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Feb 3, 2020
Excellent Class - Worth Taking
A fantastic 2-day training. You will learn how to incorporate the practices and metrics of Kanban into your Scrum framework to achieve a better cadence and increase the predictability of delivering value to the stakeholders. In case you happen to work in an organization that exhibits a preference for evolving in a structured way, this course is a must. A very good blend of theory and practical simulations.
Louise-Philippe Carignan is an excellent instructor. He masters this topic and is very passionate about it. Very helpful and able to inspire and motivate.
Alexandra Ursea
Jan 28, 2020
A must for anyone working with the Scrum Framework
Integrating Kanban's strategies for optimizing the flow of value throughout product development just makes sense, period. Add to that meaningful metrics that improve the overall predictability of your process, what more could you ask for...It's a natural evolution for Scrum.
Louis-Philippe's approach of meaningful discussions and practical simulations make it easy to understand, and more importantly apply all the key concepts of this class. It was an enlightening class that I highly recommend...
Francis Calderisi
Jan 27, 2020
Excellente classe de Louis-Philippe
Excellente classe de Louis-Philippe. Il connais bien son sujet, et est très pertinent. Réussi toujours à nous faire comprendre avec des exemples de cas réels. Il n'hésite pas à nous faire focuser sur ce qui compte, en nous écartant de nos cas d'exception. Il suis bien le rythme du groupe, et prends le temps de nous faire comprendre tant que ce n'est pas claire.
J'ai adorer qu'il nous fasse comprendre comment on peut optimiser le famework Scrum en ajouter les statégies du Kanban.
Francis
Jan 23, 2020
Formation inspirante !!
Excellente maitrise de son sujet; excellent tact; un bon investissement de suivre cette formation avec Louis-Philippe.
MARTIN FROMENT
Jan 20, 2020
Really helpfull for my work + great trainer
Really usefull for me who needed a good reset on kanban + scrum. I really like how the trainer approached the different subjects. I'm more into getting the knowledge and unlocking the necessary tools to improve my work, less about the certification (which is a great bonus, but a bonus nonetheless).
I think this trainer is like that as wel but he's flexible enough to answer the needs of the trainees. I'm saying this because some people are all about passing the test and less about aquiring the knowledge.
Great training and lots of fun and new connections!
Frederic Brochu
Jan 18, 2020
J’ai vraiment apprécié la formation PSK…
J’ai vraiment apprécié la formation PSK de 2 jours avec Louis-Philippe. J’ai aimé son style calme et posé et sa façon de bien expliquer la théorie tout en répondant aux interrogations des participants. Les différentes activités réalisées au cours de la formation ont permis d’éclaircir et d'assimiler rapidement tous ces nouveaux concepts.
Caroline G.
Nov 10, 2019
The class had a lot of information
The class had a lot of information, however we asked to mix some martial from the Kanban class and as a result I feel that we didn't get all the information about Nexus. Still, this was a choice we made. Going forward, I will resist mixing two types of classes into one.
Pros:
- Interactive class
- Interesting
- Teacher knows his material
- workshops were excellent
Cons:
- teacher was sticking to class martial too much, should expend on real life scenarios more and case studies.
- Impact Mapping would be better if we did it from scratch (without filling the blanks)
Overall, I left the class wanting more, so I started to read more, the teacher provided an excellent list of books, and links to follow up on, enough to keep me busy for a while. However, unfortunately, I didn't feel the class got me 100% ready for the assessment, topics on architecture, Sprint goals, Nexus+ were not fully covered in the class but the material provided covered it.
to make the class better, I would mix more scenario based situations and how to solve them.
I would like to acknowledge, that our group sometimes went off topic, and the teacher, was always pleasant and polite but sometimes should be more assertive.
Overall a good experience, and will recommend for more classes.
Mike Peretz
Oct 26, 2019
Required knowledge if you're a scrum master
Louis-Philippe partage l'information avec une grande justesse et générosité. Il le fait au rythme du groupe.
Je vous recommande cette formation car elle remet en perspective le cadre Scrum et permet d'optimiser un impact positif sur les équipes.
Hakime Bezza
Oct 12, 2019
Learned a lot thanks to Louis-Philippe.
Being an active PSM I since 2011, I learned a lot from this class and was able to add so much more to my toolbox. I came in with a few major challenges from my practice in mind, all answered with next steps to undertake. The balance between sharing, real examples, clear theory and practice through games was awesome.
The guides were also properly used as reassuring and supportive references. We ran the open assessment in an effective manner. I was also happy to having done it a few times prior. I hope to be able to pass the upcoming certification exam; thanks to LP for having prepared us so well.
Marco Miller
Jun 19, 2019
Awesome class!
Excellent trainer, He really focus on the understanding of each person. I really liked the concrete examples of integration into real project. I learned a lot of interesting concepts that i plan to use in the near future for my day to day job.
Samuel Joyal
Louis-Philippe's Certifications
Louis-Philippe's Bio
Louis-Philippe Carignan first discovered Agile while toying with test-driven development and continuous integration in 2004. He then encountered XP, Scrum and never looked back after. With 15 years of Agile experience, Louis-Philippe is a seasoned Agile trainer and consultant who can navigate from business agility all the way down to team agility. As a trainer, he has taught Scrum.org classes to more than 500 people over the years. As a consultant, he helps teams, departments, and SMBs achieve their business objectives through the help of Agile.
Spoken Languages
- French
- English
Courses taught by Louis-Philippe
See What My Students Say
Feb 3, 2020
Excellent Class - Worth Taking
A fantastic 2-day training. You will learn how to incorporate the practices and metrics of Kanban into your Scrum framework to achieve a better cadence and increase the predictability of delivering value to the stakeholders. In case you happen to work in an organization that exhibits a preference for evolving in a structured way, this course is a must. A very good blend of theory and practical simulations.
Louise-Philippe Carignan is an excellent instructor. He masters this topic and is very passionate about it. Very helpful and able to inspire and motivate.
Alexandra Ursea
Jan 28, 2020
A must for anyone working with the Scrum Framework
Integrating Kanban's strategies for optimizing the flow of value throughout product development just makes sense, period. Add to that meaningful metrics that improve the overall predictability of your process, what more could you ask for...It's a natural evolution for Scrum.
Louis-Philippe's approach of meaningful discussions and practical simulations make it easy to understand, and more importantly apply all the key concepts of this class. It was an enlightening class that I highly recommend...
Francis Calderisi
Jan 27, 2020
Excellente classe de Louis-Philippe
Excellente classe de Louis-Philippe. Il connais bien son sujet, et est très pertinent. Réussi toujours à nous faire comprendre avec des exemples de cas réels. Il n'hésite pas à nous faire focuser sur ce qui compte, en nous écartant de nos cas d'exception. Il suis bien le rythme du groupe, et prends le temps de nous faire comprendre tant que ce n'est pas claire.
J'ai adorer qu'il nous fasse comprendre comment on peut optimiser le famework Scrum en ajouter les statégies du Kanban.
Francis
Jan 23, 2020
Formation inspirante !!
Excellente maitrise de son sujet; excellent tact; un bon investissement de suivre cette formation avec Louis-Philippe.
MARTIN FROMENT
Jan 20, 2020
Really helpfull for my work + great trainer
Really usefull for me who needed a good reset on kanban + scrum. I really like how the trainer approached the different subjects. I'm more into getting the knowledge and unlocking the necessary tools to improve my work, less about the certification (which is a great bonus, but a bonus nonetheless).
I think this trainer is like that as wel but he's flexible enough to answer the needs of the trainees. I'm saying this because some people are all about passing the test and less about aquiring the knowledge.
Great training and lots of fun and new connections!
Frederic Brochu
Jan 18, 2020
J’ai vraiment apprécié la formation PSK…
J’ai vraiment apprécié la formation PSK de 2 jours avec Louis-Philippe. J’ai aimé son style calme et posé et sa façon de bien expliquer la théorie tout en répondant aux interrogations des participants. Les différentes activités réalisées au cours de la formation ont permis d’éclaircir et d'assimiler rapidement tous ces nouveaux concepts.
Caroline G.
Nov 10, 2019
The class had a lot of information
The class had a lot of information, however we asked to mix some martial from the Kanban class and as a result I feel that we didn't get all the information about Nexus. Still, this was a choice we made. Going forward, I will resist mixing two types of classes into one.
Pros:
- Interactive class
- Interesting
- Teacher knows his material
- workshops were excellent
Cons:
- teacher was sticking to class martial too much, should expend on real life scenarios more and case studies.
- Impact Mapping would be better if we did it from scratch (without filling the blanks)
Overall, I left the class wanting more, so I started to read more, the teacher provided an excellent list of books, and links to follow up on, enough to keep me busy for a while. However, unfortunately, I didn't feel the class got me 100% ready for the assessment, topics on architecture, Sprint goals, Nexus+ were not fully covered in the class but the material provided covered it.
to make the class better, I would mix more scenario based situations and how to solve them.
I would like to acknowledge, that our group sometimes went off topic, and the teacher, was always pleasant and polite but sometimes should be more assertive.
Overall a good experience, and will recommend for more classes.
Mike Peretz
Oct 26, 2019
Required knowledge if you're a scrum master
Louis-Philippe partage l'information avec une grande justesse et générosité. Il le fait au rythme du groupe.
Je vous recommande cette formation car elle remet en perspective le cadre Scrum et permet d'optimiser un impact positif sur les équipes.
Hakime Bezza
Oct 12, 2019
Learned a lot thanks to Louis-Philippe.
Being an active PSM I since 2011, I learned a lot from this class and was able to add so much more to my toolbox. I came in with a few major challenges from my practice in mind, all answered with next steps to undertake. The balance between sharing, real examples, clear theory and practice through games was awesome.
The guides were also properly used as reassuring and supportive references. We ran the open assessment in an effective manner. I was also happy to having done it a few times prior. I hope to be able to pass the upcoming certification exam; thanks to LP for having prepared us so well.
Marco Miller
Jun 19, 2019
Awesome class!
Excellent trainer, He really focus on the understanding of each person. I really liked the concrete examples of integration into real project. I learned a lot of interesting concepts that i plan to use in the near future for my day to day job.
Samuel Joyal
Upcoming Classes by Louis-Philippe
See all upcoming classesClasses Attended by Louis-Philippe
Latest Blogs by Louis-Philippe
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Louis-Philippe Carignan
This is a post explaining how to do throughput-driven sprint planning using throughput and Service Level Expectation (SLE).
Feb 17, 2020
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Louis-Philippe Carignan
If there is one trend that has surpassed Agile in our profession over the last five years, I would say DevOps would be a good culprit. As we’ve seen an explosion of tools to implement CI/CD in our Scrum teams, we’ve also seen some of our Agile practices being challenged by this new reality.
Dec 16, 2019
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Louis-Philippe Carignan
I’ve been teaching the class Professional Scrum with Kanban (PSK) for the last year now and I strongly believe parts of its content will send some of our current practices and books to the Agile museum.
Dec 10, 2019
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Louis-Philippe Carignan
The Professional Scrum with Kanban (PSK) course has now been out for more than 6 months at Scrum.org. As one of the first few trainers who wanted to teach this course when it came out, I find it is a great way to combine the Scrum framework with Kanban as a strategy to deliver value to your customer.
Jan 14, 2019
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Louis-Philippe Carignan
DevOps is all over the place nowadays. The toolset is exploding. Companies are offering a large variety of products to suit the needs of customers. Looking at Google Trends, the keyword devops has doubled in popularity in the last two years.
Acting as an Agile coach, I’ve been steadily working with DevOps teams for the last year where I’ve seen some downsides of being DevOps. Sorting through other blog articles, I didn’t find a lot of content on two downsides that I’ve witnessed with my teams. I thought I would share this experience to give readers another perspective to DevOps.
What is DevOps for us?
That’s a good question and it varies a lot depending on what you read. If only the founders of the term would have captured their definition in a manifesto (wink to Agile). For the rest of this article, our DevOps teams follow the mantra “You build it. You run it.”. They support the system they code. They are responsible for the entire lifecycle of the code. Once they start writing it, they know they will also debug it when it breaks in production.
Developer fatigue
While it is a thrilling experience to know that thousands of people are using your system, it is not as thrilling to get woken up in the middle of the night to handle a system failure. While the reader could say we should build more stability into our system to avoid this problem, this isn’t an overnight fix in our thriving startup that is ramping up more than 30 new hires in the last year months. Developers make mistakes like anybody else and these cause bugs in production.
In the meantime, our DevOps teams have to share call rotation as well as having a backup in case our first response team member is running into an issue. We’ve had people going out for a bike ride on a sunny Sunday morning turning back to their laptops as they had to debug code that had failed in production. We’ve even had in our interview process candidates asking how we handled call rotation as we presented our teams as DevOps.
User fatigue
It is great to have a continuous deployment train that can automatically push new features in production. It is not so great to read customer feedback telling us they are exhausted with learning new features every other month. Who would have thought! We were so happy to push features, automate our deployment process to speed up things that we completely forgot about the customer at the end of the production line.
I define User fatigue as customers who can’t keep up with new features. Features roll out just to frequently for a user to discover and adapt them to their current ways of working with the software. It might be hard for software developers to understand this as we are always in the gist of it. Think about field technicians or customer service representative that have a different relationship with software. Their main focus is not the piece of software we are passionately working on so their level of interest on new features isn't as high as our desire to deploy new features as soon as they are build.
I have experienced first-hand this user fatigue through the numerous releases of Visual Studio Code (VS Code). As I sometimes write a bit of code, I can open up the tool a few times per month. In the first few months back in early 2017, I was excited to get an indicator telling me a new version was available. I would read the long and descriptive readme file to discover how the tool improved. Two years later, I don’t really bother reading the file. There’s always a ton of new features. Animated gifs are there to speed up my learning. But I’m just to busy to take the time.
Conclusion
While I cannot neglect the tremendous value that the DevOps tooling brings to our profession, I would say that a well-educated decision about how you want to operate your DevOps teams is necessary.
Before jumping on the DevOps bandwagon, I would advise that your team ask itself the following questions to tackle some of the downsides of DevOps:
How will we respond to system failures in production when they occur outside office hours?
What are our delays to acknowledge this system failure? Do we let our customers know?
Do we have a procedure to find the root cause of the system failure to avoid the problem from happing again in production? Do we set an ETA on those post-mortems to force us to learn from system failures?
Do we have beta users who are more willing than others to opt-in to the frequent release of new features?
Nov 12, 2018
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Louis-Philippe Carignan
I have an important favor to ask to Scrum practitioners who are asking their team to commit themselves to their sprint backlog at sprint planning.
Oct 22, 2018
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Louis-Philippe Carignan
According to the Scrum guide, sprint retrospectives are "an opportunity for the Scrum Team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next Sprint."
In my early career as a Scrum Master, I used to follow this definition quite stricly. Time was taken to look for our problems and create improvement plans. Unfortunately, as I advanced in my role, I learned that people would get tired of always looking for ways to improve. Trying to dig deeper into problems, sometimes organisational, sometimes professional, would drag the team motivation down. On the other hand, just being told that they were good seemed to give better results. Surprisingly, it brought ideas as the mood of the meeting was positive. People felt good about themselves and worked toward getting better.
I've also found that positive retrospectives were better when they are started with an activity to launch conversations. Simply starting a positive retrospective by saying we will praise each other felt kind of awkward.
To initiate these conversations, I have found that the niko-niko calendar and the mood board were good instruments to articulate positive conversations.
The niko-niko calendar is a very well documented tool where you follow the mood of the team. Bernd Schiffer has a great post explaining it. It basically consists of tracking the team's feeling at every day of the iteration with smiley faces.
If you did not set in place such a tool, the mood board can be an alternative. The mood board is basically a graph where the X axis is the timeline of the project while the Y axis is the level of happiness. As this is a very scientific tool, notice how the top level of happiness is a big smiley face.
In the picture above, notice how each line is of a different colour. As I had multiple team members, and whom got on board at different moments of the project (removing other team members), we used a color for each person and the line would start at a different place for each person. I then asked people to recall positive events around this artifact.
In my example, we were in a slump around iterations 5 and 6. While we could have complained about what was going wrong around that time, the objective was to talk about positive interactions. So we started talking about how we got out of this slump. And praises started surfacing. John (the green line) underlined how the arrival of Martin #2 (the purple line) helped the project. And things just flowed for a while ... postitively.
There were no tangible action plan out of this meeting. Just good vibes because of our appreciation of each other. And sometimes, team moral is the thing to knock on during a retrospective.
Dec 1, 2015
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Louis-Philippe Carignan
In his book Good to Great, author Jim Collins asks the reader:
Do you have a "to do" list?
Do you also have a "stop doing" list?
He goes on by saying:
Those who built the good-to-great companies, however, made as much use of "stop doing" lists as "to do" lists. They displayed a remarkable discipline to unplung all sorts of extraneous junk.
With this in mind, I've decided to create my own personal "stop doing" list. With all those annual reviews, comments from previous clients or teams that I've coached, I have enough material to build it. To remind me often about things I have to stop doing, I've put it in front of my computer screen at work.
As a Scrum Master, it's always good to walk the talk. When I work with teams to find things they should stop doing, my own personal list demonstrate how I apply this technique to myself. If it's good for me, could it be useful for them?
Uneccessary question from readers: Did you ask your step-mom to provide more themes on this list?
May 11, 2015
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Louis-Philippe Carignan
When reading the role of the Scrum Master in the Scrum guide, one of the core competencies is to facilitate meetings. While in a meeting, a Scrum Master might want to visualize what the team is thinking or expressing. Or he might want to enhance the collaboration through an activity. Colored Post-It, markers, tape and planning poker cards are some of the things found in the Scrum Master toolbox. Just like powerful questions and active listening are tools a Scrum Master can use improve the effectiveness of a meeting, he also needs some physical material to synthesize or visualize what people are saying.
To make this possible, I used to carry this material around in a small cardboard box. Overtime, it wore down into pieces. As I have consulting gigs at different customers, it was not practical to carry around from one office to the other. I ended up using one of those reusable bag I picked up at Agile conferences. While it was better than the box, it was always a pain to search the bag for a marker or a bunch of Post-It.
I’ve (finally) found a great container to carry my stuff around: the tackle box.
It’s cheap. It’s robust (for an office environment). It doesn't break appart after a week. It has sections to separate your stuff. It can attract a conversation when you are seen as the dangerous Agile consultant. You quickly get identified as the guy who puts stuff on walls in a meeting. I would recommend it to anyone who has to carry stuff around and have been in the same situation I've described above.
For those living in Canada and like the idea, Canadian Tire sells the Plano tackle box for $14,99
Apr 4, 2015
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Louis-Philippe Carignan
A team that I work with decided one day to improve the general mood in the team. A member of the team (David) bought the Snakes & Ladders board game for the team. By playing the game, his goal was to counter pessimism that was generally flowing within the team. As negative remarks about the project plagued the team, David wanted to end this. This was his way of doing it.
As the goal of Snakes & Ladders is to be the first to reach the end of the board, the team added a few rules of their own. Team members choose their own pawn (notice Caillou, R2D2 Tintin rocket to the Moon). Each day, every member of the team has to role the dice in order to know how many steps he moves his pawn. If during that day, this team member would show pessimism, he would move backward by rolling the dice again. He could move backward as many times as he was being pessimistic about the project. On the other hand, he could only move forward once on each day.
To confirm a person was being pessimistic, two other team members had to validate the remark. Sarcasms were also considered pessimistic remarks while negative news (Ex: build break, tests failed) were considered facts and not negative remarks. On the other hand, complaining about these negative facts was considered pessimistic, hence rolling a backward move on the board.
Honestly, the rules fitted on an entire page while the other side of the page had rules on how to change the rules.
Who won? The team obviously! Ok, it’s the technical lead of the team who won but chasing away pessimism was the real win in this team.
Jan 31, 2015
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