Net Objectives has been a leader in Lean and most of the popular methods of Agile, including XP, Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe®. We still support these methods; however, we now offer advanced methods based on the next generation of Lean and Agile: Flow. If you are not satisfied with what you've been getting with Scrum, Kanban, SAFe®or LeSS, we can both explain why and take you further. 

Net Objectives offers an extensive set of services, workshops and resources.

	Assessments Before starting a new way of working it is important to understand where you are. We can also include basic management workshops with this.		Training for developers and testers From test-first to emergent design, we’ve got you covered. We are leaders in design patterns, Test-Driven Development, Acceptance-Test Driven Development and Agile architecture and have workshops in all of these topics. Most of our courses are delivered by authors who wrote the book on these topics.
	Agile at scale (with or without SAFe) We have been doing Agile at scale since 2006. Although we are contributors to SAFe® and were once gold partners, and our CEO was even the first non-SAFe SPC trainer, the difference in ease and effectiveness of our approach (FLEX) and SAFe is so great now that we don’t offer out of the box SAFe training. Our way is better.		Team Tune-ups We have found that most teams get trained in Scrum or Kanban. Teams need a bit of both. We help you do Team Agility better by seeing your teams’ challenges and providing solutions for them. If you're interested in this, please contact Al Shalloway.
	SAFe® Tuneups We have been finding more and more small to mid-sized companies adopting SAFe even though it is more complex than necessary for them. We can also help development groups within large SAFe organizations with our Lean Portfolio and Product Management approach. Regardless of where you are with SAFe, if you are looking to see how to improve what you're doing, we can help. If you're more interested in effectiveness than following SAFe by the book, we can help. Please contact Al Shalloway.		Team Agility (Scrum/Kanban) Role & Team Training Scrum and Kanban are the most popular methods out there. However, our experience is a blend of the two based on Lean is the best way to go. As thought leaders in both we can help you find what you need. We also offer an on-the-job, online workshop for ScrumMasters and Kanban coaches to take people from initial 2-3 day workshops to true mastery. By using scaled learning techniques cost is kept to a fraction of normal classes while providing significantly more breadth and depth.

If you are looking for a partner to help you solve your challenges instead of someone to offer you their solutions, we're the people you're looking for.

Whether it's small to mid-scale Agile adoption of technology groups under 1000 people or top-quality team agility and team technical training, we believe it is important first to what what your challenges are before offering solutions. We have been thought leaders in a wide variety of topics including Lean-Agile, SAFe®, Scrum, XP, Kanban, design patterns, TDD, ATDD and more. Although we help companies who are using SAFe, we recommend a lighter weight aproach for organizations whose technology group is less than 1000 people. To learn more, see Using the Essence of SAFe at Small to Mid-scale. 

If you are looking at scaling Agile and don't quite feel comfortable with SAFe, LeSS or Spotify, we are definitely the folks to talk to.  Although we help clients with challenges with their SAFe adoption, we recommend a lighter weight approach for technology organizations for up to 1000 people. We were early contributors to SAFe and our CEO was the first SPCT not part of Scaled Agile Inc.  But as SAFe as grown we feel it has grown overly complex for any organization beyond truly large scale. As much experience as we have in SAFe (see the case study we led), we prefer to use a Lean-Agile approach we call FLEX (see a case study here). If you are not sure whether you should use SAFe, check out Deciding If and How to Use SAFe at Small to Mid-scale with FLEX.

If you are considering training or coaching, we invite you to a free 30 minute consultation.  Contact us to make a request.

Our goal is to help you achieve Business Agility

Your energies on improvement should be about increasing your ability to deliver value to your customers quickly, predictably, sustainably, and with high quality. Business Agility creates the context within which your teams can innovate and be more efficient by aligning them around the true goal of value delivery across the organization, not merely effective teams.

There are several paths available to companies to take. But you need to start with identifying both what your goals are as well as the roadblocks in your way. No one size fits all and without an understanding of your desired endgame and a roadmap to fulfill it you are likely not going to make a successful choice for the best path. Fortunately, patterns of adoptions exist and can be used to create a roadmap in a surprisingly short period of time.

By using Lean-Thinking as a guide, we show you how to create initiatives based on your strategies. These initiatives guide the work being done by focusing on quick delivery of value that can be realized by your customers. By focusing on high value in a short time, alignment across the organization increases and provides feedback to help the organization stay on track. Lean provides the overall umbrella within which Agile teams can collaborate together.

The benefits of Business Agility

Our goal is to help you become self-sufficient quickly and sustainably

Our goals are to start you on a path that will lead you to significant improvement in your ability to deliver high value to your customers in a quicker and more cost effective manner. Our role is to be the “point of the spear” so to speak. We encourage train-the-trainer approaches so you can become more effective and even grow your own people. We accomplish this by using advanced training techniques such as scaled learning and back of the room training that have been around for decades but have not been readily adopted by the Agile Consulting industry. Scaled learning enables entire development groups (up to 100 peopl) to be taught together. This improves effectiveness of the workshops because collaboration is a key part of Agile... and people learn in a collaborative manner.

For roles such as the team-coach (e.g., Scrum Master), we provide on-line training that can accommodate hundreds of Agile coaches learning in an on-the-job manner over time. For the cost of one embedded coach you can bring hundreds of team coaches from novice to advanced in a matter of months. All of our workshops center around the actual work that is needed, not just discussions about what the end result should look like. 

Other services

There is more value created with overall alignment than with local excellence. Edwards Deming

Often reducing batch size is all it takes to bring a system back into control. Eli Goldratt

How we do it

We attend to patterns of adoption that lead to success or failure. There is no one size fits all, but what’s needed to succeed, even for companies in different industries, is surprising similar. The combination of Lean with Agile provides an overall view to improve collaboration while increasing the efficiency of the teams. Lean provides the eyeglasses, so to speak, on how to do this.

A quick assessment of how a company is doing on the dozen or so steps required for success enables us to see where to start. The outcomes required are clear from patterns of adoption gleamed from 20 years of experience with Lean-Agile methods. The steps required to achieve these goals are readily tailored for your organization.

By attending to the identification of truly valuable work and how to realize it in small chunks, your organization tends to both naturally improve. By creating visibility on your work flow each improvement provides guidance to the next.

Our advanced workshop styles based on the latest scaled learning methods enable us to deliver high-impact, cost-effective workshops to large numbers of teams and their coaches. We also provide a support system to help teams to continue learning after the initial workshops.

We help you become self sufficient by providing train-the-trainer programs for bringing your teams and Agile coaches up to speed. This is where the bulk of the cost of transformation programs are and too much of the cost is often spent on outside consultants with little internal staff improvements to show for it.