Advanced Certified Scrum Master – 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 below

A-CSM Certification Requirements

The course meets the learning objectives for the Scrum Alliance Advanced Certified ScrumMaster (A-CSM) Certification Training. This class is one of the requirements to receive the A-CSM certification. To qualify, you must:

1. Have an active Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) certification with the Scrum Alliance.
2. Complete the class prework.
3. Attend and participate in the entire A-CSM class.
4. Document at least 12 months of experience as a ScrumMaster on your Scrum Alliance Profile. Note: If you do not meet this requirement, you can take the class and document the experience as you get it. You will not receive the certification until the documentation is complete.

The A-CSM is an advanced course on the path to certification as a Certified Scrum Professional. Read more about the A-CSM and Scrum Alliance Certification process or read all of the A-CSM Learning Objectives.

Course Facilitators

Jake Calabrese

Jake is a coach, trainer, and coach-consultant working to help organizations meet the promise of agile by going beyond agile practices to address culture challenges and help teams and leaders reach and maintain high performance. He has unique expertise as an Organization & Relationship Systems Certified Coach (ORSCC), a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST), Certified Enterprise Coach (CEC), and Professional Certified Coach (PCC), and as a trainer and coach for Agile Companies (helping non-software organizations use agile). Jake created the AgileSafari cartoon series to introduce humor into the more challenging issues we have to tackle. Jake uses ideas from various areas of thinking such as: Lean, professional coaching, neuroscience, psychology, facilitation, brain-based training, improvisation, agile, kanban, and scrum. Jake regularly speaks at local and national conferences including Mile High Agile, Scrum Gathering, and Agile Alliance Agile20xx conferences.

Cancellations and Transfers

Please email us to request a transfer or to cancel. Refunds will be provided with 30 days notice of cancellation. One-time transfer to a future class will be provided with 14 days notice, for free. Transfers requests with less than 14 days of notice or additional transfers (after the first transfer), will incur a $250 fee.