Train Your Agile Team Together!
Our company was involved in XP and agile development for many years, and because of this success, we started providing agile team training in 2009. We found there was a lot of Certified Scrum Master and related training but not a lot of Agile team member training.
This knowledge gap was creating frustration. So our agile team training course was designed to fill this gap with specific agile training for the entire team. In training, we defined roles between team members, product owner and scrum master and how they work together to make an effective team.
The other thing we noticed was the training available did not really prepare participants to be effective when they were back in their work environment.
Because of these gaps, we developed the Agile Team Boot Camp, or simply the Agile Team Training scenario-based workshop. Our goal was to create a two-day workshop that combined theory with several real-world, hands-on exercises that included all parts of the Sprint, so that when you get back to your work, you and your team can be successful.
We worked IBM Canada at first to provide the training in an open enrollment format, but that was not successful. What we learned was it was best taught privately to teams either starting a new project or those looking to refocus their skills.
Results from Agile Training
The results have been impressive, and we are very proud of this course. When clients take the class, the Net Promoter Scores are always over 60% which is very high.
Five Benefits of Agile Team Training
Course design
When we started providing the training, we also hired an adult learning professional who provided the course design and andragogy skills to build a really good course, one that we could be proud of and one which we knew people would learn from.
Many Agile courses are designed, so you realize you also need Agile coaching and will put you into a sales funnel, not our Agile team training; it’s designed so you will learn and be able to do adopt Agile when you return to your work.
Agile Instructors
I know that everyone says their instructors are the best, and we understand that. However, what makes working with Scrum Masters different is the instructors are not actually full-time instructors. The trainers are senior software delivery people who work for other companies and take a few days off to do training part-time.
This means that when you ask a question in training, the answer you get will be based on theory and practical experience. The real-world experience of the instructors makes all the difference in the world, and we see this reflected in the comments on the end-of-course surveys.
Simulation-Based
The hands-on simulation literally makes all the difference in how well participants learn. Our approach is to provide an agile-related simulation starting from the moment the course begins until the last retrospective. In as much as we can, we run the training as an agile scrum project.
The simulations we have created cover the software delivery life-cycle and a typical project however, we have also created simulations for other knowledge domains, including apartment construction, health care and sales.
Team Training Compresses the Tuckman Ladder
While agile team training is primarily about teaching agile and scrum, it seems that it also has a significant amount of agile coaching as well. The Tuckman’s Ladder is a tool project managers us to understand and identify team development. It includes five stages of team development: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning.
Most project management methodologies recognize the Tuckman Ladder Model, but not all apply it in scrum training. One of the benefits of an agility framework and ways to scale agile is the team. In agile project management, we need to accelerate the team as much as possible through the storming phase of the Tuckman Ladder as quickly as possible.
Quickly find your best way of working
Our Agile team training is focused on teaching mostly Scrum, which is used by many software development organizations and was made popular by the Scrum Alliance and their certification course. Scrum is a great starting point.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that Scrum is only one manifestation of the Agile Manifesto, which was created in 2001. The Agile Manifesto has four values and twelve agile principles, and for many people, it’s the North Star that guides their adoption of Agile. The Manifesto was the North Star for the creation of Scrum, and it can be your North Star for how you create an agile way of working for you and your organization.
What our firm does know from our client’s experiences is organizations that closely align with the Manifesto have better outcomes than those that don’t. This is an important piece of information because it’s possible and actually preferred to use the Agile Manifesto as your North Star.
Click here to learn more about our agile team training.