Advanced Certified ScrumMaster (A-CSM) – Agile Facilitation

When working in organizations, we often hear the question, “How do we help our teams improve?” Facilitation skills play a crucial role in this process. They help in more subtle and lasting ways than using positional power to tell people what to do. One of the critical challenges is learning how to help bring people together to deliver value without taking ownership. Bringing people together goes beyond getting consensus. Getting to collaboration means tapping into the knowledge and wisdom of the entire team.

Advanced Certified Scrum Master® (A-CSM℠) – Agile Facilitation helps ScrumMasters and other Agile leaders with the real day-to-day challenges of helping teams and organizations grow and improve. Throughout the course, you will use hands-on, engaging exercises to learn and expand your knowledge of how to:

  • Facilitate better dialogue between the Product Owner, team members, customers, stakeholders, and executives.
  • Respond confidently when encountering resistance to change, lack of engagement, low motivation, and people’s unavailability.
  • Troubleshoot agile challenges and issues – in ways that create more learning.
  • Increase engagement to encourage greater accountability, commitment, and buy-in.
  • Have valuable agile scaling conversations.

Throughout this course, you will work through exercises based on common agile and organizational challenges. You will have the opportunity to design and facilitate sessions, assess and explore conflict models, assess areas for your own personal development (which is critical for leaders), and experience a live professional coaching session to begin to understand the power of professional coaching for leaders and ScrumMasters.

Who Should Attend

Typical attendees include ScrumMasters, manages, agile coaches, project managers, product owners/managers, facilitators, and agile team members.

We welcome anyone who wants to level up their facilitation skills or incorporate new leadership approaches, including:

  • Leaders and others in the organization who are looking for ways to tap into more of their people’s knowledge
  • Anyone who wants to explore new approaches and concepts to help improve as a leader
  • Those interested in learning how to use facilitation techniques to increase team engagement
  • Individuals who understand the basics of scrum and want to look at root cause issues behind surface level challenges
  • People with an interest in improving themselves so they are not – inadvertently – the impediment to progress

Learning Objectives

  • Understand how facilitation helps leaders achieve high-performance teams
  • Explain the value of facilitation and all aspects involved in great facilitation (and learn why it is not the same as ‘leading the meeting’)
  • Examine common facilitation challenges to improve your results
  • Analyze challenges and break assumptions to identify the real issues slowing you and your team’s down
  • Identify key aspects of what it means to be a team leader and how you can leverage those skills
  • Discover what drives your team towards shared ownership
  • Define what it means to be a high-performance team and factors to focus on to help teams improve

  • Practice designing, facilitating, and evaluating several events using multiple facilitation tools and techniques
  • Explore key scrum challenges and gain techniques to deal with topics such as conflict, listening, collaboration, and decision making
  • Recognize various scaling approaches and discuss when to scale
  • Observe and evaluate the differences between coaching and other approaches
  • Evaluate how engineering principles and practices can help teams collaborate and deliver value
  • Learn new ways to improve how you listen, how you can stop blocking your listening, and techniques to have hard conversations

What to Expect

We take training and learning seriously, whether in-person or virtual, and respect the investment of both time and money you are making to advance your skills. We have significant experience creating engaging and valuable training experiences and believe in building instructor-led sessions that don’t rely on pre-recorded video or extensive slides.

Whether you choose in-person or virtual instruction, you can expect:

  • Brain-friendly, experiential training to dramatically increase learning and retention. Our aim is a class that’s extremely engaging, interesting, and applicable, taught by instructors practiced in neuroscience-based training methods.
  • Color, in-depth printed workbooks provided for all students. For virtual courses, we ship worksbooks direct to your home (or other location).
  • Learning canvasses, interactive discussions, and answers to reality-based questions beyond the theory.
  • Opportunities for challenging work throughout the course that focus on your real-world situations.
  • In-depth engagement with your instructor and fellow attendees. If you are looking for a dry lecture (or to watch your instructor click through endless slides), this class is NOT for you!

We’re happy to walk you through a live training session to illustrate how we teach and answer any questions.  We offer this course publicly and privately for your organization. Currently, public classes are running virtually to accommodate people from multiple locations. If you are interested in a private class for your organization, please contact us to discuss options.

Details

Length, Level & Credit

  • Length: 2-Days + prework
  • Level: Intermediate
  • Course Credit:
    • 16 PMI PDUs
    • 16 Scrum Alliance® SEUs
    • Qualified to apply for the Scrum Alliance – Advanced Certified ScrumMaster (A-CSM)

Prerequisites

  • Anyone interested in learning these practices and ideas with a mindset open to new concepts (skeptical is still okay as long as you are open)
  • For the A-CSM Certification, see the Certification Requirements sidebar

Certification Requirements

A-CSM Certification requires a CSM as well as 12 months of experience.
Read More→

Get Started Now

  • Contact us to schedule a time for us to answer any questions you have or to discuss private training classes for your organization.
  • Sign up for a public class using the links below (or join the waitlist if we don’t have a class scheduled that meets your needs).

Upcoming Events

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Interested in future dates for this class?

We schedule some workshops based on demand, so please add your name to our Waitlist. Adding your name to our waitlist will allow us to notify you when we schedule one. This allows us to gauge interest and schedule a course sooner.