scrum framework, its' purpose and interaction with the other pieces of the framework. Describe the rights, responsibilities and interactions of each role in Scrum-Team Member, Product Owner, ScrumMaster and Stakeholder.

Discuss with the other participants what Scrum means to you and what it will mean to be a ScrumMaster in your organization.

Identify the main obstacles to using Scrum and the challenges for sustaining Scrum in your organization.

Evaluate if Scrum is the right process for you, your team, your project and/or your organization.

Practice applying ScrumMaster skills and thinking to solve day-to-day issues and challenges.

Watch Scrum in action as the framework of Scrum will be used to deliver the course material.

Draw a diagram describing the Scrum framework, highlighting all meetings, roles and artifacts.

Explain how Innovation Games® can help your team and business achieve better results with Scrum.

What you will receive from this course:

A vivid, 55 page student workbook full of custom exercises, activities and course summaries that capture the essential points you need to learn and comprehend to pass the Certified ScrumMaster assessment.

A signed copy of Carlton's book, Fourteen Observations of Good Scrum Practice, to use as a study guide to prepare for the assessment.

Documented Scrum case studies explaining how Scrum was used to create successful outcomes and improved teams.

A reading list of great books to jump start your continuing education on topics such as how to do Scrum better, scaling Scrum, distributed Scrum, estimating and planning, Lean Thinking, facilitation, collaboration, communication and other essential topics.

Thought-provoking articles relating to the role of ScrumMaster, the challenges associated with doing Scrum, identifying waste in your business, the Agile Manifesto, how Scrum was used to rescue a troubled project and facilitating change.

A forty-five minute, personalized question and answer session with a Scrum expert at the conclusion of the first day to answer your specific questions about Scrum and how to get started in your company.

Two-year membership with the Scrum Alliance providing access to additional articles, case studies and templates authored by other Scrum practioners like yourself along with discounts to Scrum events and conferences.

One year standard subscription to Innovation Games® online - a $495 value.

Who should attend:

Any person who is interested in learning more about Scrum or wants to make Scrum work better for their Team or organization, is encouraged to attend. While the focus of the class is for people who want to learn how to leverage the Scrum framework to bring about change, any member of the Team or the organization who is interested in how to use Scrum would find this class useful. Typical attendees in the past have been functional managers, Team leads, analysts, architects, engineers, software developers, directors, testers and other roles that support product development.

This is what you will learn from the other participants in the course: "Learn how they implemented Scrum, roadblocks they faced and how to overcome those" "Knowledge to decide whether Scrum is for me or not and when to implement it" "That others are facing similar issues in adopting and adapting to Scrum" "I learned a lot from people with different roles in their organization" "Mechanics are not the emphasis for success in this methodology" "The issues I face in my work is common among my classmates" "Surprised that Scrum is not as structured as PMI"

Instructors:

Carlton Nettleton -  

My name is Carlton Nettleton and I am the President of Look Forward Consulting. My passion is to share my excitement, enthusiasm and encouragement with teams and organizations as they reach for higher levels of performance and engagement. My business is to help your business grow and flourish. When we work together, I will be sharing tools, techniques, practices and insights I have gained in the last 10 years while working with Agile teams as both a contributor (I used to write code a long time ago), leader and a consultant. My goal is nothing less than to develop high-performing teams through a combination of visibility, accountability and real ownership of the work and authentic personal relationships. When these factors come together in your organization, teams will deliver not just the same mediocre results faster, but astonishing results. The types of outcomes and innovation that will stun your leadership, customers and competitors. Today, my main focus is to lend my experience and deep knowledge of Scrum to organizations that are looking for something more out of their business and teams. Together we will apply Scrum and Lean Thinking to your projects so you can develop products that satisfy your customer's needs better than your competitors.

Jason Tanner -

Jason coaches, teaches and mentors product managers and teams to achieve their goals through Agile principles and practices. He currently focuses on large enterprise transformation. Jason brings his professional experience with software companies, a telecom carrier and the Marine Corps to engagements. Jason has been an Agilist for 6 years. His expertise spans Agile product management, product marketing, business planning, partner relationships, project management and leadership. Jason attends and speaks regularly at local events - wherever he works - national and international events including Scrum Gatherings and Agile Alliance conferences. He holds an engineering degree from Cornell and an MBA from Duke and is a CSM and a CSP.

Certified Scrum Product Owner Training teaches you, the product owner, how to use the product backlog as a tool for success. As you watch the product take shape, iteration after iteration, you can restructure the Product Backlog to incorporate your insights or respond to changes in business conditions. You can also identify and cancel unsuccessful projects early, often within the first several months. The Certified Scrum Product Owner; course equips you with what you need to achieve success with Scrum.

Intuitive and lightweight, the Scrum process delivers completed increments of the product at rapid, regular intervals, usually from every two weeks to a month. Rather than the traditional system of turning a project over to a project manager while you then wait and hope for the best, Scrum offers an effective alternative, made even more attractive when considering the statistics of traditional product approaches in which over 50% of all projects fail and those that succeed deliver products in which 64% of the functionality is rarely or never used.

Let us help you avoid becoming one of these statistics.

Following successful completion of the course, each participant will be designated a Certified Scrum Product Owner. This certification includes a one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, where additional member-only material and information are available.

PMPs: This course counts for 15 Professional Development Units (PDUs). This course also counts as 15 of the 21 contact hours needed of Agile Project Management Training to be eligible for the PMI-ACP certification.

What You Will Learn

• Practical, project-proven practices
• How to write user stories for the product backlog
• Proven techniques for prioritizing the product backlog
• How to predict the delivery date of a project (or the features that will be complete by a given date) using velocity
• Tips for managing the key variables influencing project success
• Tips and tricks from the instructor's fifteen years of using Scrum in a wide variety of environments

Who Should Attend?

This course is ideal for product managers, analysts, testers, and others who represent and are expected to understand the desires of users and customers on agile projects. You will leave with solid knowledge of how and why Scrum works and of your role on the project. Through practical, hands-on exercises and small-group discussion you will leave prepared to guide a Scrum team to success.

PMPs: This course counts for 15 Professional Development Units (PDUs). This course also counts as 15 of the 21 contact hours needed of Agile Project Management Training to be eligible for the PMI-ACP certification.

What You Get

• High quality training from an industry expert
• Recognition by the Scrum Alliance as a Certified Scrum Product Owner after passing a short certification exam
• A breakfast buffet, a hot lunch buffet, an afternoon snack, and continuously replenished drinks
• A 4 GB USB drive containing a PDF of the course materials, relevant articles by Mike Cohn and others, sample chapters from Mike's books, and other information
• A one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, a $50 value
• A printed, color copy of the course materials
• Planning Poker® cards for use in estimating with your team

Certified Scrum Product Owner Training teaches you, the product owner, how to use the product backlog as a tool for success. As you watch the product take shape, iteration after iteration, you can restructure the Product Backlog to incorporate your insights or respond to changes in business conditions. You can also identify and cancel unsuccessful projects early, often within the first several months. The Certified Scrum Product Owner; course equips you with what you need to achieve success with Scrum.

Intuitive and lightweight, the Scrum process delivers completed increments of the product at rapid, regular intervals, usually from every two weeks to a month. Rather than the traditional system of turning a project over to a project manager while you then wait and hope for the best, Scrum offers an effective alternative, made even more attractive when considering the statistics of traditional product approaches in which over 50% of all projects fail and those that succeed deliver products in which 64% of the functionality is rarely or never used.

Let us help you avoid becoming one of these statistics.

Following successful completion of the course, each participant will be designated a Certified Scrum Product Owner. This certification includes a one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, where additional member-only material and information are available.

This course counts for 15 professional development units. This course also counts as 15 of the 21 contact hours needed of Agile Project Management Training to be eligible for the PMI-ACP certification.

What You Will Learn

• Practical, project-proven practices
• How to write user stories for the product backlog
• Proven techniques for prioritizing the product backlog
• How to predict the delivery date of a project (or the features that will be complete by a given date) using velocity
• Tips for managing the key variables influencing project success
• Tips and tricks from the instructor's fifteen years of using Scrum in a wide variety of environments

Who Should Attend?

This course is ideal for product managers, analysts, testers, and others who represent and are expected to understand the desires of users and customers on agile projects. You will leave with solid knowledge of how and why Scrum works and of your role on the project. Through practical, hands-on exercises and small-group discussion you will leave prepared to guide a Scrum team to success.

PMPs: This course counts for 15 Professional Development Units (PDUs). This course also counts as 15 of the 21 contact hours needed of Agile Project Management Training to be eligible for the PMI-ACP certification.

What You Get

• High quality training from an industry expert
• Recognition by the Scrum Alliance as a Certified Scrum Product Owner after passing a short certification exam
• A hot lunch buffet and afternoon biscuits
• A one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, a $50 value
• A USB drive containing a PDF of the course materials, relevant articles by Mike Cohn and others, sample chapters from Mike's books, and other information
• A printed and bound copy of the course materials
• Planning Poker® cards for use in estimating with your team

During the course, attendees will learn why such a seemingly simple process such as Scrum can have such profound effects on an organization. Participants gain practical experience working with Scrum tools and activities such as the product backlog, sprint backlog, daily Scrum meetings, sprint planning meeting, and burndown charts. Participants leave knowing how to apply Scrum to all sizes of projects, from a single collocated team to a large, highly distributed team.

Following successful completion of the course, you will be qualified and ready to pass the Scrum Alliance assessment exam. This multiple-choice, online test is required to become a Certified ScrumMaster, which includes a one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, where additional ScrumMaster-only material and information are available. For more information on the certification exam, see this page about the CSM exam.

PMPs: This course counts for 15 Professional Development Units (PDUs). This course also counts as 15 of the 21 contact hours needed of Agile Project Management Training to be eligible for the PMI-ACP certification.

What You Will Learn

• Practical, project-proven practices
• The essentials of getting a project off on the right foot
• How to write user stories for the product backlog
• Why there's more to leading a self-organizing team than buying pizza and getting out of the way
• How to help both new and experienced teams be more successful
• How to successfully scale Scrum to large, multi-continent projects with team sizes in the hundreds
• Tips and tricks from the instructor's fifteen years of using Scrum in a wide variety of environments

Who Should Attend?

Whether you're a manager, programmer, tester, analyst, product manager, or someone interested in working on or with a Scrum team, this course is suited for you. You will leave with solid knowledge of how and why Scrum works. Through practical, hands-on exercises and small-group discussion you will be prepared to plan your first sprint immediately after this class.

PMPs: This agile training class counts for 15 Professional Development Units (PDUs).

What You Get

• High quality training from an industry expert
• Recognition by the Scrum Alliance as a Certified ScrumMaster after passing a short certification exam
• A continental breakfast buffet, fruit, a lunch buffet including soda, an afternoon snack, and continuously replenished coffee, tea and water
• A one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, a $50 value
• A USB drive containing a PDF of the course materials, relevant articles by Mike Cohn and others, sample chapters from Mike's books, and other information
• A printed and bound copy of the course materials
• Planning Poker® cards for use in estimating with your team

Our first course is devoted to an Introduction to Scrum for Software Developers, in which you will explore the Scrum Framework and how it supports faster and simpler software development. The second course covers Design Pattern Developer Essentials, where you will discover a core set of design patterns that every developer should know. This training program concludes with the popular Scrum Software Developer Essentials course, in which you’ll learn how to write higher-quality code more quickly and with fewer defects using practices from Extreme Programming (XP) that include test-first development, refactoring, and emergent design, as well as a variety of Agile problem-solving techniques.

You’ll be taken on a guided tour through essential developer practices, such as story writing, sprint planning, pair programming and test driven development. You’ll learn how to discover patterns in problems and to implement designs as needed. You’ll also explore the principles behind the practices so you understand how to use them to make the best design choices, and you’ll gain a powerful framework for encapsulating and abstracting virtually any problem for maximum flexibility, without over-complicating the solution.

You’ll learn the secrets of high-performance, cross-functional development teams and gain a shared design vocabulary for dramatically improving inter-team communication that can be applied equally well to new development and to maintaining or extending existing systems. You’ll then put theory into practice and apply your new skills by building the core of an application using the expert-level techniques you’ve learned for rapidly writing quality software.

By the end of this training program you’ll be armed with several new, effective tools and techniques for Scrum development that will make your software more robust, manageable, and easier to extend.

Who Should Take This Course

This training is for all team members, and has the greatest impact when the entire team attends. This set of courses will benefit architects; designers and developers; development and product managers; software engineers/programmers; testers and QA engineers; and technical analysts, leads, and writers. Familiarity with basic Object-Oriented (OO) concepts and terminology is recommended. Participants who successfully complete the programming exercises in the Scrum Software Developer Essentials training are eligible to become a Certified Scrum Developer, and require the ability to write simple programs in Java or C Sharp.

Course Benefits

Completing this training curriculum will give you the knowledge and experience of using Scrum to rapidly build quality software, and enable you to:

• Accurately estimate development tasks
• Write stories and build features in sprints
• Participate in each type of Scrum meeting
• Use test-first development to drive design
• Work effectively with legacy code
• Employ techniques that reduce defects
• Quickly implement effective design alternatives
• Collaborate smoothly with other team members
• Understand the Scrum framework and its roles, artifacts and ceremonies
• Recognize the key differences between Scrum and traditional waterfall development
• Define an effective strategy for continuously integrating software as it is built
• Lead a Scrum team to plan, estimate, and prioritize their backlog
• Establish standards and practices for rapidly building quality software
• Avoid upfront overdesign and practice just-in-time development
• Identify and correct potential impediments to Scrum success
• Use object-oriented techniques to write more extensible software
• Support collaboration, pair programming, and cross-functional teams
• Write software that supports an iterative process without excessive rework
• Support collaborative code ownership and embrace a common aesthetic
• Implement better design alternatives and avoid upfront overdesign

Agenda

Introduction to Scrum for Software Developers — Covers essential elements of Scrum for software developers: Scrum principles, values, and framework; artifacts; story writing; collaboration; estimation and planning; coaching and facilitation. Hands-on exercises include story writing, defining acceptance tests, estimation and sprint planning. See the full course description for Introduction to Scrum for Software Developers.

Design Pattern Developer Essentials — Covers Agile principles and patterns: approaches to design; key principles; problem-solving techniques; seeing patterns by what they encapsulate; discovering patterns in problems; design exercise; what patterns teach us; emergent design and refactoring to patterns. Includes an in-depth design exercise and debrief. See the full course description for Design Pattern Essentials for Developers.

Scrum Software Developer Essentials — Covers essential practices from Scrum and XP: continuous integration; pair programming; coding standards; test-first development (TDD); red green refactor; using TDD to inform design, code qualities; OOAD revisited and revised; discovering design patterns; conducting code reviews; essential Scrum developer practices; writing testable code; advanced testing techniques; refactoring legacy code; emerging solutions. Includes six hands-on programming exercises in Java and C Sharp. See the full course description for Scrum Software Developer Essentials.

Your Instructor

David Bernstein’s continuing passion for software design and construction has led him to train more than 7,500 developers in the last 23 years for clients that have included Fortune 500 firms such as Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo!, Boeing, AT&T, Sprint, Medtronic, SunGard, State Farm, MetLife and Weyerhaeuser. As a longtime IBM consultant, David trained software engineers around the globe, giving them the skills to write the next generation of applications and operating system software while earning one of the highest satisfaction ratings in the history of IBM education. Since 2006, he has devoted his consulting practice to providing organizations with training and coaching for software developers and teams transitioning to Agile and Scrum.

Certification

The three courses of this forty-hour training (which together comprise Our Certified Scrum Developer Essentials Training Week) satisfy all the training requirements for becoming a Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) through the Scrum Alliance. These courses count for 40 Professional Development Units (PDUs). See http://ToBeAgile.com/faq for more details.

Praise for David's Training

“Have you ever felt the fear of starting a project, not knowing what design to start? Ever felt the fear of making a small change and having everything crash down? Take this class and learn a better way to live and develop without fear.” – D.J. Hagberg, Software Architect “Take the course. It will change how you approach software development.” – Eric Huber, Senior Software Developer “One of the most interesting and interactive trainings that I have ever taken part in.” – Brandon Whitaker, Software Engineer

Become a more proficient developer—Register for the next session of this training or contact me to arrange a private, on-site session for your team.

View a pdf version of this course description or the one-page flyer.

During the course, attendees will learn why such a seemingly simple process such as Scrum can have such profound effects on an organization. Participants gain practical experience working with Scrum tools and activities such as the product backlog, sprint backlog, daily Scrum meetings, sprint planning meeting, and burndown charts. Participants leave knowing how to apply Scrum to all sizes of projects, from a single collocated team to a large, highly distributed team.

Following successful completion of the course, you will be qualified and ready to pass the Scrum Alliance assessment exam. This multiple-choice, online test is required to become a Certified ScrumMaster, which includes a one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, where additional ScrumMaster-only material and information are available. For more information on the certification exam, see this page about the CSM exam.

PMPs: This course counts for 15 Professional Development Units (PDUs).

What You Will Learn

• Practical, project-proven practices
• The essentials of getting a project off on the right foot
• How to write user stories for the product backlog
• Why there's more to leading a self-organizing team than buying pizza and getting out of the way
• How to help both new and experienced teams be more successful
• How to successfully scale Scrum to large, multi-continent projects with team sizes in the hundreds
• Tips and tricks from the instructor's fifteen years of using Scrum in a wide variety of environments

Who Should Attend?

Whether you're a manager, programmer, tester, analyst, product manager, or someone interested in working on or with a Scrum team, this course is suited for you. You will leave with solid knowledge of how and why Scrum works. Through practical, hands-on exercises and small-group discussion you will be prepared to plan your first sprint immediately after this class.

PMPs: This agile training class counts for 15 Professional Development Units (PDUs).

What You Get

• High quality training from an industry expert
• Recognition by the Scrum Alliance as a Certified ScrumMaster after passing a short certification exam
• A continental breakfast buffet, fruit, a lunch buffet including soda, an afternoon snack, and continuously replenished coffee, tea and water
• A one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, a $50 value
• A USB drive containing a PDF of the course materials, relevant articles by Mike Cohn and others, sample chapters from Mike's books, and other information
• A printed and bound copy of the course materials
• Planning Poker® cards for use in estimating with your team

Class Overview:

Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) is an in-depth two day immersion into the world of Agile Product Management. The class is full of practical, real world techniques, which can be implemented immediately at your workplace. This class will allow your organization to enjoy the many advantages Scrum has to offer. Hands-on exercises demonstrate key concepts and let you experience the benefits of Scrum firsthand.

Limited to only 20 seats...
Sign-up now in order to ensure your spot is reserved!
14 PDUs Awarded		Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) eligible class

What others are are saying about us:

• "I knew absolutely nothing about Scrum or how it worked and now I feel I have a good baseline that I can use to start using it and adding to that knowledge base." - Don
• "I learned a great deal in a short period (2 days). This class has prepared me to be a successful partner & product owner. The exercises were entertaining while very educational." - David
• "Braintrust did an amazing job keeping the class entertaining and incorporated real life issues a product owner could face with Scrum. I had a great time and excited to share what I've learned with my team." - Rachel

Who should attend?

• Product Managers/Business Analysts
• Functional/Operational Managers
• Project Sponsors
• IT Leadership (Managers/Directors/VPs/CIOs/CTOs)
• Anyone interested in learning the benefits of Scrum

Prerequisites:

• None

Class Learning Objectives:

• As a CSPO class participant, I want...
  1. To explain Scrum’s history, so that I can better appreciate Scrum.
  2. To explain the importance of having team values, so that I can understand how the team has agreed to work together.
  3. To list situations where using Scrum is appropriate, so that I can better understand why Scrum will benefit my organization.
  4. To describe the Scrum framework, so that I can clearly comprehend the Scrum process.
  5. To describe the roles and responsibilities in Scrum, so that I can understand who does what.
  6. To select a product, so that I can have a real-world example to base the class exercises on.
  7. To demonstrate how to create a product vision statement, so that I can establish a guiding light for the product, with the help of my stakeholders.
  8. To demonstrate how to create a product roadmap, so that I can chart a class for the team and help build consensus with my stakeholders.
  9. To demonstrate how to establish user roles and personas, so that I can ensure that I don’t miss an important stakeholder’s business need.
  10. To explain how to seed a product backlog, so that I can quickly establish enough backlog items so that the team can start sprinting.
  11. To demonstrate how to write user stories, so that I can clearly articulate the who, what, and why behind each backlog item.
  12. To list how the team will relatively size backlog items, so that I can factor-in implementation complexity, when I assess the overall priority of a backlog item.
  13. To demonstrate how to quickly assess business value, so that I can establish an initial priority for the backlog items in my product backlog.
  14. To explain how to tell a good user story from a bad one, so that I can create a better product backlog.
  15. To list several ways to prioritize my product backlog, so that I can determine what is the best approach for the situation at hand.
  16. To list and explain the key meetings in Scrum, so that I know what is happening, before, during, and after each sprint.
  17. To demonstrate how to track team progress, so that I can make more informed prioritization decisions and forecast possible release dates.
  18. To list and explain the additional meetings recommended for Scrum, so that I can improve the overall efficiency of the Scrum process.
  19. To demonstrate how to play product box, so that I understand the key features that my customer(s) want(s) in my product.
  20. To list areas where we might get into trouble, so that I know what to look out for as my organization implements Scrum.
  21. An open forum to discuss challenging questions about Scrum, so that I can utilize the collective intelligence of the class participants to brainstorm creative ways to solve problems.

Benefits:

• Learn while not being bored and having fun
• Retain more information because of our unique hands-on approach; based on the latest research into brain science
• Be entertained by stories from our real-world experienced and knowledgeable instructors
• Maximize investments already made by gaining valuable Professional Development Units (PDUs)
• Increase your personal worth within your company and in the marketplace

Takeaways:

• Easy to use reminders of Scrum
  • Printed class manual
  • Scrum reference card
  • Thumbdrive loaded with; articles, class exercises, whitepapers, etc...
• 14 PDUs
• A two year membership to the Scrum Alliance
• The Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) designation (upon successful class completion)

About The Instructor: Lonnie Weaver-Johnson, CST

Lonnie Weaver-Johnson, CST is the Agile Practice Lead for The Braintrust Consulting Group. She obtained a degree in communications and then went on to a 20+ year career implementing IT projects and leading people through change. Lonnie enjoys transforming people through; coaching, conflict resolution, performance management, and imparting knowledge. Lonnie started working with Scrum in 2006 and her experience has taken her across the United States and to foreign lands such as India and Canada. Helping teams learn and grow together until they reach a high performing stage is Lonnie’s passion. Her candid and patient coaching style helps people understand how to make the necessary behavioral changes to make Scrum work for their teams. She also enjoys partnering with leaders to help them understand how the changes will impact their organization. Lonnie has been an IT leader, a business analyst, a corporate trainer, a ToastMaster officer, a public speaker in her community, and a volunteer at local high schools training kids in team development. In all cases Lonnie brings high energy to her classes, motivates the learners, and uses humor and stories to keep people engaged. To contact Lonnie please e-mail her at lonnie.weaver-johnson@braintrustgroup.com or join her on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/lonnieweaverjohnson.

Want more testimonials? Check these out! http://www.braintrustgroup.com/case-studies/testimonials

Organizations That We Have Trained:

Cancellation Policy:

In order to receive a refund of your tuition for this class you must notify us no later than 5 days prior to the class start date. Cancellation requests received after the 5 day window will be issued a credit that can be applied towards a future class.

Privacy Notice:

We may on some occasions share your email address with a limited number of our trusted partners. We do not sell your personal information and we treat your privacy with the utmost regard. Please contact us at info@braintrustgroup.com if you have any concerns.

It was originally created to train ScrumMasters, but is now used to train teams and the managers around teams.  It is particularly useful if a whole team (or team group) takes the course together.  In any case, all team roles (programmer, tester, analyst, Product Owner, ScrumMaster, etc) and managers and other interested parties can attend.  For example, CEOs have attended with benefit.

While it is a beginner level course, this course includes the practical knowledge to immediately start doing Scrum with a team.   You will also learn not just the how, but also the why.

This course is immersive and intensive, including practical, hands-on exercises and small-group discussions.

Summary of the Course

Through a combination of immersive team-based learning, exercises, and real-world case studies, you will learn:

• To plan, initiate and lead a Scrum project
• To establish a shared vision for the entire team
• To generate an agile release plan utilizing user stories and story point estimation
• To lead your Scrum team through planning, review, and retrospective sessions
• To create an environment in which self-managing teams can flourish
• To identify and remove impediments
• To identify, engage and involve business stakeholders in your project
• To take most existing teams to the next level
• Practical suggestions purchased expensively from the school of hard knocks

This training provides an applied understanding of the Scrum process and helps participants begin to develop the tools, insights, and skills required to apply Scrum on their projects and across their organizations.

For more information about the course, click on the Register button. (You will not be “forced” to register.)

Additional Information: The course will run from 9am-5pm each day. A continental breakfast, breaks and lunch will be provided.

Following the course, each participant is enrolled as a Certified ScrumMaster, which includes a one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, where additional ScrumMaster-only material and information are available.  Participants will also get a hardcopy and a softcopy of the slide deck used (and more).

Course Leader: Joe Little is an Agile coach and Certified Scrum Trainer.  His goal is to use Lean-Agile principles and practices to help firms deliver more business value for customers, to make workers’ lives better and to benefit stakeholders.  Discovering business value is one of his passions.  And helping teams discover new avenues to greater productivity. He is proud for several people he has mentored, who now themselves are very strong in Agile.

Joe learned Scrum from Ken Schwaber and later mentored with Jeff Sutherland, with whom he continues to co-teach. He also works with several other CSTs (and friends).  He produces Lean Software training with the Poppendiecks.  His preference is to practice Agile as a combination of Scrum, XP and Lean principles and practices.  Joe was a speaker at Agile2007 and at Agile2008 and at AgileTour 2009.  He started Agile-Carolinas.

Best Two days of training I ever had – Sridhar Sept/11

Fantastic. Very personable and great delivery – Jennifer Nov/11

Great Actionable Content – Jason Sept/11

Wonderful Course Delivering both “How to do it” and “Why it works” in a fun and enlightened way. – Hugo Aug/11

----

In this two day course you will use Scrum to build a new application, learning how it feels to be part of Scrum team and how Scrum works. The two day course that is a mix of exercises, lecture and open discussion. Along with the exercises the course itself is run using a “Scrum” like process with a product backlog, estimates and even acceptance criteria giving students a chance to see how we handle changing requirements in Scrum.

After completing this course you will:

• have an excellent understanding of the Scrum Basics (principles, roles and meetings)
• know how to go from Release Planning to Project Completion using Scrum
• know the value of User Stories and Relative Estimation
• understand how to build a high performance team
• know how to reduce time to market and increase quality
• know how to create a culture of learning and continuous improvement
• fulfill the requirements of the Certified ScrumMaster Program including preparation for the CSM Exam

Finally this is one of the few CSM courses where you’re likely to discuss the neuroscience and psychology of teams.

This course qualifies for 14 PMI PDU’s for PMP renewal.

It was originally created to train ScrumMasters, but is now used to train teams and the managers around teams.  It is particularly useful if a whole team (or team group) takes the course together.  In any case, all team roles (programmer, tester, analyst, Product Owner, ScrumMaster, etc) and managers and other interested parties can attend.  For example, CEOs have attended with benefit.

While it is a beginner level course, this course includes the practical knowledge to immediately start doing Scrum with a team.   You will also learn not just the how, but also the why.

This course is immersive and intensive, including practical, hands-on exercises and small-group discussions.

Summary of the Course

Through a combination of immersive team-based learning, exercises, and real-world case studies, you will learn:

• To plan, initiate and lead a Scrum project
• To establish a shared vision for the entire team
• To generate an agile release plan utilizing user stories and story point estimation
• To lead your Scrum team through planning, review, and retrospective sessions
• To create an environment in which self-managing teams can flourish
• To identify and remove impediments
• To identify, engage and involve business stakeholders in your project
• To take most existing teams to the next level
• Practical suggestions purchased expensively from the school of hard knocks

This training provides an applied understanding of the Scrum process and helps participants begin to develop the tools, insights, and skills required to apply Scrum on their projects and across their organizations.

For more information about the course, click on the Register button. (You will not be “forced” to register.)

Additional Information: The course will run from 9am-5pm each day. A continental breakfast, breaks and lunch will be provided.

Following the course, each participant is enrolled as a Certified ScrumMaster, which includes a one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, where additional ScrumMaster-only material and information are available.  Participants will also get a hardcopy and a softcopy of the slide deck used (and more).

Course Leader: Joe Little is an Agile coach and Certified Scrum Trainer.  His goal is to use Lean-Agile principles and practices to help firms deliver more business value for customers, to make workers’ lives better and to benefit stakeholders.  Discovering business value is one of his passions.  And helping teams discover new avenues to greater productivity. He is proud for several people he has mentored, who now themselves are very strong in Agile.

Joe learned Scrum from Ken Schwaber and later mentored with Jeff Sutherland, with whom he continues to co-teach. He also works with several other CSTs (and friends).  He produces Lean Software training with the Poppendiecks.  His preference is to practice Agile as a combination of Scrum, XP and Lean principles and practices.  Joe was a speaker at Agile2007 and at Agile2008 and at AgileTour 2009.  He started Agile-Carolinas.

It was originally created to train ScrumMasters, but is now used to train teams and the managers around teams.  It is particularly useful if a whole team (or team group) takes the course together.  In any case, all team roles (programmer, tester, analyst, Product Owner, ScrumMaster, etc) and managers and other interested parties can attend.  For example, CEOs have attended with benefit.

While it is a beginner level course, this course includes the practical knowledge to immediately start doing Scrum with a team.   You will also learn not just the how, but also the why.

This course is immersive and intensive, including practical, hands-on exercises and small-group discussions.

Summary of the Course

Through a combination of immersive team-based learning, exercises, and real-world case studies, you will learn:

• To plan, initiate and lead a Scrum project
• To establish a shared vision for the entire team
• To generate an agile release plan utilizing user stories and story point estimation
• To lead your Scrum team through planning, review, and retrospective sessions
• To create an environment in which self-managing teams can flourish
• To identify and remove impediments
• To identify, engage and involve business stakeholders in your project
• To take most existing teams to the next level
• Practical suggestions purchased expensively from the school of hard knocks

This training provides an applied understanding of the Scrum process and helps participants begin to develop the tools, insights, and skills required to apply Scrum on their projects and across their organizations.

For more information about the course, click on the Register button. (You will not be “forced” to register.)

Additional Information: The course will run from 9am-5pm each day. A continental breakfast, breaks and lunch will be provided.

Following the course, each participant is enrolled as a Certified ScrumMaster, which includes a one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, where additional ScrumMaster-only material and information are available.  Participants will also get a hardcopy and a softcopy of the slide deck used (and more).

Course Leader: Joe Little is an Agile coach and Certified Scrum Trainer.  His goal is to use Lean-Agile principles and practices to help firms deliver more business value for customers, to make workers’ lives better and to benefit stakeholders.  Discovering business value is one of his passions.  And helping teams discover new avenues to greater productivity. He is proud for several people he has mentored, who now themselves are very strong in Agile.

Joe learned Scrum from Ken Schwaber and later mentored with Jeff Sutherland, with whom he continues to co-teach. He also works with several other CSTs (and friends).  He produces Lean Software training with the Poppendiecks.  His preference is to practice Agile as a combination of Scrum, XP and Lean principles and practices.  Joe was a speaker at Agile2007 and at Agile2008 and at AgileTour 2009.  He started Agile-Carolinas.

During the course, attendees will learn why such a seemingly simple process such as Scrum can have such profound effects on an organization. Participants gain practical experience working with Scrum tools and activities such as the product backlog, sprint backlog, daily Scrum meetings, sprint planning meeting, and burndown charts. Participants leave knowing how to apply Scrum to all sizes of projects, from a single collocated team to a large, highly distributed team.

Following successful completion of the course, you will be qualified and ready to pass the Scrum Alliance assessment exam. This multiple-choice, online test is required to become a Certified ScrumMaster, which includes a one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, where additional ScrumMaster-only material and information are available. For more information on the certification exam, see this page about the CSM exam.

PMPs: This course counts for 15 Professional Development Units (PDUs). This course also counts as 15 of the 21 contact hours needed of Agile Project Management Training to be eligible for the PMI-ACP certification.

What You Will Learn

• Practical, project-proven practices
• The essentials of getting a project off on the right foot
• How to write user stories for the product backlog
• Why there's more to leading a self-organizing team than buying pizza and getting out of the way
• How to help both new and experienced teams be more successful
• How to successfully scale Scrum to large, multi-continent projects with team sizes in the hundreds
• Tips and tricks from the instructor's fifteen years of using Scrum in a wide variety of environments

Who Should Attend?

Whether you're a manager, programmer, tester, analyst, product manager, or someone interested in working on or with a Scrum team, this course is suited for you. You will leave with solid knowledge of how and why Scrum works. Through practical, hands-on exercises and small-group discussion you will be prepared to plan your first sprint immediately after this class.

PMPs: This course counts for 15 Professional Development Units (PDUs). This course also counts as 15 of the 21 contact hours needed of Agile Project Management Training to be eligible for the PMI-ACP certification.

What You Get

• High quality training from an industry expert
• Recognition by the Scrum Alliance as a Certified ScrumMaster after passing a short certification exam
• A breakfast buffet, a hot lunch buffet, an afternoon snack, and continuously replenished drinks
• A 4 GB USB drive containing a PDF of the course materials, relevant articles by Mike Cohn and others, sample chapters from Mike's books, and other information
• A one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, a $50 value
• A printed, color copy of the course materials
• Planning Poker® cards for use in estimating with your team

Our first course is devoted to an Introduction to Scrum for Software Developers, in which you will explore the Scrum Framework and how it supports faster and simpler software development. The second course covers Design Pattern Developer Essentials, where you will discover a core set of design patterns that every developer should know. This training program concludes with the popular Scrum Software Developer Essentials course, in which you’ll learn how to write higher-quality code more quickly and with fewer defects using practices from Extreme Programming (XP) that include test-first development, refactoring, and emergent design, as well as a variety of Agile problem-solving techniques.

You’ll be taken on a guided tour through essential developer practices, such as story writing, sprint planning, pair programming and test driven development. You’ll learn how to discover patterns in problems and to implement designs as needed. You’ll also explore the principles behind the practices so you understand how to use them to make the best design choices, and you’ll gain a powerful framework for encapsulating and abstracting virtually any problem for maximum flexibility, without over-complicating the solution.

You’ll learn the secrets of high-performance, cross-functional development teams and gain a shared design vocabulary for dramatically improving inter-team communication that can be applied equally well to new development and to maintaining or extending existing systems. You’ll then put theory into practice and apply your new skills by building the core of an application using the expert-level techniques you’ve learned for rapidly writing quality software.

By the end of this training program you’ll be armed with several new, effective tools and techniques for Scrum development that will make your software more robust, manageable, and easier to extend.

Who Should Take This Course

This training is for all team members, and has the greatest impact when the entire team attends. This set of courses will benefit architects; designers and developers; development and product managers; software engineers/programmers; testers and QA engineers; and technical analysts, leads, and writers. Familiarity with basic Object-Oriented (OO) concepts and terminology is recommended. Participants who successfully complete the programming exercises in the Scrum Software Developer Essentials training are eligible to become a Certified Scrum Developer, and require the ability to write simple programs in Java or C Sharp.

Course Benefits

Completing this training curriculum will give you the knowledge and experience of using Scrum to rapidly build quality software, and enable you to:

• Accurately estimate development tasks
• Write stories and build features in sprints
• Participate in each type of Scrum meeting
• Use test-first development to drive design
• Work effectively with legacy code
• Employ techniques that reduce defects
• Quickly implement effective design alternatives
• Collaborate smoothly with other team members
• Understand the Scrum framework and its roles, artifacts and ceremonies
• Recognize the key differences between Scrum and traditional waterfall development
• Define an effective strategy for continuously integrating software as it is built
• Lead a Scrum team to plan, estimate, and prioritize their backlog
• Establish standards and practices for rapidly building quality software
• Avoid upfront overdesign and practice just-in-time development
• Identify and correct potential impediments to Scrum success
• Use object-oriented techniques to write more extensible software
• Support collaboration, pair programming, and cross-functional teams
• Write software that supports an iterative process without excessive rework
• Support collaborative code ownership and embrace a common aesthetic
• Implement better design alternatives and avoid upfront overdesign

Agenda

Introduction to Scrum for Software Developers — Covers essential elements of Scrum for software developers: Scrum principles, values, and framework; artifacts; story writing; collaboration; estimation and planning; coaching and facilitation. Hands-on exercises include story writing, defining acceptance tests, estimation and sprint planning. See the full course description for Introduction to Scrum for Software Developers.

Design Pattern Developer Essentials — Covers Agile principles and patterns: approaches to design; key principles; problem-solving techniques; seeing patterns by what they encapsulate; discovering patterns in problems; design exercise; what patterns teach us; emergent design and refactoring to patterns. Includes an in-depth design exercise and debrief. See the full course description for Design Pattern Essentials for Developers.

Scrum Software Developer Essentials — Covers essential practices from Scrum and XP: continuous integration; pair programming; coding standards; test-first development (TDD); red green refactor; using TDD to inform design, code qualities; OOAD revisited and revised; discovering design patterns; conducting code reviews; essential Scrum developer practices; writing testable code; advanced testing techniques; refactoring legacy code; emerging solutions. Includes six hands-on programming exercises in Java and C Sharp. See the full course description for Scrum Software Developer Essentials.

Your Instructor

David Bernstein’s continuing passion for software design and construction has led him to train more than 7,500 developers in the last 23 years for clients that have included Fortune 500 firms such as Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo!, Boeing, AT&T, Sprint, Medtronic, SunGard, State Farm, MetLife and Weyerhaeuser. As a longtime IBM consultant, David trained software engineers around the globe, giving them the skills to write the next generation of applications and operating system software while earning one of the highest satisfaction ratings in the history of IBM education. Since 2006, he has devoted his consulting practice to providing organizations with training and coaching for software developers and teams transitioning to Agile and Scrum.

Certification

The three courses of this forty-hour training (which together comprise Our Certified Scrum Developer Essentials Training Week) satisfy all the training requirements for becoming a Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) through the Scrum Alliance. These courses count for 40 Professional Development Units (PDUs). See http://ToBeAgile.com/faq for more details.

Praise for David's Training

“Have you ever felt the fear of starting a project, not knowing what design to start? Ever felt the fear of making a small change and having everything crash down? Take this class and learn a better way to live and develop without fear.” – D.J. Hagberg, Software Architect “Take the course. It will change how you approach software development.” – Eric Huber, Senior Software Developer “One of the most interesting and interactive trainings that I have ever taken part in.” – Brandon Whitaker, Software Engineer

Become a more proficient developer—Register for the next session of this training or contact me to arrange a private, on-site session for your team.

View a pdf version of this course description or the one-page flyer.

During the course, attendees will learn why such a seemingly simple process such as Scrum can have such profound effects on an organization. Participants gain practical experience working with Scrum tools and activities such as the product backlog, sprint backlog, daily Scrum meetings, sprint planning meeting, and burndown charts. Participants leave knowing how to apply Scrum to all sizes of projects, from a single collocated team to a large, highly distributed team.

Following successful completion of the course, you will be qualified and ready to pass the Scrum Alliance assessment exam. This multiple-choice, online test is required to become a Certified ScrumMaster, which includes a one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, where additional ScrumMaster-only material and information are available. For more information on the certification exam, see this page about the CSM exam.

This class is preceded by an Effective User Stories course and is followed by an Agile Estimating and Planning class in the same location. You can attend these classes separately or together.

PMPs: This course counts for 15 Professional Development Units (PDUs).

What You Will Learn

• Practical, project-proven practices
• The essentials of getting a project off on the right foot
• How to write user stories for the product backlog
• Why there's more to leading a self-organizing team than buying pizza and getting out of the way
• How to help both new and experienced teams be more successful
• How to successfully scale Scrum to large, multi-continent projects with team sizes in the hundreds
• Tips and tricks from the instructor's fifteen years of using Scrum in a wide variety of environments

Who Should Attend?

Whether you're a manager, programmer, tester, analyst, product manager, or someone interested in working on or with a Scrum team, this course is suited for you. You will leave with solid knowledge of how and why Scrum works. Through practical, hands-on exercises and small-group discussion you will be prepared to plan your first sprint immediately after this class.

PMPs: This agile training class counts for 15 Professional Development Units (PDUs).

What You Get

• High quality training from an industry expert
• Recognition by the Scrum Alliance as a Certified ScrumMaster after passing a short certification exam
• A hot lunch buffet and afternoon biscuits
• A one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, a $50 value
• A USB drive containing a PDF of the course materials, relevant articles by Mike Cohn and others, sample chapters from Mike's books, and other information
• A printed and bound copy of the course materials
• Planning Poker® cards for use in estimating with your team

Participants will learn advanced teamwork techniques, including ways to subtly guide a self-organizing team and how to ensure that all team members (including designers, architects, and testers) are busy on each day of the sprint. They will discover ways to effectively scale Scrum, in one location or on a globally distributed team. The course will explore what it means to be agile while meeting regulatory compliance requirements, how to overcome common problems, and tools for measuring the benefits of agile.

Agile isn't a final destination; it's something you grow towards each day. Learn how to iterate towards a higher level of agility, no matter where you are on your journey.  

PMPs: This course counts for 15 Professional Development Units (PDUs).

What You Will Learn

• How the same process used during transition can help spread agile or Scrum across the enterprise.
• How the roles of project managers, functional managers, programmers, testers, data professionals, architects, analysts, and others change in an agile process
• Ways in which a leader can influence a self-organizing team
• How to incorporate technical design, interaction design, and architecture into agile projects
• How improvement communities can drive the hard work of organizational change.
• How to effectively structure teams, including how to make proper use of specialists.

Who Should Attend?

This advanced course is suited for anyone who has previously attended an introductory agile or Scrum training course, such as a Certified ScrumMaster or Certified Scrum Product Owner class. It is also appropriate for anyone with prior agile experience who is looking for answers to the hundreds of questions that arise during any agile adoption.

PMPs: This agile training class counts for 15 Professional Development Units (PDUs).

What You Get

• High quality training from an industry expert
• A continental breakfast buffet, fruit, a lunch buffet including soda, an afternoon snack, and continuously replenished coffee, tea and water
• A USB drive containing a PDF of the course materials, relevant articles by Mike Cohn and others, sample chapters from Mike's books, and other information
• A printed and bound copy of the course materials

Agile Coaching Institute in partnership with Lithespeed - Coaching Agile Teams course description

Coaching Agile Teams is a training experience that covers both the being and the doing of agile coaching.  There’s a lot to learn, experience and practice! At the end of the course, you will be capable of applying many new tools and techniques, as well as your own mindset changes, to coach agile teams to high performance. As practical as it is provocative, the Coaching Agile Teams course challenges agile coaches to rise to the fullest expression of their role and offer simple, practical ways to get there.

Outcome

You’ll walk away from the course with your personal coaching improvement backlog – a tangible plan you can use to thoughtfully improve your coaching when you’re back in your daily circumstances.  We use your real world situations and scenarios throughout the class allowing you to craft powerful ways to address the challenges you face.  You’ll also have many new things to try with your teams and you will probably depart with a few provocative ideas to chew on (in fact, maybe wrangle with for a while). All of these outcomes add up to your ability to become the excellent agile coach your teams need.

Audience
The Coaching Agile Teams course is meant for ScrumMasters, agile coaches and project managers in transition – people  who are ready to take the next step beyond practices and principles and move into activating teams to achieve the full promise of agile.

This course is tailor-made for you if:

• You’ve had a few experiences as an agile coach and it just doesn’t seem to be working for you.
• Your job has become routine and you notice the teams seem to be going through the motions, too.
• Your teams get the practices and are doing well, but not getting the fabulous results you were supposed to get.
• Your are an awesome agile coach and you want the skills that will help you earn the Certified Scrum Coach designation.
• You are spread across many agile teams because your managers think agile coaching is not a full-time job.
• You are not sure if the agile coach role is really right for you.

Course Content

• What is Agile Coaching? :: Why is it Important?
• The Being and the Doing of Agile Coaching
• Professional Coaching Skills for Coaching Teams, Team Members, Product Owners, Managers, Stakeholders, Leaders
• Coaching Approaches and When to Use Which
• Setting the Environment for High Performance Teams
• Agile Coaching Competencies: Skills, Knowledge, Stance
• Coaching and Mentoring as Separate Skills
• Real Agile Teams: Coaching for Health & High Performance
• Starting up Great Teams :: Resetting Existing Teams
• Agile Coach Failure, Recovery and Success Modes

Prerequisites
You must be a practicing agile coach with at least 6 months of hands-on experience. Ideally, you will also have Certified ScrumMaster or equivalent agile training.  This is not an Introduction-level course and we will not be covering the basics of agile or Scrum.  In addition, you will be asked to use what you know about your real teams throughout the class so that you can leave with ideas for helping them as soon as you get back.

This two-day certification course will teach you how to use a variety of games with your customers to:

• Uncover unspoken needs & breakthrough opportunities 

• Understand where your offerings fit into your customers' operations 

• Clarify exactly how & when customers will use your product or service 

• Deliver the right new features & make better strategy decisions 

• Increase empathy for the customers' experience within your organization 

• Improve the effectiveness of the sales & service organizations 

• Identify your most effective marketing messages and sellable features
• Discover what customers don't like about your offerings

The course covers both in-person and online games, including our online sales enablement game Knowsy, and includes sections on facilitation and presentation skills.

Content Outline

• Discussion of Innovation Games® and market research
• High-level planning, playing and post-processing of Innovation Games
• Detailed planning, playing and post-processing the results of several case studies that enable participants to experience all phases of Innovation Games
• Review and shared discussion; helping participants plan their adoption of these techniques
• Facilitation and presentation skills

Who should attend?

• Product Managers/Directors
• Portfolio/Product Management Professionals
• Marketing Professionals
• Market Research Professionals
• Software Engineers/Developers/Architects 
• Executive Management
• Agile Coaches/Team Leads

Theory of Instruction

The course is guided by a “learning by doing” model of education: 

• What participants will know after taking the class.
• What participants will do during the seminar to reinforce key concepts.
• What participants will have after the seminar to promote further practice and study.

Course :

Looking for a straight-forward explanation of Scrum and how to use it effectively?
Searching for ways to tailor your current processes to effectively support Scrum?
During this two-day dynamic, interactive Certified ScrumMaster class, renowned
consultant and Certified Scrum Trainer®, Carlton Nettleton will share his proven, real-
world experienced and techniques implementing Scrum and show you how you can be
successful with Scrum.

Through short, focused lectures that simplify each piece of the Scrum framework,
the class will include lots of peer-to-peer discussions and small-group activities, that
reinforce each topic and will help you maximize your understanding and retention of
Scrum. You will learn from Carlton’s experience, and the experiences of the others,
what works and what does not work with Scrum. Most importantly, you will have a blast
learning as there is absolutely NO PowerPoint in this class.

Agenda :

The learning objectives for this course are:

• List the five values of Scrum and the eight essential Scrum principles.
• Discuss each piece of the Scrum framework, it’s purpose and interaction with the
other pieces of the framework.
• Describe the rights, responsibilities and interactions of each role in Scrum – Team
member, Product Owner, ScrumMaster and stakeholder.
• Discuss with the other participants what Scrum means to you and what it will
mean to be a ScrumMaster in your organization.
• Identify the main obstacles to using Scrum and the challenges for sustaining
Scrum in your organization.
• Evaluate if Scrum is the right process for you, your team, your project andor your
organization.
• Practice applying ScrumMaster skills and thinking to solve day-to-day issues and
challenges.
• Watch Scrum in action as the framework of Scrum will be used to deliver the
course material.
• Draw a diagram describing the Scrum framework, highlighting all meetings, roles
and artifacts

Class Overview:

Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) is an in-depth two day immersion into the world of Scrum. The class is full of practical, real world techniques that can be implemented immediately at your workplace. This class will allow your organization to enjoy the many advantages Scrum has to offer. Hands-on exercises demonstrate key concepts and let you experience the benefits of Scrum firsthand.

Limited to only 20 seats...
Sign-up now in order to ensure your spot is reserved!
14 PDUs Awarded		Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) eligible class

What others are are saying about us:

• "This was the biggest "bang for the buck" of any class I've ever taken (in 18 years of professional development)." - Heather
• "The class was extremely helpful in helping me find my role as ScrumMaster on my team." - Michael
• "I was pleasantly surprised that after only two days I now have a foundation to begin using Scrum at my agency." - Kevin

Who should attend?

• IT Professionals (Architects, BAs, DBAs, Developers, Testers, etc.)
• IT Leadership (Managers/Directors/VPs/CIOs/CTOs)
• Project Managers
• Anyone interested in learning the benefits of Scrum

Prerequisites:

• None

Class Learning Objectives:

• As a CSM class participant, I want...
  1. To explain Scrum’s history, so that I can better appreciate Scrum.
  2. To demonstrate the importance of having team values, so that I can facilitate the creation of working agreements amongst team members.
  3. To list situations where using Scrum is appropriate, so that I can be more successful at applying Scrum.
  4. To describe the Scrum framework, so that I can clearly comprehend the Scrum process.
  5. To describe the roles and responsibilities in Scrum, so that I can understand who does what.
  6. To experience Scrum, so that I know what it feels like when I start doing it for real.
  7. To explain the value of a product vision statement, so that I gain a greater appreciation for why we need one.
  8. To explain how to seed a product backlog, so that I can assist the Product Owner with creating one.
  9. To demonstrate how to write user stories, so that I can clearly articulate the who, what, and why behind a backlog item.
  10. To teach team members how to relatively size backlog items, so that the product owner can make better prioritization decisions.
  11. To list and explain the key meetings in Scrum, so that I know what is happening, before, during, and after each sprint.
  12. To explain how to tell a good user story from a bad one, so that I can better assist the Product Owner with creating an effective product backlog.
  13. To demonstrate how to track team progress, so that I can accurately understand what has been accomplished and how much longer it will take to complete the product.
  14. To list and explain the additional meetings recommended for Scrum, so that I can improve the overall efficiency of the Scrum process.
  15. To list areas where we might get into trouble, so that I know what to look out for as my organization implements Scrum.
  16. To list other fields that may enhance our ability to do Scrum better, so that I can have additional tools to increase our chances of success.
  17. An open forum to discuss challenging questions about Scrum, so that I can utilize the collective intelligence of the class participants to brainstorm creative solutions to complex problems.

Benefits:

• Learn while not being bored and having fun
• Retain more information because of our unique hands-on approach; based on the latest research into brain science
• Be entertained by stories from our real-world experienced and knowledgeable instructors
• Maximize investments already made by gaining valuable Professional Development Units (PDUs)
• Increase your personal worth within your company and in the marketplace

Takeaways:

• Easy to use reminders of Scrum
  • Printed class manual
  • Scrum reference card
  • Thumbdrive loaded with; articles, class exercises, whitepapers, etc...
• 14 PDUs
• A two year membership to the Scrum Alliance
• Eligibility to sit for the Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) exam

About The Instructor: Brian M. Rabon, CST, PMP

Brian M. Rabon, CST, PMP is the President of The Braintrust Consulting Group, a worldwide leader in Agile transformations. Throughout his 16 years of IT industry experience, Brian has applied Agile methods in order to successfully deliver working product to his customers. Brian holds a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from Auburn University and a Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. When not in the classroom, Brian can be found around the globe evangelizing the benefits of Agile to the likes of Agile 20XX, the Project Management Institute’s (PMI) many chapters, and the Scrum Alliance’s Scrum Gatherings. Brian is an avid blogger, writing for his company’s blog at http://www.braintrustgroup.com/blog. To contact Brian please e-mail him at brian.rabon@braintrustgroup.com or join him on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/bmrabon.

Want more testimonials? Check these out! http://www.braintrustgroup.com/case-studies/testimonials

Organizations That We Have Trained:

Cancellation Policy:

In order to receive a refund of your tuition for this class you must notify us no later than 5 days prior to the class start date. Cancellation requests received after the 5 day window will be issued a credit that can be applied towards a future class.

Privacy Notice:

We may on some occasions share your email address with a limited number of our trusted partners. We do not sell your personal information and we treat your privacy with the utmost regard. Please contact us at info@braintrustgroup.com if you have any concerns.

Class Overview:

Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) is an in-depth two day immersion into the world of Scrum. The class is full of practical, real world techniques that can be implemented immediately at your workplace. This class will allow your organization to enjoy the many advantages Scrum has to offer. Hands-on exercises demonstrate key concepts and let you experience the benefits of Scrum firsthand.

Limited to only 20 seats...
Sign-up now in order to ensure your spot is reserved!
14 PDUs Awarded		Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) eligible class

What others are are saying about us:

• "This was the biggest "bang for the buck" of any class I've ever taken (in 18 years of professional development)." - Heather
• "The class was extremely helpful in helping me find my role as ScrumMaster on my team." - Michael
• "I was pleasantly surprised that after only two days I now have a foundation to begin using Scrum at my agency." - Kevin

Who should attend?

• IT Professionals (Architects, BAs, DBAs, Developers, Testers, etc.)
• IT Leadership (Managers/Directors/VPs/CIOs/CTOs)
• Project Managers
• Anyone interested in learning the benefits of Scrum

Prerequisites:

• None

Class Learning Objectives:

• As a CSM class participant, I want...
  1. To explain Scrum’s history, so that I can better appreciate Scrum.
  2. To demonstrate the importance of having team values, so that I can facilitate the creation of working agreements amongst team members.
  3. To list situations where using Scrum is appropriate, so that I can be more successful at applying Scrum.
  4. To describe the Scrum framework, so that I can clearly comprehend the Scrum process.
  5. To describe the roles and responsibilities in Scrum, so that I can understand who does what.
  6. To experience Scrum, so that I know what it feels like when I start doing it for real.
  7. To explain the value of a product vision statement, so that I gain a greater appreciation for why we need one.
  8. To explain how to seed a product backlog, so that I can assist the Product Owner with creating one.
  9. To demonstrate how to write user stories, so that I can clearly articulate the who, what, and why behind a backlog item.
  10. To teach team members how to relatively size backlog items, so that the product owner can make better prioritization decisions.
  11. To list and explain the key meetings in Scrum, so that I know what is happening, before, during, and after each sprint.
  12. To explain how to tell a good user story from a bad one, so that I can better assist the Product Owner with creating an effective product backlog.
  13. To demonstrate how to track team progress, so that I can accurately understand what has been accomplished and how much longer it will take to complete the product.
  14. To list and explain the additional meetings recommended for Scrum, so that I can improve the overall efficiency of the Scrum process.
  15. To list areas where we might get into trouble, so that I know what to look out for as my organization implements Scrum.
  16. To list other fields that may enhance our ability to do Scrum better, so that I can have additional tools to increase our chances of success.
  17. An open forum to discuss challenging questions about Scrum, so that I can utilize the collective intelligence of the class participants to brainstorm creative solutions to complex problems.

Benefits:

• Learn while not being bored and having fun
• Retain more information because of our unique hands-on approach; based on the latest research into brain science
• Be entertained by stories from our real-world experienced and knowledgeable instructors
• Maximize investments already made by gaining valuable Professional Development Units (PDUs)
• Increase your personal worth within your company and in the marketplace

Takeaways:

• Easy to use reminders of Scrum
  • Printed class manual
  • Scrum reference card
  • Thumbdrive loaded with; articles, class exercises, whitepapers, etc...
• 14 PDUs
• A two year membership to the Scrum Alliance
• Eligibility to sit for the Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) exam

About The Instructor: Lonnie Weaver-Johnson, CST

Lonnie Weaver-Johnson, CST is the Agile Practice Lead for The Braintrust Consulting Group. She obtained a degree in communications and then went on to a 20+ year career implementing IT projects and leading people through change. Lonnie enjoys transforming people through; coaching, conflict resolution, performance management, and imparting knowledge. Lonnie started working with Scrum in 2006 and her experience has taken her across the United States and to foreign lands such as India and Canada. Helping teams learn and grow together until they reach a high performing stage is Lonnie’s passion. Her candid and patient coaching style helps people understand how to make the necessary behavioral changes to make Scrum work for their teams. She also enjoys partnering with leaders to help them understand how the changes will impact their organization. Lonnie has been an IT leader, a business analyst, a corporate trainer, a ToastMaster officer, a public speaker in her community, and a volunteer at local high schools training kids in team development. In all cases Lonnie brings high energy to her classes, motivates the learners, and uses humor and stories to keep people engaged. To contact Lonnie please e-mail her at lonnie.weaver-johnson@braintrustgroup.com or join her on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/lonnieweaverjohnson.

Want more testimonials? Check these out! http://www.braintrustgroup.com/case-studies/testimonials

Organizations That We Have Trained:

Cancellation Policy:

In order to receive a refund of your tuition for this class you must notify us no later than 5 days prior to the class start date. Cancellation requests received after the 5 day window will be issued a credit that can be applied towards a future class.

Privacy Notice:

We may on some occasions share your email address with a limited number of our trusted partners. We do not sell your personal information and we treat your privacy with the utmost regard. Please contact us at info@braintrustgroup.com if you have any concerns.

It was originally created to train ScrumMasters, but is now used to train teams and the managers around teams.  It is particularly useful if a whole team (or team group) takes the course together.  In any case, all team roles (programmer, tester, analyst, Product Owner, ScrumMaster, etc) and managers and other interested parties can attend.  For example, CEOs have attended with benefit.

While it is a beginner level course, this course includes the practical knowledge to immediately start doing Scrum with a team.   You will also learn not just the how, but also the why.

This course is immersive and intensive, including practical, hands-on exercises and small-group discussions.

Summary of the Course

Through a combination of immersive team-based learning, exercises, and real-world case studies, you will learn:

• To plan, initiate and lead a Scrum project
• To establish a shared vision for the entire team
• To generate an agile release plan utilizing user stories and story point estimation
• To lead your Scrum team through planning, review, and retrospective sessions
• To create an environment in which self-managing teams can flourish
• To identify and remove impediments
• To identify, engage and involve business stakeholders in your project
• To take most existing teams to the next level
• Practical suggestions purchased expensively from the school of hard knocks

This training provides an applied understanding of the Scrum process and helps participants begin to develop the tools, insights, and skills required to apply Scrum on their projects and across their organizations.

For more information about the course, click on the Register button. (You will not be “forced” to register.)

Additional Information: The course will run from 9am-5pm each day. A continental breakfast, breaks and lunch will be provided.

Following the course, each participant is enrolled as a Certified ScrumMaster, which includes a one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, where additional ScrumMaster-only material and information are available.  Participants will also get a hardcopy and a softcopy of the slide deck used (and more).

Course Leader: Joe Little is an Agile coach and Certified Scrum Trainer.  His goal is to use Lean-Agile principles and practices to help firms deliver more business value for customers, to make workers’ lives better and to benefit stakeholders.  Discovering business value is one of his passions.  And helping teams discover new avenues to greater productivity. He is proud for several people he has mentored, who now themselves are very strong in Agile.

Joe learned Scrum from Ken Schwaber and later mentored with Jeff Sutherland, with whom he continues to co-teach. He also works with several other CSTs (and friends).  He produces Lean Software training with the Poppendiecks.  His preference is to practice Agile as a combination of Scrum, XP and Lean principles and practices.  Joe was a speaker at Agile2007 and at Agile2008 and at AgileTour 2009.  He started Agile-Carolinas.

The following elements will be covered during the one day course
* Scrum in Practice: the course is designed to illustrate Scrum in action.
* Understanding of the Agile Manifesto and what it means to them.
* Essence of Scrum: values, foundations and a new way of thinking.
* Understanding how Scrum values and foundations are related to the practices.
* Get a sense of what self-organization is (and is not).
* Can draw a diagram of mechanics of Scrum: framework, roles, artifacts & flow.

About your Instructor:

Bachan Anand is an Agile Coach and the founder of Conscires Agile Practices. He brings the vision to support others building successful organizations through the empowerment of people and lightweight processes.
 

• have an excellent understanding of the Scrum Basics (principles, roles and meetings)
• know how to go from Release Planning to Project Completion using Scrum
• know the value of User Stories and Relative Estimation
• understand how to build a high performance team
• know how to reduce time to market and increase quality
• know how to create a culture of learning and continuous improvement
• fulfill the requirements of the Certified ScrumMaster Program including preparation for the CSM Exam

Finally this is one of the few CSM courses where you’re likely to discuss the neuroscience and psychology of teams.

• have an excellent understanding of the Scrum Basics (principles, roles and meetings)
• know how to go from Release Planning to Project Completion using Scrum
• know the value of User Stories and Relative Estimation
• understand how to build a high performance team
• know how to reduce time to market and increase quality
• know how to create a culture of learning and continuous improvement
• fulfill the requirements of the Certified ScrumMaster Program including preparation for the CSM Exam

Finally this is one of the few CSM courses where you’re likely to discuss the neuroscience and psychology of teams.

• What question your agenda trying to answer?
• Do you have your meeting organizing tools prepared?
• How you will design your agenda to meet the desired outcome?
• Do you know what tools will you use to move the group towards consensus?
• How will you handle the disagreements that arise from competing priorities?

• Disciplined techniques for planning and facilitating effective agile team meetings that produce actionable results
• How to embrace difficult team members and use healthy conflict to produce extraordinary results rather than allowing unhealthy conflict to destroy meetings
• Improve team collaboration and communication to make better decisions and minimize the ‘rehashing’ of critical decisions
• To apply facilitation techniques like brainstorming, prioritization and consensus building to agile teams to optimize their time together and produces better decisions
• To utilize fresh insights to raises the bar on your team's performance, achieve the performance objectives of the project and ensure everyone on the team is engaged and willing to actively participate and be accountable for their work.

It was originally created to train ScrumMasters, but is now used to train teams and the managers around teams.  It is particularly useful if a whole team (or team group) takes the course together.  In any case, all team roles (programmer, tester, analyst, Product Owner, ScrumMaster, etc) and managers and other interested parties can attend.  For example, CEOs have attended with benefit.

While it is a beginner level course, this course includes the practical knowledge to immediately start doing Scrum with a team.   You will also learn not just the how, but also the why.

This course is immersive and intensive, including practical, hands-on exercises and small-group discussions.

Summary of the Course

Through a combination of immersive team-based learning, exercises, and real-world case studies, you will learn:

• To plan, initiate and lead a Scrum project
• To establish a shared vision for the entire team
• To generate an agile release plan utilizing user stories and story point estimation
• To lead your Scrum team through planning, review, and retrospective sessions
• To create an environment in which self-managing teams can flourish
• To identify and remove impediments
• To identify, engage and involve business stakeholders in your project
• To take most existing teams to the next level
• Practical suggestions purchased expensively from the school of hard knocks

This training provides an applied understanding of the Scrum process and helps participants begin to develop the tools, insights, and skills required to apply Scrum on their projects and across their organizations.

For more information about the course, click on the Register button. (You will not be “forced” to register.)

Additional Information: The course will run from 9am-5pm each day. A continental breakfast, breaks and lunch will be provided.

Following the course, each participant is enrolled as a Certified ScrumMaster, which includes a one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, where additional ScrumMaster-only material and information are available.  Participants will also get a hardcopy and a softcopy of the slide deck used (and more).

Course Leader: Joe Little is an Agile coach and Certified Scrum Trainer.  His goal is to use Lean-Agile principles and practices to help firms deliver more business value for customers, to make workers’ lives better and to benefit stakeholders.  Discovering business value is one of his passions.  And helping teams discover new avenues to greater productivity. He is proud for several people he has mentored, who now themselves are very strong in Agile.

Joe learned Scrum from Ken Schwaber and later mentored with Jeff Sutherland, with whom he continues to co-teach. He also works with several other CSTs (and friends).  He produces Lean Software training with the Poppendiecks.  His preference is to practice Agile as a combination of Scrum, XP and Lean principles and practices.  Joe was a speaker at Agile2007 and at Agile2008 and at AgileTour 2009.  He started Agile-Carolinas.

The following elements will be covered during the one day course
* Scrum in Practice: the course is designed to illustrate Scrum in action.
* Understanding of the Agile Manifesto and what it means to them.
* Essence of Scrum: values, foundations and a new way of thinking.
* Understanding how Scrum values and foundations are related to the practices.
* Get a sense of what self-organization is (and is not).
* Can draw a diagram of mechanics of Scrum: framework, roles, artifacts & flow.

About your Instructor:

Bachan Anand is an Agile Coach and the founder of Conscires Agile Practices. He brings the vision to support others building successful organizations through the empowerment of people and lightweight processes. 

Class Overview:

Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) is an in-depth two day immersion into the world of Agile Product Management. The class is full of practical, real world techniques, which can be implemented immediately at your workplace. This class will allow your organization to enjoy the many advantages Scrum has to offer. Hands-on exercises demonstrate key concepts and let you experience the benefits of Scrum firsthand.

Limited to only 20 seats...
Sign-up now in order to ensure your spot is reserved!
14 PDUs Awarded		Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) eligible class

What others are are saying about us:

• "I knew absolutely nothing about Scrum or how it worked and now I feel I have a good baseline that I can use to start using it and adding to that knowledge base." - Don
• "I learned a great deal in a short period (2 days). This class has prepared me to be a successful partner & product owner. The exercises were entertaining while very educational." - David
• "Braintrust did an amazing job keeping the class entertaining and incorporated real life issues a product owner could face with Scrum. I had a great time and excited to share what I've learned with my team." - Rachel

Who should attend?

• Product Managers/Business Analysts
• Functional/Operational Managers
• Project Sponsors
• IT Leadership (Managers/Directors/VPs/CIOs/CTOs)
• Anyone interested in learning the benefits of Scrum

Prerequisites:

• None

Class Learning Objectives:

• As a CSPO class participant, I want...
  1. To explain Scrum’s history, so that I can better appreciate Scrum.
  2. To explain the importance of having team values, so that I can understand how the team has agreed to work together.
  3. To list situations where using Scrum is appropriate, so that I can better understand why Scrum will benefit my organization.
  4. To describe the Scrum framework, so that I can clearly comprehend the Scrum process.
  5. To describe the roles and responsibilities in Scrum, so that I can understand who does what.
  6. To select a product, so that I can have a real-world example to base the class exercises on.
  7. To demonstrate how to create a product vision statement, so that I can establish a guiding light for the product, with the help of my stakeholders.
  8. To demonstrate how to create a product roadmap, so that I can chart a class for the team and help build consensus with my stakeholders.
  9. To demonstrate how to establish user roles and personas, so that I can ensure that I don’t miss an important stakeholder’s business need.
  10. To explain how to seed a product backlog, so that I can quickly establish enough backlog items so that the team can start sprinting.
  11. To demonstrate how to write user stories, so that I can clearly articulate the who, what, and why behind each backlog item.
  12. To list how the team will relatively size backlog items, so that I can factor-in implementation complexity, when I assess the overall priority of a backlog item.
  13. To demonstrate how to quickly assess business value, so that I can establish an initial priority for the backlog items in my product backlog.
  14. To explain how to tell a good user story from a bad one, so that I can create a better product backlog.
  15. To list several ways to prioritize my product backlog, so that I can determine what is the best approach for the situation at hand.
  16. To list and explain the key meetings in Scrum, so that I know what is happening, before, during, and after each sprint.
  17. To demonstrate how to track team progress, so that I can make more informed prioritization decisions and forecast possible release dates.
  18. To list and explain the additional meetings recommended for Scrum, so that I can improve the overall efficiency of the Scrum process.
  19. To demonstrate how to play product box, so that I understand the key features that my customer(s) want(s) in my product.
  20. To list areas where we might get into trouble, so that I know what to look out for as my organization implements Scrum.
  21. An open forum to discuss challenging questions about Scrum, so that I can utilize the collective intelligence of the class participants to brainstorm creative ways to solve problems.

Benefits:

• Learn while not being bored and having fun
• Retain more information because of our unique hands-on approach; based on the latest research into brain science
• Be entertained by stories from our real-world experienced and knowledgeable instructors
• Maximize investments already made by gaining valuable Professional Development Units (PDUs)
• Increase your personal worth within your company and in the marketplace

Takeaways:

• Easy to use reminders of Scrum
  • Printed class manual
  • Scrum reference card
  • Thumbdrive loaded with; articles, class exercises, whitepapers, etc...
• 14 PDUs
• A two year membership to the Scrum Alliance
• The Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) designation (upon successful class completion)

About The Instructor: Lonnie Weaver-Johnson, CST

Lonnie Weaver-Johnson, CST is the Agile Practice Lead for The Braintrust Consulting Group. She obtained a degree in communications and then went on to a 20+ year career implementing IT projects and leading people through change. Lonnie enjoys transforming people through; coaching, conflict resolution, performance management, and imparting knowledge. Lonnie started working with Scrum in 2006 and her experience has taken her across the United States and to foreign lands such as India and Canada. Helping teams learn and grow together until they reach a high performing stage is Lonnie’s passion. Her candid and patient coaching style helps people understand how to make the necessary behavioral changes to make Scrum work for their teams. She also enjoys partnering with leaders to help them understand how the changes will impact their organization. Lonnie has been an IT leader, a business analyst, a corporate trainer, a ToastMaster officer, a public speaker in her community, and a volunteer at local high schools training kids in team development. In all cases Lonnie brings high energy to her classes, motivates the learners, and uses humor and stories to keep people engaged. To contact Lonnie please e-mail her at lonnie.weaver-johnson@braintrustgroup.com or join her on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/lonnieweaverjohnson.

Want more testimonials? Check these out! http://www.braintrustgroup.com/case-studies/testimonials

Organizations That We Have Trained:

Cancellation Policy:

In order to receive a refund of your tuition for this class you must notify us no later than 5 days prior to the class start date. Cancellation requests received after the 5 day window will be issued a credit that can be applied towards a future class.

Privacy Notice:

We may on some occasions share your email address with a limited number of our trusted partners. We do not sell your personal information and we treat your privacy with the utmost regard. Please contact us at info@braintrustgroup.com if you have any concerns.

The Coaching Stance course description

Come learn and experience what the world of professional coaching has to offer the agile coach.   In this course, you will be steeped in the skills and mind-sets of professional coaching while being firmly grounded in our agile context.  Everything is 100% applicable to your real-world situation of coaching agile teams and organizations and you will both learn and practice, practice, practice throughout the course.

Outcome

Just like with the Coaching Agile Teams course, by the end of this course you’ll walk away with your personal coaching improvement backlog – a tangible plan you can use to thoughtfully improve your coaching when you’re back in your daily circumstances.  We use agile scenarios throughout the class allowing you to craft powerful ways to address the real world challenges you face.  You’ll also have many new things to try and you will probably depart with a few provocative ideas to chew on (in fact, maybe wrangle with for a while). All of this adds up to your ability to become the excellent agile coach your teams and organizations need.

Audience

The Coaching Stance is meant for ScrumMasters, agile coaches, project managers in transition to agile and managers of agile teams.

This course is tailor-made for you if:

• You sense you can have a bigger impact on the people and teams you coach but don’t know how to make it real.
• You notice that the agile transition seems to take a step backwards as soon as your turn your back.
• People, teams, and organizations continue to serve up challenging circumstances that your well-honed skills of mentoring, teaching and consulting don’t completely address.
• Organizations want the great results of agile but don’t know how to change themselves to truly get them, and you wonder what skills you can bring to “help them see it” and then, help them get it.
• You face resistance about agile from people and teams and have learned that the strategies of ignoring it, muscling through it or compelling people to “just do it” fall short.

Prerequisites

You must be a practicing agile coach with at least 6 months of hands-on experience.   Ideally, you will also have Certified ScrumMaster or equivalent agile training.

This is not an introduction-level course and we will not be covering the basics of agile or Scrum.  In addition, you will be asked to use what you know about your real teams throughout the class so that you can leave with ideas for helping them as soon as you get back.

You do not have to complete the Coaching Agile Teams course before taking this course, although it is highly recommended.

Course Content

Deep dive on core professional coaching skills such as Levels of Listening, Powerful Questions, Articulating What’s Going On, Acknowledgement, Clearing, Self-Management, Finding Values, Curiosity and more

• Designing the coaching alliance with sponsors, managers, teams and team members
• The anatomy of a coaching session (and a lot of practice!)
• Making clear requests and achieving accountability
• Agile coach competencies framework and the coaching stance
• Dealing with complaints
• Working with resistance and strong emotions
• Perspective coaching: reframing circumstances to move from being stuck into a world of useful possibilities

Our Instructors

Lyssa Adkins

Since 2004, I have taught Scrum to hundreds of students, coached many agile teams, and served as master coach to many apprentice coaches. In both one-on-one settings and small groups, I enjoy a front-row seat as remarkable agile coaches emerge and go on to entice the very best from the teams they coach. Prior to agile, I had more than fifteen years of expertise leading project teams and groups of project managers (I was even a PMO Director -- twice!), yet nothing prepared me for the power of agile done simply and well.

I believe that agile is more than an alternate project management methodology and I am passionate about deepening the roles in agile – specifically agile coach and agile manager – to help agile move into its fullest expression.

I hold an alphabet soup of certifications: Certified Scrum Coach (CSC), Certified Scrum Trainer (CST), Project Management Professional (PMP), Six Sigma Green Belt (SSGB) and Organization and Relationship Systems Certified Coach (ORSCC). I am also a trained Co-Active Coach and Leader.

In 2010, I authored Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition. 

Cynthia Loy Darst

Named “One of the Top Ten Most Influential Coaches in the U.S.,” Darst is playful and inspiring, working with all kinds of people to move them past limitations and into action. She was one of the first to gain the designation of Master Certified Coach (MCC) by the International Coach Federation (ICF), was a founding leader for The Center for Right Relationship and The Coaches Training Institute, as well as being one of the founders of the ICF. Darst maintains a full roster of private clients including entrepreneurs, entertainment industry executives and corporate executives at Boeing, American Express, Wells Fargo, and Ernst & Young, among others.  Cynthia co-created The Coaching Stance course with ACI and lends her expertise to co-lead that course for ACI.

Cancellation Policy

We make business decisions based on how many people have registered for a given event.  If you must change or cancel your registration, please know that it impacts everyone.  Still, we know that sometimes things happen.  Here's how it will work if you must reschedule of cancel:

If you notify ACI at least 15 business days prior to the event, you may receive full credit for a future event   -or-
a full refund.

If you notify ACI less than 15 business days prior to the event, you may receive full credit for a future event minus a $25 rescheduling fee  -or-  a full refund minus a $100 cancellation fee.

If you notify ACI less than 5 business days prior to the event, you may receive full credit for a future event minus a $150 rescheduling fee plus any additional expenses incurred for catering and event charges resulting from your cancellation. No refunds.

• have an excellent understanding of the Scrum Basics (principles, roles and meetings)
• know how to go from Release Planning to Project Completion using Scrum
• know the value of User Stories and Relative Estimation
• understand how to build a high performance team
• know how to reduce time to market and increase quality
• know how to create a culture of learning and continuous improvement
• fulfill the requirements of the Certified ScrumMaster Program including preparation for the CSM Exam

Finally this is one of the few CSM courses where you’re likely to discuss the neuroscience and psychology of teams.

The following elements will be covered during the one day course
* Scrum in Practice: the course is designed to illustrate Scrum in action.
* Understanding of the Agile Manifesto and what it means to them.
* Essence of Scrum: values, foundations and a new way of thinking.
* Understanding how Scrum values and foundations are related to the practices.
* Get a sense of what self-organization is (and is not).
* Can draw a diagram of mechanics of Scrum: framework, roles, artifacts & flow.

About your Instructor:

Bachan Anand is an Agile Coach and the founder of Conscires Agile Practices. He brings the vision to support others building successful organizations through the empowerment of people and lightweight processes.
 

Class Overview:

Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) is an in-depth two day immersion into the world of Agile Product Management. The class is full of practical, real world techniques, which can be implemented immediately at your workplace. This class will allow your organization to enjoy the many advantages Scrum has to offer. Hands-on exercises demonstrate key concepts and let you experience the benefits of Scrum firsthand.

Limited to only 20 seats...
Sign-up now in order to ensure your spot is reserved!
14 PDUs Awarded		Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) eligible class

What others are are saying about us:

• "I knew absolutely nothing about Scrum or how it worked and now I feel I have a good baseline that I can use to start using it and adding to that knowledge base." - Don
• "I learned a great deal in a short period (2 days). This class has prepared me to be a successful partner & product owner. The exercises were entertaining while very educational." - David
• "Braintrust did an amazing job keeping the class entertaining and incorporated real life issues a product owner could face with Scrum. I had a great time and excited to share what I've learned with my team." - Rachel

Who should attend?

• Product Managers/Business Analysts
• Functional/Operational Managers
• Project Sponsors
• IT Leadership (Managers/Directors/VPs/CIOs/CTOs)
• Anyone interested in learning the benefits of Scrum

Prerequisites:

• None

Class Learning Objectives:

• As a CSPO class participant, I want...
  1. To explain Scrum’s history, so that I can better appreciate Scrum.
  2. To explain the importance of having team values, so that I can understand how the team has agreed to work together.
  3. To list situations where using Scrum is appropriate, so that I can better understand why Scrum will benefit my organization.
  4. To describe the Scrum framework, so that I can clearly comprehend the Scrum process.
  5. To describe the roles and responsibilities in Scrum, so that I can understand who does what.
  6. To select a product, so that I can have a real-world example to base the class exercises on.
  7. To demonstrate how to create a product vision statement, so that I can establish a guiding light for the product, with the help of my stakeholders.
  8. To demonstrate how to create a product roadmap, so that I can chart a class for the team and help build consensus with my stakeholders.
  9. To demonstrate how to establish user roles and personas, so that I can ensure that I don’t miss an important stakeholder’s business need.
  10. To explain how to seed a product backlog, so that I can quickly establish enough backlog items so that the team can start sprinting.
  11. To demonstrate how to write user stories, so that I can clearly articulate the who, what, and why behind each backlog item.
  12. To list how the team will relatively size backlog items, so that I can factor-in implementation complexity, when I assess the overall priority of a backlog item.
  13. To demonstrate how to quickly assess business value, so that I can establish an initial priority for the backlog items in my product backlog.
  14. To explain how to tell a good user story from a bad one, so that I can create a better product backlog.
  15. To list several ways to prioritize my product backlog, so that I can determine what is the best approach for the situation at hand.
  16. To list and explain the key meetings in Scrum, so that I know what is happening, before, during, and after each sprint.
  17. To demonstrate how to track team progress, so that I can make more informed prioritization decisions and forecast possible release dates.
  18. To list and explain the additional meetings recommended for Scrum, so that I can improve the overall efficiency of the Scrum process.
  19. To demonstrate how to play product box, so that I understand the key features that my customer(s) want(s) in my product.
  20. To list areas where we might get into trouble, so that I know what to look out for as my organization implements Scrum.
  21. An open forum to discuss challenging questions about Scrum, so that I can utilize the collective intelligence of the class participants to brainstorm creative ways to solve problems.

Benefits:

• Learn while not being bored and having fun
• Retain more information because of our unique hands-on approach; based on the latest research into brain science
• Be entertained by stories from our real-world experienced and knowledgeable instructors
• Maximize investments already made by gaining valuable Professional Development Units (PDUs)
• Increase your personal worth within your company and in the marketplace

Takeaways:

• Easy to use reminders of Scrum
  • Printed class manual
  • Scrum reference card
  • Thumbdrive loaded with; articles, class exercises, whitepapers, etc...
• 14 PDUs
• A two year membership to the Scrum Alliance
• The Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) designation (upon successful class completion)

About The Instructor: Lonnie Weaver-Johnson, CST

Lonnie Weaver-Johnson, CST is the Agile Practice Lead for The Braintrust Consulting Group. She obtained a degree in communications and then went on to a 20+ year career implementing IT projects and leading people through change. Lonnie enjoys transforming people through; coaching, conflict resolution, performance management, and imparting knowledge. Lonnie started working with Scrum in 2006 and her experience has taken her across the United States and to foreign lands such as India and Canada. Helping teams learn and grow together until they reach a high performing stage is Lonnie’s passion. Her candid and patient coaching style helps people understand how to make the necessary behavioral changes to make Scrum work for their teams. She also enjoys partnering with leaders to help them understand how the changes will impact their organization. Lonnie has been an IT leader, a business analyst, a corporate trainer, a ToastMaster officer, a public speaker in her community, and a volunteer at local high schools training kids in team development. In all cases Lonnie brings high energy to her classes, motivates the learners, and uses humor and stories to keep people engaged. To contact Lonnie please e-mail her at lonnie.weaver-johnson@braintrustgroup.com or join her on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/lonnieweaverjohnson.

Want more testimonials? Check these out! http://www.braintrustgroup.com/case-studies/testimonials

Organizations That We Have Trained:

Cancellation Policy:

In order to receive a refund of your tuition for this class you must notify us no later than 5 days prior to the class start date. Cancellation requests received after the 5 day window will be issued a credit that can be applied towards a future class.

Privacy Notice:

We may on some occasions share your email address with a limited number of our trusted partners. We do not sell your personal information and we treat your privacy with the utmost regard. Please contact us at info@braintrustgroup.com if you have any concerns.

During the course, attendees will learn why such a seemingly simple process such as Scrum can have such profound effects on an organization. Participants gain practical experience working with Scrum tools and activities such as the product backlog, sprint backlog, daily Scrum meetings, sprint planning meeting, and burndown charts. Participants leave knowing how to apply Scrum to all sizes of projects, from a single collocated team to a large, highly distributed team.

Following successful completion of the course, you will be qualified and ready to pass the Scrum Alliance assessment exam. This multiple-choice, online test is required to become a Certified ScrumMaster, which includes a one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, where additional ScrumMaster-only material and information are available. For more information on the certification exam, see this page about the CSM exam.

PMPs: This course counts for 15 Professional Development Units (PDUs). This course also counts as 15 of the 21 contact hours needed of Agile Project Management Training to be eligible for the PMI-ACP certification.

What You Will Learn

• Practical, project-proven practices
• The essentials of getting a project off on the right foot
• How to write user stories for the product backlog
• Why there's more to leading a self-organizing team than buying pizza and getting out of the way
• How to help both new and experienced teams be more successful
• How to successfully scale Scrum to large, multi-continent projects with team sizes in the hundreds
• Tips and tricks from the instructor's fifteen years of using Scrum in a wide variety of environments

Who Should Attend?

Whether you're a manager, programmer, tester, analyst, product manager, or someone interested in working on or with a Scrum team, this course is suited for you. You will leave with solid knowledge of how and why Scrum works. Through practical, hands-on exercises and small-group discussion you will be prepared to plan your first sprint immediately after this class.

PMPs: This agile training class counts for 15 Professional Development Units (PDUs). This course also counts as 15 of the 21 contact hours needed of Agile Project Management Training to be eligible for the PMI-ACP certification.

What You Get

• High quality training from an industry expert
• Recognition by the Scrum Alliance as a Certified ScrumMaster after passing a short certification exam
• A hot lunch buffet and afternoon biscuits
• A one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, a $50 value
• A USB drive containing a PDF of the course materials, relevant articles by Mike Cohn and others, sample chapters from Mike's books, and other information
• A printed and bound copy of the course materials
• Planning Poker® cards for use in estimating with your team

Class Overview:

Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) is an in-depth two day immersion into the world of Scrum. The class is full of practical, real world techniques that can be implemented immediately at your workplace. This class will allow your organization to enjoy the many advantages Scrum has to offer. Hands-on exercises demonstrate key concepts and let you experience the benefits of Scrum firsthand.

Limited to only 20 seats...
Sign-up now in order to ensure your spot is reserved!
14 PDUs Awarded		Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) eligible class

What others are are saying about us:

• "This was the biggest "bang for the buck" of any class I've ever taken (in 18 years of professional development)." - Heather
• "The class was extremely helpful in helping me find my role as ScrumMaster on my team." - Michael
• "I was pleasantly surprised that after only two days I now have a foundation to begin using Scrum at my agency." - Kevin

Who should attend?

• IT Professionals (Architects, BAs, DBAs, Developers, Testers, etc.)
• IT Leadership (Managers/Directors/VPs/CIOs/CTOs)
• Project Managers
• Anyone interested in learning the benefits of Scrum

Prerequisites:

• None

Class Learning Objectives:

• As a CSM class participant, I want...
  1. To explain Scrum’s history, so that I can better appreciate Scrum.
  2. To demonstrate the importance of having team values, so that I can facilitate the creation of working agreements amongst team members.
  3. To list situations where using Scrum is appropriate, so that I can be more successful at applying Scrum.
  4. To describe the Scrum framework, so that I can clearly comprehend the Scrum process.
  5. To describe the roles and responsibilities in Scrum, so that I can understand who does what.
  6. To experience Scrum, so that I know what it feels like when I start doing it for real.
  7. To explain the value of a product vision statement, so that I gain a greater appreciation for why we need one.
  8. To explain how to seed a product backlog, so that I can assist the Product Owner with creating one.
  9. To demonstrate how to write user stories, so that I can clearly articulate the who, what, and why behind a backlog item.
  10. To teach team members how to relatively size backlog items, so that the product owner can make better prioritization decisions.
  11. To list and explain the key meetings in Scrum, so that I know what is happening, before, during, and after each sprint.
  12. To explain how to tell a good user story from a bad one, so that I can better assist the Product Owner with creating an effective product backlog.
  13. To demonstrate how to track team progress, so that I can accurately understand what has been accomplished and how much longer it will take to complete the product.
  14. To list and explain the additional meetings recommended for Scrum, so that I can improve the overall efficiency of the Scrum process.
  15. To list areas where we might get into trouble, so that I know what to look out for as my organization implements Scrum.
  16. To list other fields that may enhance our ability to do Scrum better, so that I can have additional tools to increase our chances of success.
  17. An open forum to discuss challenging questions about Scrum, so that I can utilize the collective intelligence of the class participants to brainstorm creative solutions to complex problems.

Benefits:

• Learn while not being bored and having fun
• Retain more information because of our unique hands-on approach; based on the latest research into brain science
• Be entertained by stories from our real-world experienced and knowledgeable instructors
• Maximize investments already made by gaining valuable Professional Development Units (PDUs)
• Increase your personal worth within your company and in the marketplace

Takeaways:

• Easy to use reminders of Scrum
  • Printed class manual
  • Scrum reference card
  • Thumbdrive loaded with; articles, class exercises, whitepapers, etc...
• 14 PDUs
• A two year membership to the Scrum Alliance
• Eligibility to sit for the Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) exam

About The Instructor: Brian M. Rabon, CST, PMP

Brian M. Rabon, CST, PMP is the President of The Braintrust Consulting Group, a worldwide leader in Agile transformations. Throughout his 16 years of IT industry experience, Brian has applied Agile methods in order to successfully deliver working product to his customers. Brian holds a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from Auburn University and a Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. When not in the classroom, Brian can be found around the globe evangelizing the benefits of Agile to the likes of Agile 20XX, the Project Management Institute’s (PMI) many chapters, and the Scrum Alliance’s Scrum Gatherings. Brian is an avid blogger, writing for his company’s blog at http://www.braintrustgroup.com/blog. To contact Brian please e-mail him at brian.rabon@braintrustgroup.com or join him on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/bmrabon.

Want more testimonials? Check these out! http://www.braintrustgroup.com/case-studies/testimonials

Organizations That We Have Trained:

Cancellation Policy:

In order to receive a refund of your tuition for this class you must notify us no later than 5 days prior to the class start date. Cancellation requests received after the 5 day window will be issued a credit that can be applied towards a future class.

Privacy Notice:

We may on some occasions share your email address with a limited number of our trusted partners. We do not sell your personal information and we treat your privacy with the utmost regard. Please contact us at info@braintrustgroup.com if you have any concerns.

The following elements will be covered during the one day course
* Scrum in Practice: the course is designed to illustrate Scrum in action.
* Understanding of the Agile Manifesto and what it means to them.
* Essence of Scrum: values, foundations and a new way of thinking.
* Understanding how Scrum values and foundations are related to the practices.
* Get a sense of what self-organization is (and is not).
* Can draw a diagram of mechanics of Scrum: framework, roles, artifacts & flow.

Scrum increases the emphasis on assessing and driving business value through close collaboration with the delivery team. The Scrum Product Owner establishes the interaction between the business and the delivery team that is so essential to increasing productivity within an Agile organization. Product Owners who assume this crucial role have the ability to guide the team and the process to gain the full benefit of Agile delivery.

SolutionsIQ Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) Training is interactive and highly experiential. Participants gain practical tools and techniques for engaging with software delivery teams.

This training includes the following:

• Scrum overview
• Roles and responsibilities
• The Product Backlog
• User stories
• Estimation and prioritization
• Acceptance criteria
• Working with teams
• Scaling
• Release planning and tracking
• External relationships
• Metrics and reporting

Download the course description.

See all SolutionsIQ courses and events. Questions? View our Agile Training Frequently Asked Questions.

Course  outline :

This 1-day course teaches the principles and practices that make Scrum effective at managing projects.The course itself uses the principles of Scrum, where the learning outcome is driven by the needs of the participants through a combination of expert instruction and self-directed learning. Opportunities to reflect and adapt the direction of the course are offered at regular intervals.At the end of the training the participants will have the confidence and understanding to begin to socialize Scrum at their own organization and support teams in improving their processes.

The following elements will be covered during the one day course

* Scrum in Practice: the course is designed to illustrate Scrum in action.

* Understanding of the Agile Manifesto and what it means to them.

* Essence of Scrum: values, foundations and a new way of thinking.

* Understanding how Scrum values and foundations are related to the practices.

* Get a sense of what self-organization is (and is not).

* Can draw a diagram of mechanics of Scrum: framework, roles, artifacts & flow.

Who Should Attend :

Any person who is interested in learning more about Scrum or wants to make Scrum work better for their Team or organization, is encouraged to attend. While the focus of the class is for people who want to learn how to leverage the Scrum framework to improve their business outcomes, any member of Team or the organization who is interested in how to use Scrum would find this class useful.

Typical attendees in the past have been managers, business analysts, architects, directors and other roles that support product development and the business.

Course  outline :

This 1-day course teaches the principles and practices that make Scrum effective at managing projects.The course itself uses the principles of Scrum, where the learning outcome is driven by the needs of the participants through a combination of expert instruction and self-directed learning. Opportunities to reflect and adapt the direction of the course are offered at regular intervals.At the end of the training the participants will have the confidence and understanding to begin to socialize Scrum at their own organization and support teams in improving their processes.

The following elements will be covered during the one day course

* Scrum in Practice: the course is designed to illustrate Scrum in action.

* Understanding of the Agile Manifesto and what it means to them.

* Essence of Scrum: values, foundations and a new way of thinking.

* Understanding how Scrum values and foundations are related to the practices.

* Get a sense of what self-organization is (and is not).

* Can draw a diagram of mechanics of Scrum: framework, roles, artifacts & flow.

Who Should Attend :

Any person who is interested in learning more about Scrum or wants to make Scrum work better for their Team or organization, is encouraged to attend. While the focus of the class is for people who want to learn how to leverage the Scrum framework to improve their business outcomes, any member of Team or the organization who is interested in how to use Scrum would find this class useful.

Typical attendees in the past have been managers, business analysts, architects, directors and other roles that support product development and the business.

Our trainings are aimed at instilling the core beliefs of Agile and Scrum and creating a transparent and collaborative environment where the team succeeds as a single entity. The Workshop uses interactive learning tools along with Scrum methods to provide instruction on foundational principles and practices of Scrum.

The learning objectives for participants are to draw a Scrum diagram, write a business feature, create a sprint backlog, demonstrate self-organization, inspect and adapt, and collaboration.

Who Should Attend?

Any person who is interested in learning more about Scrum or wants to make Scrum work better for their organization is encouraged to attend. Typical attendees in the past have been executives, functional managers, software developers, business analysts, project managers, testers, architects

About your Instructor:

Bachan Anand is an Agile Coach and the founder of Conscires Agile Practices. He brings the vision to support others building successful organizations through the empowerment of people and lightweight processes.
 

It was originally created to train ScrumMasters, but is now used to train teams and the managers around teams.  It is particularly useful if a whole team (or team group) takes the course together.  In any case, all team roles (programmer, tester, analyst, Product Owner, ScrumMaster, etc) and managers and other interested parties can attend.  For example, CEOs have attended with benefit.

While it is a beginner level course, this course includes the practical knowledge to immediately start doing Scrum with a team.   You will also learn not just the how, but also the why.

This course is immersive and intensive, including practical, hands-on exercises and small-group discussions.

Summary of the Course

Through a combination of immersive team-based learning, exercises, and real-world case studies, you will learn:

• To plan, initiate and lead a Scrum project
• To establish a shared vision for the entire team
• To generate an agile release plan utilizing user stories and story point estimation
• To lead your Scrum team through planning, review, and retrospective sessions
• To create an environment in which self-managing teams can flourish
• To identify and remove impediments
• To identify, engage and involve business stakeholders in your project
• To take most existing teams to the next level
• Practical suggestions purchased expensively from the school of hard knocks

This training provides an applied understanding of the Scrum process and helps participants begin to develop the tools, insights, and skills required to apply Scrum on their projects and across their organizations.

For more information about the course, click on the Register button. (You will not be “forced” to register.)

Additional Information: The course will run from 9am-5pm each day. A continental breakfast, breaks and lunch will be provided.

Following the course, each participant is enrolled as a Certified ScrumMaster, which includes a one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, where additional ScrumMaster-only material and information are available.  Participants will also get a hardcopy and a softcopy of the slide deck used (and more).

Course Leader: Joe Little is an Agile coach and Certified Scrum Trainer.  His goal is to use Lean-Agile principles and practices to help firms deliver more business value for customers, to make workers’ lives better and to benefit stakeholders.  Discovering business value is one of his passions.  And helping teams discover new avenues to greater productivity. He is proud for several people he has mentored, who now themselves are very strong in Agile.

Joe learned Scrum from Ken Schwaber and later mentored with Jeff Sutherland, with whom he continues to co-teach. He also works with several other CSTs (and friends).  He produces Lean Software training with the Poppendiecks.  His preference is to practice Agile as a combination of Scrum, XP and Lean principles and practices.  Joe was a speaker at Agile2007 and at Agile2008 and at AgileTour 2009.  He started Agile-Carolinas.

his highly interactive two day session has been designed to give you the ability to experience first-hand what it is like to be part of a Scrum team. Arrive prepared to face the challenges every ScrumMaster encounters and leave with the knowledge of how to handle each situation. This course is high energy and contains numerous exercises that require attendee full participation. The instructor will help each of you whether brand new to Scrum or adapting to a Scrum implementation identify what is required within each Scrum team member role, learn about Scrum reporting and meetings, and how to return to your organization with a fresh way of approaching complex projects successfully applying the Scrum framework to achieve success.

Upon successful completion of this course, and passage of the certification examination, each participant will be enrolled as a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM). Your certification will be registered and includes a one-year Scrum Alliance membership. The Scrum Alliance is home to additional ScrumMaster-only material as well as the latest in Scrum information and course offerings.

Class Overview:

Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) is an in-depth two day immersion into the world of Agile Product Management. The class is full of practical, real world techniques, which can be implemented immediately at your workplace. This class will allow your organization to enjoy the many advantages Scrum has to offer. Hands-on exercises demonstrate key concepts and let you experience the benefits of Scrum firsthand.

Limited to only 20 seats...
Sign-up now in order to ensure your spot is reserved!
14 PDUs Awarded		Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) eligible class

What others are are saying about us:

• "I knew absolutely nothing about Scrum or how it worked and now I feel I have a good baseline that I can use to start using it and adding to that knowledge base." - Don
• "I learned a great deal in a short period (2 days). This class has prepared me to be a successful partner & product owner. The exercises were entertaining while very educational." - David
• "Braintrust did an amazing job keeping the class entertaining and incorporated real life issues a product owner could face with Scrum. I had a great time and excited to share what I've learned with my team." - Rachel

Who should attend?

• Product Managers/Business Analysts
• Functional/Operational Managers
• Project Sponsors
• IT Leadership (Managers/Directors/VPs/CIOs/CTOs)
• Anyone interested in learning the benefits of Scrum

Prerequisites:

• None

Class Learning Objectives:

• As a CSPO class participant, I want...
  1. To explain Scrum’s history, so that I can better appreciate Scrum.
  2. To explain the importance of having team values, so that I can understand how the team has agreed to work together.
  3. To list situations where using Scrum is appropriate, so that I can better understand why Scrum will benefit my organization.
  4. To describe the Scrum framework, so that I can clearly comprehend the Scrum process.
  5. To describe the roles and responsibilities in Scrum, so that I can understand who does what.
  6. To select a product, so that I can have a real-world example to base the class exercises on.
  7. To demonstrate how to create a product vision statement, so that I can establish a guiding light for the product, with the help of my stakeholders.
  8. To demonstrate how to create a product roadmap, so that I can chart a class for the team and help build consensus with my stakeholders.
  9. To demonstrate how to establish user roles and personas, so that I can ensure that I don’t miss an important stakeholder’s business need.
  10. To explain how to seed a product backlog, so that I can quickly establish enough backlog items so that the team can start sprinting.
  11. To demonstrate how to write user stories, so that I can clearly articulate the who, what, and why behind each backlog item.
  12. To list how the team will relatively size backlog items, so that I can factor-in implementation complexity, when I assess the overall priority of a backlog item.
  13. To demonstrate how to quickly assess business value, so that I can establish an initial priority for the backlog items in my product backlog.
  14. To explain how to tell a good user story from a bad one, so that I can create a better product backlog.
  15. To list several ways to prioritize my product backlog, so that I can determine what is the best approach for the situation at hand.
  16. To list and explain the key meetings in Scrum, so that I know what is happening, before, during, and after each sprint.
  17. To demonstrate how to track team progress, so that I can make more informed prioritization decisions and forecast possible release dates.
  18. To list and explain the additional meetings recommended for Scrum, so that I can improve the overall efficiency of the Scrum process.
  19. To demonstrate how to play product box, so that I understand the key features that my customer(s) want(s) in my product.
  20. To list areas where we might get into trouble, so that I know what to look out for as my organization implements Scrum.
  21. An open forum to discuss challenging questions about Scrum, so that I can utilize the collective intelligence of the class participants to brainstorm creative ways to solve problems.

Benefits:

• Learn while not being bored and having fun
• Retain more information because of our unique hands-on approach; based on the latest research into brain science
• Be entertained by stories from our real-world experienced and knowledgeable instructors
• Maximize investments already made by gaining valuable Professional Development Units (PDUs)
• Increase your personal worth within your company and in the marketplace

Takeaways:

• Easy to use reminders of Scrum
  • Printed class manual
  • Scrum reference card
  • Thumbdrive loaded with; articles, class exercises, whitepapers, etc...
• 14 PDUs
• A two year membership to the Scrum Alliance
• The Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) designation (upon successful class completion)
• A free iPad!!!

About The Instructor: Lonnie Weaver-Johnson, CST

Lonnie Weaver-Johnson, CST is the Agile Practice Lead for The Braintrust Consulting Group. She obtained a degree in communications and then went on to a 20+ year career implementing IT projects and leading people through change. Lonnie enjoys transforming people through; coaching, conflict resolution, performance management, and imparting knowledge. Lonnie started working with Scrum in 2006 and her experience has taken her across the United States and to foreign lands such as India and Canada. Helping teams learn and grow together until they reach a high performing stage is Lonnie’s passion. Her candid and patient coaching style helps people understand how to make the necessary behavioral changes to make Scrum work for their teams. She also enjoys partnering with leaders to help them understand how the changes will impact their organization. Lonnie has been an IT leader, a business analyst, a corporate trainer, a ToastMaster officer, a public speaker in her community, and a volunteer at local high schools training kids in team development. In all cases Lonnie brings high energy to her classes, motivates the learners, and uses humor and stories to keep people engaged. To contact Lonnie please e-mail her at lonnie.weaver-johnson@braintrustgroup.com or join her on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/lonnieweaverjohnson.

Want more testimonials? Check these out! http://www.braintrustgroup.com/case-studies/testimonials

Organizations That We Have Trained:

Cancellation Policy:

In order to receive a refund of your tuition for this class you must notify us no later than 5 days prior to the class start date. Cancellation requests received after the 5 day window will be issued a credit that can be applied towards a future class.

Privacy Notice:

We may on some occasions share your email address with a limited number of our trusted partners. We do not sell your personal information and we treat your privacy with the utmost regard. Please contact us at info@braintrustgroup.com if you have any concerns.

This highly interactive two day session has been designed to give you the ability to experience first-hand what it is like to be part of a Scrum team. Arrive prepared to face the challenges every ScrumMaster encounters and leave with the knowledge of how to handle each situation. This course is high energy and contains numerous exercises that require attendee full participation. The instructor will help each of you whether brand new to Scrum or adapting to a Scrum implementation identify what is required within each Scrum team member role, learn about Scrum reporting and meetings, and how to return to your organization with a fresh way of approaching complex projects successfully applying the Scrum framework to achieve success.

Upon successful completion of this course, and passage of the certification examination, each participant will be enrolled as a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM). Your certification will be registered and includes a one-year Scrum Alliance membership. The Scrum Alliance is home to additional ScrumMaster-only material as well as the latest in Scrum information and course offerings.

Certified Scrum Product Owner Training teaches you, the product owner, how to use the product backlog as a tool for success. As you watch the product take shape, iteration after iteration, you can restructure the Product Backlog to incorporate your insights or respond to changes in business conditions. You can also identify and cancel unsuccessful projects early, often within the first several months. The Certified Scrum Product Owner; course equips you with what you need to achieve success with Scrum.

Intuitive and lightweight, the Scrum process delivers completed increments of the product at rapid, regular intervals, usually from every two weeks to a month. Rather than the traditional system of turning a project over to a project manager while you then wait and hope for the best, Scrum offers an effective alternative, made even more attractive when considering the statistics of traditional product approaches in which over 50% of all projects fail and those that succeed deliver products in which 64% of the functionality is rarely or never used.

Let us help you avoid becoming one of these statistics.

Following successful completion of the course, each participant will be designated a Certified Scrum Product Owner. This certification includes a one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, where additional member-only material and information are available.

PMPs: This course counts for 15 Professional Development Units (PDUs).

What You Will Learn

• Practical, project-proven practices
• How to write user stories for the product backlog
• Proven techniques for prioritizing the product backlog
• How to predict the delivery date of a project (or the features that will be complete by a given date) using velocity
• Tips for managing the key variables influencing project success
• Tips and tricks from the instructor's fifteen years of using Scrum in a wide variety of environments

Who Should Attend?

This course is ideal for product managers, analysts, testers, and others who represent and are expected to understand the desires of users and customers on agile projects. You will leave with solid knowledge of how and why Scrum works and of your role on the project. Through practical, hands-on exercises and small-group discussion you will leave prepared to guide a Scrum team to success.

PMPs: This course counts for 15 Professional Development Units (PDUs).

What You Get

• High quality training from an industry expert
• Recognition by the Scrum Alliance as a Certified Scrum Product Owner after passing a short certification exam
• A breakfast buffet, a hot lunch buffet, an afternoon snack, and continuously replenished drinks
• A 4 GB USB drive containing a PDF of the course materials, relevant articles by Mike Cohn and others, sample chapters from Mike's books, and other information
• A one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, a $50 value
• A printed, color copy of the course materials
• Planning Poker® cards for use in estimating with your team

It was originally created to train ScrumMasters, but is now used to train teams and the managers around teams.  It is particularly useful if a whole team (or team group) takes the course together.  In any case, all team roles (programmer, tester, analyst, Product Owner, ScrumMaster, etc) and managers and other interested parties can attend.  For example, CEOs have attended with benefit.

While it is a beginner level course, this course includes the practical knowledge to immediately start doing Scrum with a team.   You will also learn not just the how, but also the why.

This course is immersive and intensive, including practical, hands-on exercises and small-group discussions.

Summary of the Course

Through a combination of immersive team-based learning, exercises, and real-world case studies, you will learn:

• To plan, initiate and lead a Scrum project
• To establish a shared vision for the entire team
• To generate an agile release plan utilizing user stories and story point estimation
• To lead your Scrum team through planning, review, and retrospective sessions
• To create an environment in which self-managing teams can flourish
• To identify and remove impediments
• To identify, engage and involve business stakeholders in your project
• To take most existing teams to the next level
• Practical suggestions purchased expensively from the school of hard knocks

This training provides an applied understanding of the Scrum process and helps participants begin to develop the tools, insights, and skills required to apply Scrum on their projects and across their organizations.

For more information about the course, click on the Register button. (You will not be “forced” to register.)

Additional Information: The course will run from 9am-5pm each day. A continental breakfast, breaks and lunch will be provided.

Following the course, each participant is enrolled as a Certified ScrumMaster, which includes a one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, where additional ScrumMaster-only material and information are available.  Participants will also get a hardcopy and a softcopy of the slide deck used (and more).

Course Leader: Joe Little is an Agile coach and Certified Scrum Trainer.  His goal is to use Lean-Agile principles and practices to help firms deliver more business value for customers, to make workers’ lives better and to benefit stakeholders.  Discovering business value is one of his passions.  And helping teams discover new avenues to greater productivity. He is proud for several people he has mentored, who now themselves are very strong in Agile.

Joe learned Scrum from Ken Schwaber and later mentored with Jeff Sutherland, with whom he continues to co-teach. He also works with several other CSTs (and friends).  He produces Lean Software training with the Poppendiecks.  His preference is to practice Agile as a combination of Scrum, XP and Lean principles and practices.  Joe was a speaker at Agile2007 and at Agile2008 and at AgileTour 2009.  He started Agile-Carolinas.

• have an excellent understanding of the Scrum Basics (principles, roles and meetings)
• know how to go from Release Planning to Project Completion using Scrum
• know the value of User Stories and Relative Estimation
• understand how to build a high performance team
• know how to reduce time to market and increase quality
• know how to create a culture of learning and continuous improvement
• fulfill the requirements of the Certified ScrumMaster Program including preparation for the CSM Exam

Finally this is one of the few CSM courses where you’re likely to discuss the neuroscience and psychology of teams.

This two-day course will begin to clear away that murkiness through short, focused lectures by a qualified Certified Scrum Trainer teaching the basics of Scrum as well as practical tools gathered while mentoring and consulting with organizations learning to apply Scrum.  An important aim of this course is to leverage the wide-ranging knowledge and experience of the participants, so expect a significant amount of this course will be spent in peer-to-peer interactions, hands-on activities and drawing connections between the classroom material and your day-to-day experience.  This course will equip the participants with the knowledge on how to facilitate Scrum in their teams and begin the process of change in their organization.

The learning objectives for this course are:

• List the five values of Scrum and the eight essential Scrum principles.
• Draw a diagram describing the Scrum framework, highlighting all meetings, roles and artifacts.
• Describe the rights and responsibilities of  each role in Scrum – Team member, Product Owner, ScrumMaster and stakeholder.
• Discuss with other participants what Scrum means to you and what it will mean to be a ScrumMaster in your organization.
• Watch Scrum in action as the framework of Scrum will be used to deliver the course material.
• Identify the main obstacles to using Scrum in your organization.
• Practice applying ScrumMaster skills to solve real life problems.
• Pass the Certified Scrum Master assessment.

In addition to the objectives listed above, your instructor will incorporate your learning objectives into the class curriculum, provide regular opportunities to reflect-and-adapt on the class direction and make adjustments to achieve your learning objective.  By the close of the training, you will have gained the confidence and understanding to begin socializing Scrum within their your organizations and support teams with improving their processes.

Who Should Attend:

Any person who is interested in learning more about Scrum or wants to make Scrum work better for their Team or organization, is encouraged to attend.  While the focus of the class is for people who want to learn how to leverage the Scrum framework to bring about change, any member of Team or the organization who is interested in how to use Scrum would find this class useful.

Typical attendees in the past have been functional managers, Team leads, analysts, architects, engineers, software developers, directors, testers and other roles that support product development.

About your Instructor:

Carlton Nettleton, is an Agile software development coach, consultant and thought-leader in San Diego County.  He provides advice, mentoring and training to teams and programs looking to better software quality, improve productivity, build great teams and apply Lean Thinking to software projects.  He has over ten years of experience with software development as a contributor, facilitator and leader.  He is a Certified Scrum Trainer and has been practicing Scrum since 2005.

The SAFe Program Consultant certification program is for internal agile change agents and external consultants. It provides the tools to implement agile programs and validates their knowledge in agile programs, program portfolio management, agile architecture, and leadership so that they can launch Agile Release Trains as part of an enterprise Lean|Agile change initiative.

Class Overview:

Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) is an in-depth two day immersion into the world of Scrum. The class is full of practical, real world techniques that can be implemented immediately at your workplace. This class will allow your organization to enjoy the many advantages Scrum has to offer. Hands-on exercises demonstrate key concepts and let you experience the benefits of Scrum firsthand.

Limited to only 20 seats...
Sign-up now in order to ensure your spot is reserved!
14 PDUs Awarded		Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) eligible class

What others are are saying about us:

• "This was the biggest "bang for the buck" of any class I've ever taken (in 18 years of professional development)." - Heather
• "The class was extremely helpful in helping me find my role as ScrumMaster on my team." - Michael
• "I was pleasantly surprised that after only two days I now have a foundation to begin using Scrum at my agency." - Kevin

Who should attend?

• IT Professionals (Architects, BAs, DBAs, Developers, Testers, etc.)
• IT Leadership (Managers/Directors/VPs/CIOs/CTOs)
• Project Managers
• Anyone interested in learning the benefits of Scrum

Prerequisites:

• None

Class Learning Objectives:

• As a CSM class participant, I want...
  1. To explain Scrum’s history, so that I can better appreciate Scrum.
  2. To demonstrate the importance of having team values, so that I can facilitate the creation of working agreements amongst team members.
  3. To list situations where using Scrum is appropriate, so that I can be more successful at applying Scrum.
  4. To describe the Scrum framework, so that I can clearly comprehend the Scrum process.
  5. To describe the roles and responsibilities in Scrum, so that I can understand who does what.
  6. To experience Scrum, so that I know what it feels like when I start doing it for real.
  7. To explain the value of a product vision statement, so that I gain a greater appreciation for why we need one.
  8. To explain how to seed a product backlog, so that I can assist the Product Owner with creating one.
  9. To demonstrate how to write user stories, so that I can clearly articulate the who, what, and why behind a backlog item.
  10. To teach team members how to relatively size backlog items, so that the product owner can make better prioritization decisions.
  11. To list and explain the key meetings in Scrum, so that I know what is happening, before, during, and after each sprint.
  12. To explain how to tell a good user story from a bad one, so that I can better assist the Product Owner with creating an effective product backlog.
  13. To demonstrate how to track team progress, so that I can accurately understand what has been accomplished and how much longer it will take to complete the product.
  14. To list and explain the additional meetings recommended for Scrum, so that I can improve the overall efficiency of the Scrum process.
  15. To list areas where we might get into trouble, so that I know what to look out for as my organization implements Scrum.
  16. To list other fields that may enhance our ability to do Scrum better, so that I can have additional tools to increase our chances of success.
  17. An open forum to discuss challenging questions about Scrum, so that I can utilize the collective intelligence of the class participants to brainstorm creative solutions to complex problems.

Benefits:

• Learn while not being bored and having fun
• Retain more information because of our unique hands-on approach; based on the latest research into brain science
• Be entertained by stories from our real-world experienced and knowledgeable instructors
• Maximize investments already made by gaining valuable Professional Development Units (PDUs)
• Increase your personal worth within your company and in the marketplace

Takeaways:

• Easy to use reminders of Scrum
  • Printed class manual
  • Scrum reference card
  • Thumbdrive loaded with; articles, class exercises, whitepapers, etc...
• 14 PDUs
• A two year membership to the Scrum Alliance
• Eligibility to sit for the Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) exam

About The Instructor: Brian M. Rabon, CST, PMP

Brian M. Rabon, CST, PMP is the President of The Braintrust Consulting Group, a worldwide leader in Agile transformations. Throughout his 16 years of IT industry experience, Brian has applied Agile methods in order to successfully deliver working product to his customers. Brian holds a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from Auburn University and a Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. When not in the classroom, Brian can be found around the globe evangelizing the benefits of Agile to the likes of Agile 20XX, the Project Management Institute’s (PMI) many chapters, and the Scrum Alliance’s Scrum Gatherings. Brian is an avid blogger, writing for his company’s blog at http://www.braintrustgroup.com/blog. To contact Brian please e-mail him at brian.rabon@braintrustgroup.com or join him on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/bmrabon.

Want more testimonials? Check these out! http://www.braintrustgroup.com/case-studies/testimonials

Organizations That We Have Trained:

Cancellation Policy:

In order to receive a refund of your tuition for this class you must notify us no later than 5 days prior to the class start date. Cancellation requests received after the 5 day window will be issued a credit that can be applied towards a future class.

Privacy Notice:

We may on some occasions share your email address with a limited number of our trusted partners. We do not sell your personal information and we treat your privacy with the utmost regard. Please contact us at info@braintrustgroup.com if you have any concerns.

Class Overview:

Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) is an in-depth two day immersion into the world of Scrum. The class is full of practical, real world techniques that can be implemented immediately at your workplace. This class will allow your organization to enjoy the many advantages Scrum has to offer. Hands-on exercises demonstrate key concepts and let you experience the benefits of Scrum firsthand.

Limited to only 20 seats...
Sign-up now in order to ensure your spot is reserved!
14 PDUs Awarded		Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) eligible class

What others are are saying about us:

• "This was the biggest "bang for the buck" of any class I've ever taken (in 18 years of professional development)." - Heather
• "The class was extremely helpful in helping me find my role as ScrumMaster on my team." - Michael
• "I was pleasantly surprised that after only two days I now have a foundation to begin using Scrum at my agency." - Kevin

Who should attend?

• IT Professionals (Architects, BAs, DBAs, Developers, Testers, etc.)
• IT Leadership (Managers/Directors/VPs/CIOs/CTOs)
• Project Managers
• Anyone interested in learning the benefits of Scrum

Prerequisites:

• None

Class Learning Objectives:

• As a CSM class participant, I want...
  1. To explain Scrum’s history, so that I can better appreciate Scrum.
  2. To demonstrate the importance of having team values, so that I can facilitate the creation of working agreements amongst team members.
  3. To list situations where using Scrum is appropriate, so that I can be more successful at applying Scrum.
  4. To describe the Scrum framework, so that I can clearly comprehend the Scrum process.
  5. To describe the roles and responsibilities in Scrum, so that I can understand who does what.
  6. To experience Scrum, so that I know what it feels like when I start doing it for real.
  7. To explain the value of a product vision statement, so that I gain a greater appreciation for why we need one.
  8. To explain how to seed a product backlog, so that I can assist the Product Owner with creating one.
  9. To demonstrate how to write user stories, so that I can clearly articulate the who, what, and why behind a backlog item.
  10. To teach team members how to relatively size backlog items, so that the product owner can make better prioritization decisions.
  11. To list and explain the key meetings in Scrum, so that I know what is happening, before, during, and after each sprint.
  12. To explain how to tell a good user story from a bad one, so that I can better assist the Product Owner with creating an effective product backlog.
  13. To demonstrate how to track team progress, so that I can accurately understand what has been accomplished and how much longer it will take to complete the product.
  14. To list and explain the additional meetings recommended for Scrum, so that I can improve the overall efficiency of the Scrum process.
  15. To list areas where we might get into trouble, so that I know what to look out for as my organization implements Scrum.
  16. To list other fields that may enhance our ability to do Scrum better, so that I can have additional tools to increase our chances of success.
  17. An open forum to discuss challenging questions about Scrum, so that I can utilize the collective intelligence of the class participants to brainstorm creative solutions to complex problems.

Benefits:

• Learn while not being bored and having fun
• Retain more information because of our unique hands-on approach; based on the latest research into brain science
• Be entertained by stories from our real-world experienced and knowledgeable instructors
• Maximize investments already made by gaining valuable Professional Development Units (PDUs)
• Increase your personal worth within your company and in the marketplace

Takeaways:

• Easy to use reminders of Scrum
  • Printed class manual
  • Scrum reference card
  • Thumbdrive loaded with; articles, class exercises, whitepapers, etc...
• 14 PDUs
• A two year membership to the Scrum Alliance
• Eligibility to sit for the Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) exam

About The Instructor: Lonnie Weaver-Johnson, CST

Lonnie Weaver-Johnson, CST is the Agile Practice Lead for The Braintrust Consulting Group. She obtained a degree in communications and then went on to a 20+ year career implementing IT projects and leading people through change. Lonnie enjoys transforming people through; coaching, conflict resolution, performance management, and imparting knowledge. Lonnie started working with Scrum in 2006 and her experience has taken her across the United States and to foreign lands such as India and Canada. Helping teams learn and grow together until they reach a high performing stage is Lonnie’s passion. Her candid and patient coaching style helps people understand how to make the necessary behavioral changes to make Scrum work for their teams. She also enjoys partnering with leaders to help them understand how the changes will impact their organization. Lonnie has been an IT leader, a business analyst, a corporate trainer, a ToastMaster officer, a public speaker in her community, and a volunteer at local high schools training kids in team development. In all cases Lonnie brings high energy to her classes, motivates the learners, and uses humor and stories to keep people engaged. To contact Lonnie please e-mail her at lonnie.weaver-johnson@braintrustgroup.com or join her on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/lonnieweaverjohnson.

Want more testimonials? Check these out! http://www.braintrustgroup.com/case-studies/testimonials

Organizations That We Have Trained:

Cancellation Policy:

In order to receive a refund of your tuition for this class you must notify us no later than 5 days prior to the class start date. Cancellation requests received after the 5 day window will be issued a credit that can be applied towards a future class.

Privacy Notice:

We may on some occasions share your email address with a limited number of our trusted partners. We do not sell your personal information and we treat your privacy with the utmost regard. Please contact us at info@braintrustgroup.com if you have any concerns.

Join VersionOne for a two hour remote Agile eLearning Sprint Planning class. During this web-based training you will learn how to prepare a sprint plan, conduct a sprint meeting and manage the plan during the sprint.

• What is Sprint Planning
  • Review what agile sprint planning is
  • Understand the 5 levels of planning
  • Learn about a the goals of the meeting
• The Sprint Planning Meeting
  • Learn who needs to participate
  • Review a meeting agenda
  • Explore story elaboration
• Managing the Sprint Plan
  • Prepare to manage a sprint
  • Inspect common mistakes
  • Analyze real world examples

The following elements will be covered during the one day course
* Scrum in Practice: the course is designed to illustrate Scrum in action.
* Understanding of the Agile Manifesto and what it means to them.
* Essence of Scrum: values, foundations and a new way of thinking.
* Understanding how Scrum values and foundations are related to the practices.
* Get a sense of what self-organization is (and is not).

About the Instructor 

Lizzy Morris is an Agile Transformation Coach and Executive facilitator from the London, UK. Her background is in global software development & delivery management.Lizzy currently works as Agile Transformation facilitator, who currently believes true agile transformation is seeded with the choice to change.Implementing the change takes willingness and courage, because the journey to transformation demands bypassing your fears of failure and the unknown.

Lizzy’s passion is training Agile teams, she loves to see a classroom light up as they begin to drive through real-world simulations that provide them a tangible Agile experience.
* Can draw a diagram of mechanics of Scrum: framework, roles, artifacts & flow.

Projects start with their requirements. How those requirements are documented or expressed has a tremendous influence on the rest of the project. A great way to build software that meets real users’ real needs and gets the project off on the right foot is to begin with user stories.

User stories are simple, clear, brief descriptions of functionality told from the perspective of a user. User stories in agile and Scrum development can be useful to either a user of the software or the customer of the software. These user stories can then become the product backlog of an agile or Scrum project.

The technique of expressing requirements as user stories is one of the most broadly applicable techniques introduced by the agile processes; and user stories can also be an effective approach on all time-constrained projects.

This course provides you with the knowledge and tools needed to identify and write effective and helpful user stories. You’ll learn the six attributes all good stories must exhibit and thirteen guidelines for writing a better user story. The class explores how user role modeling can help when gathering a project's initial stories. During this hands-on course, all participants will have the opportunity to practice identifying user roles and writing stories on a case study.

This course counts for 7.5 Professional Development Units (PDUs).

What You Will Learn

• A useful template for writing user stories
• The six attributes of a good story and how to achieve them
• How to write non-functional requirements as user stories
• How much work to do up-front and how much to do just-in-time
• How to conduct a story-writing workshop
• Practical examples from real-world projects

Who Should Attend

This course is equally suited for programmers, testers, managers, analysts and even customers and product owners who are interested in applying these agile techniques to their projects.

PMPs: This agile training class counts for 7.5 Professional Development Units (PDUs).

What You Get

• High quality training from an industry expert
• A continental breakfast buffet, a hot lunch buffet, an afternoon snack, and continuously replenished drinks
• A 4 GB USB drive containing a PDF of the course materials, relevant articles by Mike Cohn and others, sample chapters from Mike's books, and other information
• A printed, color copy of the course materials

Class Overview:

Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) is an in-depth two day immersion into the world of Agile Product Management. The class is full of practical, real world techniques, which can be implemented immediately at your workplace. This class will allow your organization to enjoy the many advantages Scrum has to offer. Hands-on exercises demonstrate key concepts and let you experience the benefits of Scrum firsthand.

Limited to only 20 seats...
Sign-up now in order to ensure your spot is reserved!
14 PDUs Awarded		Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) eligible class

What others are are saying about us:

• "I knew absolutely nothing about Scrum or how it worked and now I feel I have a good baseline that I can use to start using it and adding to that knowledge base." - Don
• "I learned a great deal in a short period (2 days). This class has prepared me to be a successful partner & product owner. The exercises were entertaining while very educational." - David
• "Braintrust did an amazing job keeping the class entertaining and incorporated real life issues a product owner could face with Scrum. I had a great time and excited to share what I've learned with my team." - Rachel

Who should attend?

• Product Managers/Business Analysts
• Functional/Operational Managers
• Project Sponsors
• IT Leadership (Managers/Directors/VPs/CIOs/CTOs)
• Anyone interested in learning the benefits of Scrum

Prerequisites:

• None

Class Learning Objectives:

• As a CSPO class participant, I want...
  1. To explain Scrum’s history, so that I can better appreciate Scrum.
  2. To explain the importance of having team values, so that I can understand how the team has agreed to work together.
  3. To list situations where using Scrum is appropriate, so that I can better understand why Scrum will benefit my organization.
  4. To describe the Scrum framework, so that I can clearly comprehend the Scrum process.
  5. To describe the roles and responsibilities in Scrum, so that I can understand who does what.
  6. To select a product, so that I can have a real-world example to base the class exercises on.
  7. To demonstrate how to create a product vision statement, so that I can establish a guiding light for the product, with the help of my stakeholders.
  8. To demonstrate how to create a product roadmap, so that I can chart a class for the team and help build consensus with my stakeholders.
  9. To demonstrate how to establish user roles and personas, so that I can ensure that I don’t miss an important stakeholder’s business need.
  10. To explain how to seed a product backlog, so that I can quickly establish enough backlog items so that the team can start sprinting.
  11. To demonstrate how to write user stories, so that I can clearly articulate the who, what, and why behind each backlog item.
  12. To list how the team will relatively size backlog items, so that I can factor-in implementation complexity, when I assess the overall priority of a backlog item.
  13. To demonstrate how to quickly assess business value, so that I can establish an initial priority for the backlog items in my product backlog.
  14. To explain how to tell a good user story from a bad one, so that I can create a better product backlog.
  15. To list several ways to prioritize my product backlog, so that I can determine what is the best approach for the situation at hand.
  16. To list and explain the key meetings in Scrum, so that I know what is happening, before, during, and after each sprint.
  17. To demonstrate how to track team progress, so that I can make more informed prioritization decisions and forecast possible release dates.
  18. To list and explain the additional meetings recommended for Scrum, so that I can improve the overall efficiency of the Scrum process.
  19. To demonstrate how to play product box, so that I understand the key features that my customer(s) want(s) in my product.
  20. To list areas where we might get into trouble, so that I know what to look out for as my organization implements Scrum.
  21. An open forum to discuss challenging questions about Scrum, so that I can utilize the collective intelligence of the class participants to brainstorm creative ways to solve problems.

Benefits:

• Learn while not being bored and having fun
• Retain more information because of our unique hands-on approach; based on the latest research into brain science
• Be entertained by stories from our real-world experienced and knowledgeable instructors
• Maximize investments already made by gaining valuable Professional Development Units (PDUs)
• Increase your personal worth within your company and in the marketplace

Takeaways:

• Easy to use reminders of Scrum
  • Printed class manual
  • Scrum reference card
  • Thumbdrive loaded with; articles, class exercises, whitepapers, etc...
• 14 PDUs
• A two year membership to the Scrum Alliance
• The Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) designation (upon successful class completion)

About The Instructor: Lonnie Weaver-Johnson, CST

Lonnie Weaver-Johnson, CST is the Agile Practice Lead for The Braintrust Consulting Group. She obtained a degree in communications and then went on to a 20+ year career implementing IT projects and leading people through change. Lonnie enjoys transforming people through; coaching, conflict resolution, performance management, and imparting knowledge. Lonnie started working with Scrum in 2006 and her experience has taken her across the United States and to foreign lands such as India and Canada. Helping teams learn and grow together until they reach a high performing stage is Lonnie’s passion. Her candid and patient coaching style helps people understand how to make the necessary behavioral changes to make Scrum work for their teams. She also enjoys partnering with leaders to help them understand how the changes will impact their organization. Lonnie has been an IT leader, a business analyst, a corporate trainer, a ToastMaster officer, a public speaker in her community, and a volunteer at local high schools training kids in team development. In all cases Lonnie brings high energy to her classes, motivates the learners, and uses humor and stories to keep people engaged. To contact Lonnie please e-mail her at lonnie.weaver-johnson@braintrustgroup.com or join her on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/lonnieweaverjohnson.

Want more testimonials? Check these out! http://www.braintrustgroup.com/case-studies/testimonials

Organizations That We Have Trained:

Cancellation Policy:

In order to receive a refund of your tuition for this class you must notify us no later than 5 days prior to the class start date. Cancellation requests received after the 5 day window will be issued a credit that can be applied towards a future class.

Privacy Notice:

We may on some occasions share your email address with a limited number of our trusted partners. We do not sell your personal information and we treat your privacy with the utmost regard. Please contact us at info@braintrustgroup.com if you have any concerns.

Class Overview:

Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) is an in-depth two day immersion into the world of Scrum. The class is full of practical, real world techniques that can be implemented immediately at your workplace. This class will allow your organization to enjoy the many advantages Scrum has to offer. Hands-on exercises demonstrate key concepts and let you experience the benefits of Scrum firsthand.

Limited to only 20 seats...
Sign-up now in order to ensure your spot is reserved!
14 PDUs Awarded		Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) eligible class

What others are are saying about us:

• "This was the biggest "bang for the buck" of any class I've ever taken (in 18 years of professional development)." - Heather
• "The class was extremely helpful in helping me find my role as ScrumMaster on my team." - Michael
• "I was pleasantly surprised that after only two days I now have a foundation to begin using Scrum at my agency." - Kevin

Who should attend?

• IT Professionals (Architects, BAs, DBAs, Developers, Testers, etc.)
• IT Leadership (Managers/Directors/VPs/CIOs/CTOs)
• Project Managers
• Anyone interested in learning the benefits of Scrum

Prerequisites:

• None

Class Learning Objectives:

• As a CSM class participant, I want...
  1. To explain Scrum’s history, so that I can better appreciate Scrum.
  2. To demonstrate the importance of having team values, so that I can facilitate the creation of working agreements amongst team members.
  3. To list situations where using Scrum is appropriate, so that I can be more successful at applying Scrum.
  4. To describe the Scrum framework, so that I can clearly comprehend the Scrum process.
  5. To describe the roles and responsibilities in Scrum, so that I can understand who does what.
  6. To experience Scrum, so that I know what it feels like when I start doing it for real.
  7. To explain the value of a product vision statement, so that I gain a greater appreciation for why we need one.
  8. To explain how to seed a product backlog, so that I can assist the Product Owner with creating one.
  9. To demonstrate how to write user stories, so that I can clearly articulate the who, what, and why behind a backlog item.
  10. To teach team members how to relatively size backlog items, so that the product owner can make better prioritization decisions.
  11. To list and explain the key meetings in Scrum, so that I know what is happening, before, during, and after each sprint.
  12. To explain how to tell a good user story from a bad one, so that I can better assist the Product Owner with creating an effective product backlog.
  13. To demonstrate how to track team progress, so that I can accurately understand what has been accomplished and how much longer it will take to complete the product.
  14. To list and explain the additional meetings recommended for Scrum, so that I can improve the overall efficiency of the Scrum process.
  15. To list areas where we might get into trouble, so that I know what to look out for as my organization implements Scrum.
  16. To list other fields that may enhance our ability to do Scrum better, so that I can have additional tools to increase our chances of success.
  17. An open forum to discuss challenging questions about Scrum, so that I can utilize the collective intelligence of the class participants to brainstorm creative solutions to complex problems.

Benefits:

• Learn while not being bored and having fun
• Retain more information because of our unique hands-on approach; based on the latest research into brain science
• Be entertained by stories from our real-world experienced and knowledgeable instructors
• Maximize investments already made by gaining valuable Professional Development Units (PDUs)
• Increase your personal worth within your company and in the marketplace

Takeaways:

• Easy to use reminders of Scrum
  • Printed class manual
  • Scrum reference card
  • Thumbdrive loaded with; articles, class exercises, whitepapers, etc...
• 14 PDUs
• A two year membership to the Scrum Alliance
• Eligibility to sit for the Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) exam

About The Instructor: Lonnie Weaver-Johnson, CST

Lonnie Weaver-Johnson, CST is the Agile Practice Lead for The Braintrust Consulting Group. She obtained a degree in communications and then went on to a 20+ year career implementing IT projects and leading people through change. Lonnie enjoys transforming people through; coaching, conflict resolution, performance management, and imparting knowledge. Lonnie started working with Scrum in 2006 and her experience has taken her across the United States and to foreign lands such as India and Canada. Helping teams learn and grow together until they reach a high performing stage is Lonnie’s passion. Her candid and patient coaching style helps people understand how to make the necessary behavioral changes to make Scrum work for their teams. She also enjoys partnering with leaders to help them understand how the changes will impact their organization. Lonnie has been an IT leader, a business analyst, a corporate trainer, a ToastMaster officer, a public speaker in her community, and a volunteer at local high schools training kids in team development. In all cases Lonnie brings high energy to her classes, motivates the learners, and uses humor and stories to keep people engaged. To contact Lonnie please e-mail her at lonnie.weaver-johnson@braintrustgroup.com or join her on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/lonnieweaverjohnson.

Want more testimonials? Check these out! http://www.braintrustgroup.com/case-studies/testimonials

Organizations That We Have Trained:

Cancellation Policy:

In order to receive a refund of your tuition for this class you must notify us no later than 5 days prior to the class start date. Cancellation requests received after the 5 day window will be issued a credit that can be applied towards a future class.

Privacy Notice:

We may on some occasions share your email address with a limited number of our trusted partners. We do not sell your personal information and we treat your privacy with the utmost regard. Please contact us at info@braintrustgroup.com if you have any concerns.

Class Overview:

Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) is an in-depth two day immersion into the world of Scrum. The class is full of practical, real world techniques that can be implemented immediately at your workplace. This class will allow your organization to enjoy the many advantages Scrum has to offer. Hands-on exercises demonstrate key concepts and let you experience the benefits of Scrum firsthand.

Limited to only 20 seats...
Sign-up now in order to ensure your spot is reserved!
14 PDUs Awarded		Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) eligible class

What others are are saying about us:

• "This was the biggest "bang for the buck" of any class I've ever taken (in 18 years of professional development)." - Heather
• "The class was extremely helpful in helping me find my role as ScrumMaster on my team." - Michael
• "I was pleasantly surprised that after only two days I now have a foundation to begin using Scrum at my agency." - Kevin

Who should attend?

• IT Professionals (Architects, BAs, DBAs, Developers, Testers, etc.)
• IT Leadership (Managers/Directors/VPs/CIOs/CTOs)
• Project Managers
• Anyone interested in learning the benefits of Scrum

Prerequisites:

• None

Class Learning Objectives:

• As a CSM class participant, I want...
  1. To explain Scrum’s history, so that I can better appreciate Scrum.
  2. To demonstrate the importance of having team values, so that I can facilitate the creation of working agreements amongst team members.
  3. To list situations where using Scrum is appropriate, so that I can be more successful at applying Scrum.
  4. To describe the Scrum framework, so that I can clearly comprehend the Scrum process.
  5. To describe the roles and responsibilities in Scrum, so that I can understand who does what.
  6. To experience Scrum, so that I know what it feels like when I start doing it for real.
  7. To explain the value of a product vision statement, so that I gain a greater appreciation for why we need one.
  8. To explain how to seed a product backlog, so that I can assist the Product Owner with creating one.
  9. To demonstrate how to write user stories, so that I can clearly articulate the who, what, and why behind a backlog item.
  10. To teach team members how to relatively size backlog items, so that the product owner can make better prioritization decisions.
  11. To list and explain the key meetings in Scrum, so that I know what is happening, before, during, and after each sprint.
  12. To explain how to tell a good user story from a bad one, so that I can better assist the Product Owner with creating an effective product backlog.
  13. To demonstrate how to track team progress, so that I can accurately understand what has been accomplished and how much longer it will take to complete the product.
  14. To list and explain the additional meetings recommended for Scrum, so that I can improve the overall efficiency of the Scrum process.
  15. To list areas where we might get into trouble, so that I know what to look out for as my organization implements Scrum.
  16. To list other fields that may enhance our ability to do Scrum better, so that I can have additional tools to increase our chances of success.
  17. An open forum to discuss challenging questions about Scrum, so that I can utilize the collective intelligence of the class participants to brainstorm creative solutions to complex problems.

Benefits:

• Learn while not being bored and having fun
• Retain more information because of our unique hands-on approach; based on the latest research into brain science
• Be entertained by stories from our real-world experienced and knowledgeable instructors
• Maximize investments already made by gaining valuable Professional Development Units (PDUs)
• Increase your personal worth within your company and in the marketplace

Takeaways:

• Easy to use reminders of Scrum
  • Printed class manual
  • Scrum reference card
  • Thumbdrive loaded with; articles, class exercises, whitepapers, etc...
• 14 PDUs
• A two year membership to the Scrum Alliance
• Eligibility to sit for the Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) exam

About The Instructor: Brian M. Rabon, CST, PMP

Brian M. Rabon, CST, PMP is the President of The Braintrust Consulting Group, a worldwide leader in Agile transformations. Throughout his 16 years of IT industry experience, Brian has applied Agile methods in order to successfully deliver working product to his customers. Brian holds a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from Auburn University and a Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. When not in the classroom, Brian can be found around the globe evangelizing the benefits of Agile to the likes of Agile 20XX, the Project Management Institute’s (PMI) many chapters, and the Scrum Alliance’s Scrum Gatherings. Brian is an avid blogger, writing for his company’s blog at http://www.braintrustgroup.com/blog. To contact Brian please e-mail him at brian.rabon@braintrustgroup.com or join him on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/bmrabon.

Want more testimonials? Check these out! http://www.braintrustgroup.com/case-studies/testimonials

Organizations That We Have Trained:

Cancellation Policy:

In order to receive a refund of your tuition for this class you must notify us no later than 5 days prior to the class start date. Cancellation requests received after the 5 day window will be issued a credit that can be applied towards a future class.

Privacy Notice:

We may on some occasions share your email address with a limited number of our trusted partners. We do not sell your personal information and we treat your privacy with the utmost regard. Please contact us at info@braintrustgroup.com if you have any concerns.

Class Overview:

Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) is an in-depth two day immersion into the world of Agile Product Management. The class is full of practical, real world techniques, which can be implemented immediately at your workplace. This class will allow your organization to enjoy the many advantages Scrum has to offer. Hands-on exercises demonstrate key concepts and let you experience the benefits of Scrum firsthand.

Limited to only 20 seats...
Sign-up now in order to ensure your spot is reserved!
14 PDUs Awarded		Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) eligible class

What others are are saying about us:

• "I knew absolutely nothing about Scrum or how it worked and now I feel I have a good baseline that I can use to start using it and adding to that knowledge base." - Don
• "I learned a great deal in a short period (2 days). This class has prepared me to be a successful partner & product owner. The exercises were entertaining while very educational." - David
• "Braintrust did an amazing job keeping the class entertaining and incorporated real life issues a product owner could face with Scrum. I had a great time and excited to share what I've learned with my team." - Rachel

Who should attend?

• Product Managers/Business Analysts
• Functional/Operational Managers
• Project Sponsors
• IT Leadership (Managers/Directors/VPs/CIOs/CTOs)
• Anyone interested in learning the benefits of Scrum

Prerequisites:

• None

Class Learning Objectives:

• As a CSPO class participant, I want...
  1. To explain Scrum’s history, so that I can better appreciate Scrum.
  2. To explain the importance of having team values, so that I can understand how the team has agreed to work together.
  3. To list situations where using Scrum is appropriate, so that I can better understand why Scrum will benefit my organization.
  4. To describe the Scrum framework, so that I can clearly comprehend the Scrum process.
  5. To describe the roles and responsibilities in Scrum, so that I can understand who does what.
  6. To select a product, so that I can have a real-world example to base the class exercises on.
  7. To demonstrate how to create a product vision statement, so that I can establish a guiding light for the product, with the help of my stakeholders.
  8. To demonstrate how to create a product roadmap, so that I can chart a class for the team and help build consensus with my stakeholders.
  9. To demonstrate how to establish user roles and personas, so that I can ensure that I don’t miss an important stakeholder’s business need.
  10. To explain how to seed a product backlog, so that I can quickly establish enough backlog items so that the team can start sprinting.
  11. To demonstrate how to write user stories, so that I can clearly articulate the who, what, and why behind each backlog item.
  12. To list how the team will relatively size backlog items, so that I can factor-in implementation complexity, when I assess the overall priority of a backlog item.
  13. To demonstrate how to quickly assess business value, so that I can establish an initial priority for the backlog items in my product backlog.
  14. To explain how to tell a good user story from a bad one, so that I can create a better product backlog.
  15. To list several ways to prioritize my product backlog, so that I can determine what is the best approach for the situation at hand.
  16. To list and explain the key meetings in Scrum, so that I know what is happening, before, during, and after each sprint.
  17. To demonstrate how to track team progress, so that I can make more informed prioritization decisions and forecast possible release dates.
  18. To list and explain the additional meetings recommended for Scrum, so that I can improve the overall efficiency of the Scrum process.
  19. To demonstrate how to play product box, so that I understand the key features that my customer(s) want(s) in my product.
  20. To list areas where we might get into trouble, so that I know what to look out for as my organization implements Scrum.
  21. An open forum to discuss challenging questions about Scrum, so that I can utilize the collective intelligence of the class participants to brainstorm creative ways to solve problems.

Benefits:

• Learn while not being bored and having fun
• Retain more information because of our unique hands-on approach; based on the latest research into brain science
• Be entertained by stories from our real-world experienced and knowledgeable instructors
• Maximize investments already made by gaining valuable Professional Development Units (PDUs)
• Increase your personal worth within your company and in the marketplace

Takeaways:

• Easy to use reminders of Scrum
  • Printed class manual
  • Scrum reference card
  • Thumbdrive loaded with; articles, class exercises, whitepapers, etc...
• 14 PDUs
• A two year membership to the Scrum Alliance
• The Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) designation (upon successful class completion)

About The Instructor: Lonnie Weaver-Johnson, CST

Lonnie Weaver-Johnson, CST is the Agile Practice Lead for The Braintrust Consulting Group. She obtained a degree in communications and then went on to a 20+ year career implementing IT projects and leading people through change. Lonnie enjoys transforming people through; coaching, conflict resolution, performance management, and imparting knowledge. Lonnie started working with Scrum in 2006 and her experience has taken her across the United States and to foreign lands such as India and Canada. Helping teams learn and grow together until they reach a high performing stage is Lonnie’s passion. Her candid and patient coaching style helps people understand how to make the necessary behavioral changes to make Scrum work for their teams. She also enjoys partnering with leaders to help them understand how the changes will impact their organization. Lonnie has been an IT leader, a business analyst, a corporate trainer, a ToastMaster officer, a public speaker in her community, and a volunteer at local high schools training kids in team development. In all cases Lonnie brings high energy to her classes, motivates the learners, and uses humor and stories to keep people engaged. To contact Lonnie please e-mail her at lonnie.weaver-johnson@braintrustgroup.com or join her on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/lonnieweaverjohnson.

Want more testimonials? Check these out! http://www.braintrustgroup.com/case-studies/testimonials

Organizations That We Have Trained:

Cancellation Policy:

In order to receive a refund of your tuition for this class you must notify us no later than 5 days prior to the class start date. Cancellation requests received after the 5 day window will be issued a credit that can be applied towards a future class.

Privacy Notice:

We may on some occasions share your email address with a limited number of our trusted partners. We do not sell your personal information and we treat your privacy with the utmost regard. Please contact us at info@braintrustgroup.com if you have any concerns.

You will go beyond the basics of Agile development and learn the practices expert developers employ to write code faster and solve a range of software problems. You’ll discover simple, yet powerful techniques for analysis and design, refactoring to patterns, and leveraging test-driven development to emerge solutions. You’ll identify code qualities that make software easier to build and test, and learn a common vocabulary for evaluating and communicating designs that will enable you to collaborate more effectively with your customer, as well as your teammates.

Anyone who develops software will find value in the techniques covered in this training, regardless of your coding proficiency or current skill level. By the end of class you will have gained an in-depth understanding of how Agile development practices improve software construction, and you will have become a more valuable contributor on any development team.

Course Benefits

Completing this training will give you a deeper understanding of software development using the Agile methodology, and enable you to:

• Employ expert techniques for analysis and design
• Read and write the most useful UML diagrams
• Estimate development tasks more accurately
• Deliver valuable software in short iterations
• Apply simple strategies for refactoring legacy code
• Create flexible designs that can be easily changed
• Identify code qualities that improve maintainability
• Recognize pathologies of poor code and fix them
• Understand the importance of continuous integration and versioning
• Support collaboration and pair programming, and work effectively with teammates
• Write software that supports an iterative process without excessive rework
• Refactor to design patterns just-in-time to avoid upfront overdesign
• Use test-driven development practices to build higher-quality software
• Write code that is more testable and easier to maintain and extend

Who Should Take This Course:

This training will benefit all software-development team members, including architects; business analysts; DBAs; designers, developers and development managers; directors; documentation specialists; operations and support staff; product and project managers; software engineers/ programmers; testers; technical analysts, leads and writers; and QA engineers. Familiarity with basic Object-Oriented (OO) concepts and terminology is recommended.

Agenda

Session 1—Agile Fundamentals: Introduction, Agile Principles, Agile Practices, Development Essentials
Session 2—Agile Analysis: CREATE Software Quality, Paradigms and Wisdom, Principles and Perspectives, Software Patterns Session 3—Agile Design: Encapsulating Varying Behavior, Encapsulating Foreignness, Group Exercise, Exercise Debrief Session 4—Agile Development: Exercise Review, Encapsulating Sequence and Cardinality, Encapsulating Construction, Development Practices
Session 5—Agile Testing: Review, Test First Development, Testing Techniques, Refactoring and Emerging Systems

Your Instructor

David Bernstein’s continuing passion for software design and construction has led him to train more than 7,500 developers in the last 23 years for clients that have included Fortune 500 firms such as Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo!, Boeing, AT&T, Sprint, Medtronic, SunGard, State Farm, MetLife and Weyerhaeuser. As a longtime IBM consultant, David trained software engineers around the globe, giving them the skills to write the next generation of applications and operating-system software while earning one of the highest satisfaction ratings in the history of IBM education. Since 2006, he has devoted his consulting practice to providing organizations with training and coaching for software developers and teams transitioning to Agile and Scrum.

Praise for this Training

“This class renewed my enthusiasm for the love of software development…[David’s] enthusiasm is infectious, and you might find that you start thinking better about software development practices.” – Mark Walsen, Owner/Developer, Notation Software

“If you want to know a better and more effective way of thinking and working with software, then don’t miss this class.” – Javier Espana, Designer/Developer, Velocity Partners, Argentina

“This class is absolutely essential for a modern software developer.” – Arkadiy Tseytlin, Software Developer, ShareBuilder.com

Become a more proficient developer—contact us to arrange a private, on-site session of this training for your team.

View a pdf version of this course description.

See our full training schedule of public classes and webinars.

Class Overview:

Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) is an in-depth two day immersion into the world of Agile Product Management. The class is full of practical, real world techniques, which can be implemented immediately at your workplace. This class will allow your organization to enjoy the many advantages Scrum has to offer. Hands-on exercises demonstrate key concepts and let you experience the benefits of Scrum firsthand.

Limited to only 20 seats...
Sign-up now in order to ensure your spot is reserved!
14 PDUs Awarded		Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Developer (CSD) eligible class

What others are are saying about us:

• "I knew absolutely nothing about Scrum or how it worked and now I feel I have a good baseline that I can use to start using it and adding to that knowledge base." - Don
• "I learned a great deal in a short period (2 days). This class has prepared me to be a successful partner & product owner. The exercises were entertaining while very educational." - David
• "Braintrust did an amazing job keeping the class entertaining and incorporated real life issues a product owner could face with Scrum. I had a great time and excited to share what I've learned with my team." - Rachel

Who should attend?

• Product Managers/Business Analysts
• Functional/Operational Managers
• Project Sponsors
• IT Leadership (Managers/Directors/VPs/CIOs/CTOs)
• Anyone interested in learning the benefits of Scrum

Prerequisites:

• None

Class Learning Objectives:

• As a CSPO class participant, I want...
  1. To explain Scrum’s history, so that I can better appreciate Scrum.
  2. To explain the importance of having team values, so that I can understand how the team has agreed to work together.
  3. To list situations where using Scrum is appropriate, so that I can better understand why Scrum will benefit my organization.
  4. To describe the Scrum framework, so that I can clearly comprehend the Scrum process.
  5. To describe the roles and responsibilities in Scrum, so that I can understand who does what.
  6. To select a product, so that I can have a real-world example to base the class exercises on.
  7. To demonstrate how to create a product vision statement, so that I can establish a guiding light for the product, with the help of my stakeholders.
  8. To demonstrate how to create a product roadmap, so that I can chart a class for the team and help build consensus with my stakeholders.
  9. To demonstrate how to establish user roles and personas, so that I can ensure that I don’t miss an important stakeholder’s business need.
  10. To explain how to seed a product backlog, so that I can quickly establish enough backlog items so that the team can start sprinting.
  11. To demonstrate how to write user stories, so that I can clearly articulate the who, what, and why behind each backlog item.
  12. To list how the team will relatively size backlog items, so that I can factor-in implementation complexity, when I assess the overall priority of a backlog item.
  13. To demonstrate how to quickly assess business value, so that I can establish an initial priority for the backlog items in my product backlog.
  14. To explain how to tell a good user story from a bad one, so that I can create a better product backlog.
  15. To list several ways to prioritize my product backlog, so that I can determine what is the best approach for the situation at hand.
  16. To list and explain the key meetings in Scrum, so that I know what is happening, before, during, and after each sprint.
  17. To demonstrate how to track team progress, so that I can make more informed prioritization decisions and forecast possible release dates.
  18. To list and explain the additional meetings recommended for Scrum, so that I can improve the overall efficiency of the Scrum process.
  19. To demonstrate how to play product box, so that I understand the key features that my customer(s) want(s) in my product.
  20. To list areas where we might get into trouble, so that I know what to look out for as my organization implements Scrum.
  21. An open forum to discuss challenging questions about Scrum, so that I can utilize the collective intelligence of the class participants to brainstorm creative ways to solve problems.

Benefits:

• Learn while not being bored and having fun
• Retain more information because of our unique hands-on approach; based on the latest research into brain science
• Be entertained by stories from our real-world experienced and knowledgeable instructors
• Maximize investments already made by gaining valuable Professional Development Units (PDUs)
• Increase your personal worth within your company and in the marketplace

Takeaways:

• Easy to use reminders of Scrum
  • Printed class manual
  • Scrum reference card
  • Thumbdrive loaded with; articles, class exercises, whitepapers, etc...
• 14 PDUs
• A two year membership to the Scrum Alliance
• The Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) designation (upon successful class completion)
• A free iPad!!!

About The Instructor: Brian M. Rabon, CST, PMP

Brian M. Rabon, CST, PMP is the President of The Braintrust Consulting Group, a worldwide leader in Agile transformations. Throughout his 16 years of IT industry experience, Brian has applied Agile methods in order to successfully deliver working product to his customers. Brian holds a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science from Auburn University and a Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. When not in the classroom, Brian can be found around the globe evangelizing the benefits of Agile to the likes of Agile 20XX, the Project Management Institute’s (PMI) many chapters, and the Scrum Alliance’s Scrum Gatherings. Brian is an avid blogger, writing for his company’s blog at http://www.braintrustgroup.com/blog. To contact Brian please e-mail him at brian.rabon@braintrustgroup.com or join him on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/bmrabon.

Want more testimonials? Check these out! http://www.braintrustgroup.com/case-studies/testimonials

Organizations That We Have Trained:

Cancellation Policy:

In order to receive a refund of your tuition for this class you must notify us no later than 5 days prior to the class start date. Cancellation requests received after the 5 day window will be issued a credit that can be applied towards a future class.

Privacy Notice:

We may on some occasions share your email address with a limited number of our trusted partners. We do not sell your personal information and we treat your privacy with the utmost regard. Please contact us at info@braintrustgroup.com if you have any concerns.

We spend a good deal of time reviewing the basics, because people always are doing them somewhat wrongly and/or misunderstanding them.  And because you must always be explaining them.  So you get practice in the course explaining them.

Overall, we use a combination of immersive team-based learning, exercises, and real-world case studies, to help you learn how to be a better Product Owner.

Topics and/or exercises include:

• Plan, initiate and lead a Scrum project
• Release Planning: what & how & why
• Develop the initial Product Backlog
• Breaking down user stories (epics)
• The different sources of PBIs in the Product Backlog
• Improve the identification of Business Value
• Story point estimation: how the PO plays, why he cares
• Managing the Gap between customer expectations and the Team's ability to deliver
• Improving business value engineering: theory, tools, exercises
• Balancing new features against digging out of technical debt
• Refactoring the Release Plan continuously
• Leading the Team and yet have the Team remain self-managing
• Working with Business Stakeholders to make them more effective
• Using the 80-20 rule
• Fixing Product Owner impediments
• Scaling & the Chief Product Owner role
• Managing urgent items
• You have to slow down to go fast
• "Things aren't perfect at my place; what do I do when...?"
• The PO's goals abd actions in the basic Scrum meetings
• Managing the flow of business information into the Team
• Using the Release Burndown and other reporting

We will also get questions and issues from the group, prioritize them, and cover them as much as possible.  We have ready far more material than can be covered in the 2 days, in part to be prepared for the different questions. For half the questions at least, another attendee is thinking "oh, I should have asked that."

This CSPO course is unique in that we are moving beyond theory, applying the Scrum framework in the course and the workshop in more real-world circumstances. It is designed to bring attendees to a level where they feel comfortable experimenting and improvising in Scrum through the role of Product Owner.  Thus, you can help the team be more creative and release more business value.

Regarding the Workshop, see this blog post. The feedback we get is that the workshop is essential in taking the 'ideas' of the course and making them 'real' via real work (with on-site coaching).

Additional Information :
The course will run from 8:30am-5:10pm each day. A continental breakfast, breaks and lunch will be provided.

Following the course, each participant is enrolled as a CSPO, which includes a one-year membership in the Scrum Alliance, where additional Scrum materials and information are available.

Who Should Attend

The CSPO is for managers, analysts, product managers, Business Stakeholders, business analysts, and ScrumMasters. And many project managers.  In fact, since the PO is integral to the Team, we recommend that the Team also attend.  You will leave with solid knowledge of how and why Scrum works. Through practical, hands-on exercises and small-group discussion you will be prepared to plan your first (or next) sprint immediately after this class.

ScrumMasters need this course, because they must coach Product Owners in these skills.

PMPs: You can receive 21 Professional Development Units (PDUs) for this course + workshop. 

Course Material

Participants will receive course materials (not books) at the course. The CSPO course was formulated to train and certify Product Owners and is used worldwide for Product Owner training. In addition, participants should obtain (at their own expense) Agile Project Management with Scrum, by Ken Schwaber, which is required reading for the course. You may also wish to obtain the primary Scrum book, Agile Software Development with SCRUM by Schwaber and Beedle, on which the course is based.

Of course, there will be updated material and training exercises in the course which you cannot get from books.

Registration and Fees

The course fee is CAD 1,700.  There is a 10% discount for groups of 3 or more.

Once you pay, you become registered. If your firm needs an invoice, we can generate those as well. You are not fully registered until we receive payment.

Refund policy
90% of the course fee will be refunded for cancellations more that 7 days in advance of the course. No refunds will be provided for cancellations within a week of the course.