Description:

These two courses cover the fundamental principles of Scrum. Both courses are suitable for all team members including Scrum Masters and product owners.

Certified ScrumMaster®

A two-day class taught by one of our Certified Scrum Trainers, the Certified ScrumMaster course covers the fundamental principles of Scrum as well as detail about the different roles, meetings, and artifacts. Despite the name, it's perfect for anyone who wants to understand Scrum, not only ScrumMasters.

Working on a Scrum Team

Based on the content of our popular Certified ScrumMaster course, Working on a Scrum Team differs by being entirely configurable. 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 estimating and less on the daily scrum, you can easily make this the course for you.

Description:

In this two-day course you'll dive deep into the advanced skills you need to be a valuable Scrum Master including coaching, facilitation, and the day-to-day techniques that build strong teams. This goes beyond foundational learning and gives you much more nuanced skills that you’ll come to rely on in real life.

It includes pre-workshop video lessons to complete before the live class. You'll then have two days of live, online lessons and group discussions as well as breakout group exercises and individual exercises. You will be expected to participate in all exercises, as well as be prepared to do research and present your thoughts and findings to the class.

With this course you can

• Use advanced facilitation skills to improve communication between the team, product owner, and stakeholders
• Overcome resistance and skepticism with practical coaching techniques
• Motivate a team so that members actually want to achieve goals together
• Stand out from other Scrum Masters and showcase your value as a specialist. 

Course Prerequisites

• Hold a CSM designation with the Scrum Alliance (your certification does not need to be active at the time you take the A-CSM course)
• Demonstrate 12 months of work experience as a Scrum Master within the last five years

Description:

This course is for anyone who needs to answer the question: 

“How much can be delivered… by when?”

If you’re working on contract-development or high-visibility projects, it’s critical to tell bosses, clients, and customers what can be delivered—and when. 

But this isn’t easy when: 

• Stakeholders often have unrealistic expectations (and don’t believe you when you say something isn’t possible)
• Teams get confused by story points and struggle to estimate accurately and quickly
• It’s not easy to plan for what you don’t know - some requirements may be hidden at the point of planning 

This course shows you how to solve those problems. 

You’ll learn proven estimating approaches in an easy-to-understand way so you can: 

• Guide any team to estimate quickly and accurately
• Tackle risk and uncertainty upfront - and plan accordingly
• Communicate plans with confidence - answering questions and managing expectations

In just one day you can create accurate, agile plans for fixed scope, fixed date, and fixed everything projects. 

This course is ideal for agile leaders at the team or group level including: 

• Technical leads
• Team leads
• Scrum Masters
• Product owners
• Product managers
• Agile coaches

The course is intermediate. If you’re new to agile, you can still benefit from this course as long as you are familiar with iterations, product backlogs, velocity, and backlog items such as user stories. 

Read the Course Outline below for more details.
 

Description:

A great product begins with a great product backlog. User stories are by far the most common way of writing product backlog items, used by an increasing number of agile teams.

This course will help participants learn solutions to some of the most common problems with user stories and product backlogs. You will finish the course with known, proven techniques to overcome your current challenges, from spending too much time splitting stories to adding too much detail to managing the need for a requirements document.

During the course, participants will work on product ideas or features you provide. Or they can work on ones we’ve designed to maximize shared learning and bring out the subtle challenges teams can face. During the course, participants can also identify new products to work on throughout the day. This flexibility ensures they are always working on relevant ideas.

Participants will practice conducting a story-writing workshop and will learn how to create a story map to improve communication with stakeholders and to uncover user needs earlier—so last-minute requirements don’t derail a project.

The Better User Stories course goes beyond user stories to give participants practice writing job stories and technical stories, two exciting approaches that can immediately improve a team’s backlog-writing skills.

Knowing how much detail to include (and how early to add it) is a vital skill for agile team members to develop. Adding too much detail too early wastes precious time that could be used on higher priority features. Adding too little detail or adding it too late can jeopardize delivery. Through this course, participants learn simple questions to ask that will get them the right amount of detail every time.

Participants will learn how to split stories so that each can fit within an iteration. Our SPIDR story-splitting framework, taught in this class, will give participants a reliable, repeatable way to split any story.

After taking this course, teams will spend more time building features that deliver the most value to stakeholders each iteration.

Description:

Taught by one of our Certified Scrum Trainers, this two-day course is appropriate for new product owners, aspiring product owners, and analysts. Here, we fully equip participants with the knowledge and skills they need to excel.

The course begins with a Scrum overview, introducing the roles of a Scrum team and how products are developed using sprints.

Participants learn the responsibilities, characteristics, and different environments in which a product owner may work. They will practice five techniques for creating and communicating a clear, elevating goal that promotes team commitment and focus.

The product backlog is a central component of every product owner’s work. So they are equipped to write product backlog items for any product, course participants gain experience with user, job, and technical stories. We also cover story mapping, which can help engage stakeholders so that user needs are discovered early—avoiding the late surprises that can derail projects.

Product owners will go beyond knowing what to build, into ensuring features are developed in the optimal order, using the multiple prioritization techniques they’ll practice in this course.

Participants will learn how to produce accurate fixed-date and fixed-scope plans, enabling better decision-making throughout the organization.

Following the successful completion of this course, each participant will become a Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Product Owner.