Agile Facilitation Training (with A-CSM)

We often hear the question, “How do we help our teams improve?” when working in organizations. 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.

Agile Facilitation (with A-CSM) 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.
• 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.

This course is designed for anyone who

• Wants to explore new approaches and concepts that help them improve as a leader
• Is interested in learning how to use facilitation techniques to increase team engagement
• Understands the basics of scrum and wants to look at root cause issues behind surface level challenges
• Has 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
• Examine common facilitation challenges to improve your results
• Dispel common servant leadership myths to avoid common leadership errors
• Identify what drives you as a team leader
• Discover what drives your team towards shared ownership
• Define what it means to be a high-performance team
• 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

What to Expect

We take training and learning seriously and take your decision to spend time advancing your skills and improving yourself seriously. As such, we use the latest training approaches and techniques, and bring energy and fun, to ensure you have the best possible experience and learn as much as possible.

• Brain-based training to dramatically increase learning and retention (all instructors are Certified in Training From the Back of the Room training)
• Expect to be challenged and look at ways you need to change to help others improve
• Opportunities throughout the course to focus on your real-world situations
• Advanced and cutting-edge skills and techniques to deal with the specific challenges you are facing
• In-depth engagement with your instructors and fellow attendees. If you are looking for a dry lecture, this class is NOT for you!
• Interactive, fun, and experiential learning – increasing safety and retention – laughing helps learning
• Access to an online community of course alumni to support your continued learning

Who Should Attend

This course welcomes anyone who wants to level up their facilitation skills and techniques or is interested in bringing new approaches to their leadership style, including:

• ScrumMasters, agile coaches, product owners, product managers
• Facilitators, agile team members
• Leaders and others in the organization who are looking for ways to tap into more of their peoples’ knowledge

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.

Details

Course Length: 2-days + pre-reading assignments

Level: Intermediate

Pre-Requisites to Qualify for A-CSM via Scrum Alliance

• Have an active CSM with the Scrum Alliance
• 12 months experience as a ScrumMaster (or similar role)

Note: Anyone may attend, but you need the above items to receive the A-CSM.

Course Credit

• 16 PMI PDUs
• 16 Scrum Alliance SEUs
• Qualified for to apply for the Scrum Alliance – Advanced Certified ScrumMaster (A-CSM) *see Pre-Requisites.

Certifications

• Scrum Alliance

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.