Coaching and Mentoring

Description:

Participants will be introduced to the fundamental principles of agile and Scrum as well as the three roles of a Scrum team. They’ll learn how sprints are used to maximize the value delivered—by creating feedback cycles to amplify and accelerate learning. 

All three roles of a Scrum project team are covered, with special emphasis on challenges and responsibilities of being an effective product owner. The course equips product owners to make better decisions and improve their relationships with stakeholders.

We’ll teach five techniques that product owners can use to create a shared, elevating vision of the product’s near- and long-term future. Practice creating a product backlog in story-writing workshops, especially with story mapping. 

Participants gain practical experience with user, job, and technical stories. 

Product backlog maintenance and refinement are fully covered, equipping participants with time-saving skills. 

Multiple techniques are practiced for prioritizing a product backlog to maximize value delivery, improve flow, and eliminate bottlenecks that can delay progress.

Participants learn how to create accurate plans of when a product will be delivered with which features. Starting with the content in our Certified Scrum Product Owner course, the Effective Product Owner course can be configured so that specific topics are shortened, lengthed, removed, or added to create the ideal course. 

Prior to the course you will work with one of our instructors to identify the most important course content. If, for example, you want more time spent on user stories and less on prioritizing the product backlog, you can easily make this the course for you.
 

Description:

This course ensures that leaders and executives can support agile and Scrum initiatives by understanding the fundamentals of these frameworks.

This session is designed for busy schedules—distilling content into actionable knowledge that leaders need to succeed.

By the end of this course, participants will have a solid understanding of Scrum and agile and know how to support teams to get the best results.

Description:

Agile is both a mindset and a collection of new practices. This course provides an overview of key agile principles with comprehensive coverage of the practices that support each principle.  The course helps participants:

• Work in short, time-boxed iterations to deliver value every couple of weeks
• Know which parts of agile are required and which can be tailored to fit a team
• Understand how roles change on a self-organizing, agile team
• Understand how cross-functional teams and overlapping lead to more rapid delivery of value

After this course, teams will be sufficiently informed to decide if agile is a promising direction and will be equipped to begin. Teams seeking more in-depth coverage specifically of Scrum may want to consider the two-day Working on a Scrum Team course.

Description:

Mountain Goat Software workshops are very practical—we spend the majority of time working directly on issues faced by your teams. 

In advance of the workshop, one of our experienced agile mentors will host a Zoom session with key team members in order to understand the challenges faced by the team and expectations of a successful retrospective.

The retrospective will begin with a brief educational piece during which your mentor may present a few slides prepared as a result of the Zoom session. 

Then the majority of the workshop will be spent conducting an actual retrospective. 

The workshop will conclude with recommendations for conducting future retrospectives.

In this workshop, a trainer will facilitate a retrospective for the team so they can see how to run one successfully. 

This workshop is perfect for: 

• Teams struggling to get valuable feedback in retrospectives and reviews
• Scrum Masters and product owners whose teams are frustrated with (and tempted to skip) retrospectives
• Teams that simply list completed tasks during a review—failing to engage stakeholders.

They’ll learn how to: 

• Avoid stale retrospectives 
• Highlight areas for improvement during a retrospective and act on them
• Elicit actionable feedback in reviews—feedback that will help teams build better products

At the end of this session, teams will understand the importance of retrospectives and have a tool kit of techniques to increase engagement.
 

Description:

We estimate product backlog items so that product owners can better prioritize the product backlog and teams can predict how much they’ll deliver by given dates. Story points—abstract, relative measures of effort—can lead to more accurate plans, but many teams struggle with them at first. Our estimating workshop is tailored to meet the needs of the one to three participating teams. A typical workshop begins with an educational section devoted to topics selected during a pre-course call. Common topics include:

• Understanding the subtle but critical relationship between story points and time
• Learning the four factors that determine an estimate
• Establishing a baseline that can be used for all later estimates
• Triangulating estimates to improve accuracy
• Estimating with Planning Poker® and Affinity Estimation

This workshop is perfect for: 

• Teams that need to improve their ability to accurately predict what can be delivered when
• Teams suffering from different understandings of what a story point is
• Teams that want to provide estimates and plans the organization can trust

At the end of this session, teams will understand what story points are and how to use them to estimate more accurately. They will also estimate some of their actual product backlog items—and those estimated items can be used as a baseline for future estimates.

Description:

Assess the current state of your organization using a proprietary Elements of Agile® framework that gives recommendations on the most promising areas for improvement.

Description:

During a release planning workshop, we help you turn an estimated product backlog into a release plan that’s useful for making decisions.

By the end of the workshop you will have:

• A plan looking 3–6 months ahead, and possibly further
• A plan on which you can base decisions
• An understanding of how planning changes when creating a fixed-date, fixed-scope, or fixed-price plan
• The best estimate of a team’s velocity range
• An understanding of how reliable the team members’ estimates are
• Possible action steps to improve your teams’ estimates
• Confidence in how to communicate about the plan with leaders and stakeholders

This workshop is perfect for:

• Product owners, Scrum Masters, coaches, or managers who are being asked to create and commit to plans

This workshop is most effective after a team has estimated product backlog items with our help in a guided Estimating Workshop

Description:

Backlog refinement is the act of ensuring the product backlog is well maintained. High priority items should be small, relatively well understood and achievable in a single iteration.

Agile teams typically conduct product backlog refinement meetings once per iteration—or shorter meetings weekly—to ensure high-priority product backlog items are ready to be brought into the next sprint.

Our backlog refinement workshop is tailored to meet the needs of the participating teams, which can number one to three. A typical workshop begins with an educational section devoted to topics selected during a pre-course call. Common topics include:

• Understanding how much detail is appropriate
• Understanding who is responsible for adding detail
• The purpose of estimating product backlog items
• How to know when an item is ready for a sprint
• How to stop spending so much time in backlog refinement
• When to do backlog refinement

Each three-hour, interactive backlog refinement workshop is led by an experienced Mountain Goat Software mentor.

At the end of this session, participants will be able to refine backlog items much more quickly with less disagreement over how much detail is appropriate. Participants will also be able to plan improvements to clean up messy product backlogs and ensure they remain in good shape.

This workshop is perfect for:

• Teams who spend too much time in product backlog refinement Teams and product owners who disagree on how much detail should be included before a sprint starts
• Teams whose product backlogs are a mess and need help improving them. We helped a company with over 2 million backlog items; we can help with yours.

Description:

Create Clear, Consistent Stories Across Teams in Just Two Days

When you combine a Better User Stories course with a Story-Writing Workshop, teams gain a solid understanding of what makes a good user story, and then practice these skills in a collaborative setting. Teams will:

• Develop a shared understanding of user story best practices.
• Immediately apply and reinforce their learning through practical exercises.
• Receive feedback and guidance from experienced instructors to refine their approach.

Better User Stories

Teams will first learn advanced techniques for working with user, job, and technical stories including splitting, adding appropriate amounts of detail, story mapping, and adding acceptance criteria.

• Improve collaboration with a process for creating consistent, well-written stories
• Spend less time writing, refining and splitting stories
• Satisfy stakeholders by more predictably and consistently delivering value every sprint

Story-Writing Workshop

From there, teams will build on what they’ve learned and improve their stories practically by working on items on their own product backlog. An experienced trainer will work with teams to help them:

• Quickly write and refine user, job and technical stories that team members and stakeholders understand.
• Eliminate delays and start building faster, by ensuring stories have the appropriate amount of detail added at the right time.
• Work confidently with stakeholders to discover their unstated but important needs

By the end of both sessions, teams can write stories that are clear, consistent, and deliver what customers really want.