Professional Agile Leadership - Essentials

Helping Leaders Understand their Role in Enabling Business Agility and Measuring Value to Enable Improvement and Agility

Being an agile organization requires senior leaders, middle managers, and agile team members to change the way that they organize their work, manage that work, and measure the results of the work. Agile teams cannot do this on their own; they need help from the entire organization. Changes in the way that people think and work are required driving improved results by having everyone's goals and ways of working aligned.

Moreover, with markets and customer needs constantly changing, organizations need information and evidence that helps them adapt quickly to new challenges and opportunities so that they can deliver greater value and achieve true business agility. Yet often organizations that use agile product development techniques use traditional management approaches, expecting leaders to set firm long-term goals and manage progress toward them with dashboards of static metrics.
 

The Professional Agile Leadership Essentials™ with Evidence Based Management™ (PAL-E + PAL-EBM) is a 3-day hands-on workshop that uses a combination of instruction and hands-on exercises to help managers and leaders of and within agile teams gain a strong understanding of how to best support, guide, and coach their teams to create the conditions for high-performance, and to guide their teams toward continuously improving customer outcomes, organizational capabilities, and business results. Evidence Based Management focuses on customer value and intentional experimentation to systematically improve an organization's performance and achieve their strategic goals.
 

• Module 1: Why Agile Matters
• Module 2: Developing People
• Module 3: Leaders Grow Agility
• Module 4: Measuring Agility
• Module 5: Challenges of an Agile Leader
• Module 6: Goals, Evidence, and Empiricism
• Module 7: Goals - Understanding Why
• Module 8: Evidence - Focusing on Value
• Module 9: Empiricism - Inspect and Adapt with EBM
• Module 10: Getting Really Started

The course also includes a free attempt at the globally recognized Professional Agile Leadership I (PAL I) and the Evidence Based Management (PAL-EBM) certification exams.
 

What you will learn

In this three day class attendees develop a deep understanding of the role that leaders play in creating the conditions for a successful agile environment and high-performing teams. Leaders and managers are critical enablers in helping their organizations be successful, yet the role of leaders and managers in an agile organization can be quite different from what they are used to. This workshop uses a combination of instruction and team-based exercises to help participants learn how to form and support agile teams to achieve better results, and how to lead the cultural and behavioral changes that organizations must make to reap the benefits of an agile product delivery approach.

Participants also learn what EBM is and how to apply it through hands-on, activity-based learning. Through a series of exercises participants learn techniques that support a more agile mindset:

• Use empiricism to set and achieve strategic goals, managing the unknown and complexity through experimentation and by adapting goals along the way
• Create a cultural environment that is required for high-performing teams, using clear goals, appropriate measures and trust to enable self-management and autonomy
• Shift the conversation away from measuring progress purely through team performance metrics, toward a focus on customer-centricity and improving customer outcomes
• Drive operational improvements by using four Key Value Areas (Unrealized Value, Current Value, Time to Market, and the Ability to Innovate) as lenses for evidence-based decision-making

What Others Say About This Course

• 41% of past participants indicate they started applying concepts learned in this class within 1 week after the class. Another 35% within 1 month after the class. That totals to 76%!
• When it comes to the concepts in this class having improved their work environment, their work culture, and their mindset, 81% indicated to agree to even strongly agree!
• And did this class improve their ability to deliver value to customers and stakeholders? 74% indicated this is absolutely the case!

And some statements:

• “Professional Agile Leadership. What's in a name? Steven brings it alive for a group of newbies. He's engaging and challenging the participants to measure their current state against Agile principles. Don't expect slides in this training. Put your laptop and smartphone away. It's a roller coaster of interactive discussions and group assignments to let you discover the compelling world of Agile Leadership." Erik M.
   
• "Steven is a deeply knowledgeable and affable Professional Scrum Trainer. Whilst working with Steven, I have been incredibly impressed with his insight and ability to generate simple yet powerful solutions to the everyday challenges that teams face. If you are looking for a professional who understands and is applies agility, then Steven should be the first person you should call. Cant wait to work with him again." Jay R.
   
• "You might want to buckle up and turn off your notifications, because Steven's trainings are not-to-miss-out-on. I've had the privilege to attend two trainings, the most recent one being the Agile Leadership Essentials. Steven as a trainer is highly engaging, challenges you as an attendee to make sure you get as much out of your investment as you possibly can. Steven, thank you once again for the interesting two day deep dive in leadership. Until next time!" Amber DH.

Course Learning Objectives

• Students will understand how agility can help you improve your teams' and organization's performance
• Students will learn the challenges teams face during an agile transformation and how to remove impediments
• Students will discover the shift in management style that a leader must make when going from traditional to agile ways of working, and to enable growing high-performing teams
• Students will understand the leader’s role in “self-managing” teams
• Students will learn how to assess and foster the team’s agile maturity
• Students will discover how to connect values (personal, team and Scrum values) and clear goals to develop high-performing teams
• Students will Identify how to measure the benefits and impacts of agility in your organization
• Students will understand the essential aspects of goals and measures and how they influence behaviors and an organization’s culture and values
• Students will be able to help organizations embrace empiricism as a leadership approach. Using experimentation to incrementally steer toward the organization’s goals
• Students will grow an appreciation for how goals and trust act together to enable autonomy, transparency, and value delivery
• Students will correlate market leadership and sustainability to curiosity, adaptation, and empiricism
• Students will understand how to use EBM and its Key Value Areas to focus measurements on improving market value and operational capabilities

Who should attend

The Professional Agile Leadership Essentials with Evidence Based Management course is designed for managers and other professionals in leadership roles who are responsible for the introduction and establishment of agile methods and techniques in an organization, who are accountable for growing high-performing teams,

• Leaders sponsoring an agile transformation or involved in the adoption of agility in their organizations
• Managers or leaders responsible for developing people on Scrum teams, growing them into high-performing teams
• Leaders of one or more Scrum Teams including Scrum Masters, Product Owners and other leaders on Scrum Teams
• Leaders who are responsible for the success of their product delivery programs or agile transformations and are seeking a means to measure and demonstrate that success
• Leaders who are looking for a framework that identifies improvement areas that increase their business agility, including their time to pivot to meet new challenges and deliver customer value
• Leaders who want to help their organization embrace empiricism and experimentation to find solutions for complex problems
• Leaders who want to articulate goals and measures in a way that fosters self-management and empower their teams to understand the connection between their work and the value their organization is providing and customer is receiving
• Leaders who want to be more effective in how they measure success by using agile measures rather than traditional measurement models (including the use of velocity)

As collaboration is a key factor in the success of any organisation, it is equally important that also Product Owners, Scrum Masters, and team members, understand the role management plays in enabling agility.

 

Format

You will work in small teams. You learn through team assignments, discussions and hands-on exercises.
Be ready to challenge and be challenged.
This course will be taught in English.

Why an In-Person workshop? The enhanced engagement, deeper understanding, and invaluable collaborative skills gained from in-person, interactive training significantly outweigh travel costs, offering a richer and more effective learning experience. It promotes real-time engagement and hands-on practice, essential for grasping complex concepts. This immersive approach not only deepens understanding but also facilitates lasting professional relationships, making it a more effective choice for those committed to mastering agile practices.

Prerequisites

You will make the most of the class if you:
 

• Have attentively read the Evidence-Based Management Guide (required).
• Have attentively read the Agile Manifesto (required)
• Took the Agile Leadership Open assessment, the Evidence Based Management Open assessment, and the Scrum Open assessment (recommended).
• Have an understanding of agile practices.
• Have been on or are closely involved in solving complex problems, such as (but not limited to), building or enhancing a product or service.
   

Note that this course is not an introduction to the Scrum Framework or to using Scrum. Attendees will get the most from this course though if they have been previously introduced to Scrum.
 

Assessment and Certification

• All participants completing the Professional Agile Leadership Essentials with Evidence Based Management course will receive a password to attempt both the Professional Agile Leadership I (PAL I) certification assessment and the Evidence Based Management (PAL-EBM) certification assessment. Class participants who attempt the assessments within 14 days of receiving their free password and do not score at least 85% will be granted a 2nd attempt at no additional cost.

• Students are able to claim Project Management Institute (PMI) PDU credits: 21 PDUs after attending a three-day Professional Agile Leadership Essentials with Evidence Based Management course.

• Please note that PMI PDUs are earned for course attendance and not for passing an assessment. Students can claim PDUs under PMI’s “Education courses provided by other third-party providers” category.

Steven, Your Trainer

I live to energise, encourage and inspire individuals and teams so they successfully overcome the challenges on their path, making them more complete humans.

Facilitating Scrum training allows me to do just that.

Want to know more? Check out

• my Scrum.org profile
• my LinkedIn profile

Why collaborate with Scrum.org

Scrum.org training provides a hands-on, activity-based learning experience using a consistent set of learning objectives around the world. Each course explores real-world challenges to help students apply what they learn in their roles once back at work.

On our path to becoming a Professional Scrum Trainer (PST), we had to prove an important number of years of Scrum experience. Once we applied, we went through an extensive process including: interviews, validation of knowledge, training approach, peer reviews and more.

The above combined, Scrum.org provides, according to us, the highest quality Scrum training and certified Professional Scrum Trainers (PSTs) to teach them.

We, as Professional Scrum Trainers, bring our own style, experience, and stories to the courses, using the same learning objectives as our basis so that all students are learning from the same solid basis.

We are a proud member of the Scrum.org Professional Training Network™(PTN). As PTN member we align with the Scrum Values and are committed to improving the profession of product delivery in part by providing Scrum.org training.

Need more info?

For additional information about this and our other Professional Scrum training modules you can contact Steven Deneir at steven@boostyourscrum.com or via 0032 477 26 93 18.
Visit our website at www.boostyourscrum.com.

Van Der Valk Hotel Brussels Airport