Advanced Lean-Agile Project Management for Scrum Masters

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Course Tabs

Course Overview

Summary:

Certification by Net Objectives. Net Objectives is not affiliated with the Scrum Alliance.This two day course teaches how to be a Scrum Master using Lean principles to manage an iteration as well as increase visibility of the team's process to management. Both are essential to improve efficiency of the team and to include corporate management to allow for changes needed to remove impediments to the team.

Target Audience:

Management

Team Agility

Transitioning to Agile

Workflow

Primary Audience:

Software developers, analysts, and project managers who want to understand how to make their Scrum teams more effective.

Learning Objectives:

How to be a Scrum Master whose team works efficiently
By learning how to manage the workflow of your team, you can help them be more efficient as well as move them into a mode of continuous process improvement more quickly
How to work with management so they can help your team become more effective
While basic Scrum tends to insulate teams from management, Lean-Scrum helps managers understand how the team works from a business perspective. This aligns management with the team - making them an ally in improving the team's methods
How to lead your team into continuously improving their process
Scrum requires teams to learn. This requires the Scrum Master to be a facilitator in this learning. Studies have shown that focusing on workflow instead of individual, or even team performance, lowers fear and accelerates this.
To identify common Scrum Anti-Patterns and use Lean principles to build on what others have learned
There is not enough time to learn from your own mistakes - you need to learn from the mistakes of others
The essence of Kanban Software Engineering
While you may want to continue with Scrum, learning how to manage your work in process and explicitly define what works best for the team can result in significant quality and time to market improvements

The Lean Connection

You'll learn Scrum in the Context of Lean Principles
This certification course includes imparting an understanding of how Lean principles guide teams in the adoption of Scrum practices.
You can avoid many of the errors most new Scrum teams make by learning how Lean solves many basic questions:
- How do we determine the order and number of stories in our Sprint backlog to work on?
- How do we handle specialized or over-worked staff?
- What is the proper work flow for our stories?
- How can we ensure that the testers keep up with the developers?
- How can we manage dependencies with other teams?

Upon Graduation

As a result of successful completion of the program, students receive an extensive list of competencies that delineate the skills required for performing as a Lean Scrum Master. Every student is given access to our proprietary Professional Self-Assessment Tool to determine which of these competencies are understood. Students enjoy ongoing access to our valuable on-line learning resources, providing them the best and most complete curriculum to continue their education in comparison to any other Agile training provider. Upon earning a passing grade on the post-course Certification Competencies Exam, the student is granted their Professional Scrum Certificate by Net Objectives.
Net Objectives is not affiliated with the Scrum Alliance.

Full Description

Scrum's adoption rate has been nothing short of amazing. There have been many success stories of Scrum at the team and small group level. Many teams trying to expand Scrum beyond the team have hit considerable difficulties, however. At Net Objectives, we've studied both why Scrum works - see Challenging Why (not if) Scrum Works - as well as why Scrum fails - see Challenging Why (not if) Scrum Fails. This has enabled us to help teams go beyond the normal limits of Scrum.

Ken Schwaber, co-creator of Scrum, estimates that "75% of those organizations using Scrum will not succeed in getting the benefits that they hope for from it." Ken alludes to management accommodating the impediments to team productivity instead of removing them as the cause for this high failure rate. While this is true, it doesn't address the question of what those attempting to use Scrum need to know to solve these impediments instead of accommodating them. Why do some teams succeed while others fail? What do you need to succeed with Scrum? Our experience with Lean Software Development enables us to extend Scrum with an Enterprise view. This is not scaling Scrum, which is still a bottom-up, with little management approach. Ours is a top-down, bottom-up approach that includes management as well as team. It also enables starting Scrum with significantly larger groups than Ken suggests. Incorporating Lean-Thinking into the Scrum process enables us to regularly start off groups of 50-70 people with great success - because we provide Lean-Thinking that deals with the issues that many accommodate without this knowledge.

This course is designed for Scrum Masters and other experienced Scrum/Agile practitioners that are attempting either to improve Scrum at the team level, or to those that are trying to scale Scrum to larger groups. This course will help those working to remove those impediments that Scrum surfaces, but doesn't give much in the way for removing them. In particular, we have found that management is needed to make the organizational changes necessary to successfully implement Scrum beyond a few teams. Lean-Thinking provides a way to have management provide leadership and coaching to self-organizing teams. We also introduce new Lean concepts such as Kanban Software Engineering which provides alternative practices to Agile teams where Scrum may not easily apply.

Lean-Thinking provides a bigger vision that allows different parts and roles of the organization to align with each other. Ironically, basic Scrum tends to insulate teams from management - the very people that are needed to facilitate Scrum's growth through the enterprise. While Scrum gives methods to provide management with the results of the team's work, its core methods provide little insight into how the team is working. Our experience has shown that without proper guidance, most new Scrum teams make the same mistakes. This is due to Scrum's value-practice oriented approach instead of including the principles on which it is based.

At Net Objectives, we have found that Lean-Thinking can be tremendous help to both of these issues. Lean provides a corporate wide view that can help management discover how they can help their team's performance. Lean-Thinking also provides questions to ask and thinking-tools to help solve them with that can greatly speed up the adoption of Scrum in new teams.

In addition to solving these particular problems, Lean provides a set of principles which enables teams to find solutions to their challenges more readily. Many organizations are trying to implement Agile methods across the enterprise. The challenge with this is that practices only apply in particular contexts. One needs an understanding of the principles underneath these practices to best define them for the situation a team is in. This course provides a starting point for Scrum Masters to look at how to apply principles to assist in the definition of the practices they need.

This course teaches people already proficient with Scrum how to be an effective Scrum Master taking advantage of basic Lean-Thinking.

Certification by Net Objectives. Net Objectives is not affiliated with the Scrum Alliance.

Prerequisites

Recommended Prerequisites:

Students need to meet one of the following criteria:

taken any Net Objectives Scrum related courses (team, product owner or Scrum Master Certification)
taken the CSM course from the Scrum Alliance
been using Scrum for 6 months