Upcoming Workshops

This workshop is meant for all those who would like to learn how to turn the big ship? How to make your team agile as a coach or as a scrum master or simply as a member of an agile team.

You have gone through multiple trainings and multiple workshops. You have earned certifications. You are inspired by the trainer still there is no agility anywhere in the organization.

After attending this course, you will learn the real meaning of servant leadership while diving deep into how they serve the team, business and organization. You will learn the difference of doing scrum, doing agile and being agile.

We will build the class together, we will have fun together, and we will lead the pack of agile coaches who would redefine the industry.

There are two parts of the workshops. The first part would train you in the fundamentals of agile, and scrum. The second part consists of 2 modules “Story Mapping” and “Elephant Carppacio” (1.5-hour each) out of 20 modules mentioned below. All of them will be interactive and filled with exercises, games and fun so that you could implement them at your workplace.

Attending this workshop would immediately change your thought process and the way you implement agile. You could start practical application the next day and would be better equipped to deal with situations that need agile response.

The intense interactive experience in this workshop is created especially by Shrikant and Ashok Singh (author of Agile in the New Economy). They have been instrumental in redefining agile workshops for a long time.

Together they have trained hundreds of people while continuously adding new examples and challenges that we face in the daily life.  In addition, this workshop has been designed to be interactive to use the knowledge of the participants in order for participants and instructors to learn from each other.

Course outline

This course is designed for change agents. You could be a scrum master, team members, agile coach, manager, or an entrepreneur who need to guide your company to success.

Course Outline. There are just a few straightforward sections that make up this course:

1. Introduction to Agile & Scrum, why agile?
2. Achieve a deep understanding of agile and scrum values and principles
3. Learn the fundamentals of the scrum framework
4. Business outcome of using agile
5. Making progress visible, information radiator
6. Understand how scrum master works as a facilitator and servant-leader of the team
7. Learn how to work with the product owner and business stakeholders
8. Learn communication and collaboration skills that enable high-performing teams
9. Learn how to become a cross-functional Team
10. Understand how to help the team write, refine, and estimate user stories
11. Build a definition of done that makes incremental delivery a reality
12. Use empirical feedback to achieve continuous improvement
13. Learn how to work in a multi-team environment
14. Understand some of the challenges of distributed and dispersed teams
15. Introducing user stories and epics
16. Introducing product backlog
17. Estimation and affinity estimation of the backlog
18. Define the release roadmap based on priority and size for multiple sprints
19. What are the scrum patterns and anti-patterns?
20. Various collaborative practices and why to use them?
21. What is the focus of testing in an agile team?
22. Different charts and metrics effectiveness and its different usages

Live interactive modules

This workshop is designed to make you agile; this is not a typical certification course full of slides. There are 20 live interactive 1.5-hour modules. You can take most of the modules in any order.

Most of the workshop is spent in fun group activities and games in zoom breakout rooms with 2-5 people depending on the activity. At the completion of the workshop, you will have dozens of games, activities, and techniques for use with your teams and organization. Discover where you are in the agile journey and pivot to make your journey meaningful.

Here are the 20 live modules in the class. With the subscription options you can take each module as many times as you would like within the term of the subscription.

ATDD

Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) aims to help a project team flesh out user stories into detailed acceptance tests that, when executed, will confirm whether the intended functionality exists.

By continuously testing for the existence of a given functionality and writing code to introduce functionality that can pass the Acceptance Tests, developers’ effort is optimized to the point of just meeting the requirement.

Work backward from customer

You will learn how we work backwards from the customer, rather than starting with an idea for a product and trying to bolt customers onto it. While working backwards can be applied to any specific product decision, using this approach is especially important when developing new products or features.

For new initiatives a product manager typically starts by writing an internal press release announcing the finished product. Internal press releases are centered around the customer problem, how current solutions (internal or external) fail, and how the new product will blow away existing solutions. Optional addendum: FAQ answering the business or tactical questions about building the product

Empathy mapping

Empathy mapping is a way to characterize your target users in order to make effective design decisions. An empathy map is a quick persona template. It’s a tool to articulate what you know about a particular type of user— their needs, goals, expectations, behaviors, pain points, and so on.

Once you’ve created an empathy map, you identify the persona and ask.

“What would this persona think when they see this?” or

“What unanswered questions would prevent them from proceeding to the next step?” and so on…

Customer journey approach

Customer Journeys are arguably the most powerful mental model which incorporates the key elements of most of the other models by looking into each interaction through the eyes of a customer. A customer journey is a way to describe a series of interactions that starts with a customer need like “I want to purchase a book” and it continues until the customer buys the book, or probably even after that.

Companies cannot effectively solve these needs until they work together. The marketing, IT, and operation or back offices work on these customer journeys together. It requires a vertical slicing of the organization which runs at odds with traditional functional, hierarchical set up.

Baking in quality

Some products are better than others. But can you figure out what makes one product better than the other, and replicate it consistently? The quality journey begins right at the story level. Once you set success standards and refine your practices, your product will be more effective and less wasteful. And of course, have better quality. You will learn to create templates, checklists, train people and use tools. It may look daunting, could be time consuming and expensive upfront expensive and difficult, using them is easy, fast, and inexpensive.

Story mapping

User journey mapping is a way to deconstruct a user’s experience with a product or service as a series of steps and themes. Put simply, these methods encourage your stakeholders to think about user needs effectively, identifying pain points and opportunities in a systematic and straightforward way. There are two types of user journey map: retrospective maps: where you map out how users currently do stuff (typically based on research findings); and prospective maps: where you map how you expect users to behave with a new product idea. In this article we’ll be doing a retrospective map.

Story writing/splitting

User stories are part of an agile approach that helps shift the focus from writing about requirements to talking about them like a story. All agile user stories include a written sentence or two and, more importantly, a series of conversations about the desired functionality. One crucial part of story writing is breaking stories down to smaller stories.

Precision questions

Use precision question and answers to keep discussion focused and make discussions efficient. Use precision questioning toolkit to analyze problems from different angels. Use precision answering to preserve credibility in interactions with executives, senior leaders.

Agile learning Vs learning agility

Agile learning is the application of agile approach (Lean, scrum, Kanban) to the software development process. It involves moving incrementally through an iterative process as a team. it combines learning and doing, for example sprints.

Learning agility, also called to as growth mindset, refers to characteristics held by individual learners or as a team. Learning agility is the ability to adapt to unfamiliar situations, learn quickly, and in a mostly self-managed way. People with high levels of learning agility can approach unfamiliar situations by quickly connecting past experiences with present problems to make sense of them and find solutions.

System thinking/Causal loop

A look at how people and teams are systems and how they are part of larger systems. We will look at system dynamics and our role as coach within all of these interdependent systems. Use causal loop to understand the system.

Creating working agreement

Working agreements are norms or guidelines created by a team to enhance their interactions for higher performance and create a common language. Practically, these agreements set group expectations, lay out ways to collaborate, and establish the kind of atmosphere required for empathetic, psychologically safe work. We’ll play the “Team with the Best Results Ever” and “Servant Leadership” games.

Elephant carpaccio

The Elephant Carpaccio exercise is a great way for software people to practice & learn how to break stories into really thin vertical slices. It also leads to interesting discussions about quality and tech practices.

Running great retrospectives

This practice of reflecting on previous work before moving on to the next is even catching on in businesses that aren’t fully on board with all things agile. Rules to make retrospective effective.

Design thinking

Design Thinking is a design methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It’s extremely useful in tackling complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown, by understanding the human needs involved, by re-framing the problem in human-centric ways, by creating many ideas in brainstorming sessions.

Using metrics to bring change

The “Goal-Question-Metric” (GQM) approach is a proven method for driving goal-oriented measures throughout a software organization. With GQM, we start by defining the goals we are trying to achieve, then clarifying the questions we are trying to answer with the data we collect. By mapping business outcomes and goals to data-driven metrics, we can form a holistic picture of the Agile environment and clearly articulate how we are doing across the span of the enterprise.

Mindset Shifts

Our mental models help shape our behavior and define our approach to solving problems, carrying out tasks and form the structure of logical reasoning. There are many things in an agile ecosystem that work best when working towards a shared vision with shared mental models. What are mental ingredients to support agile adoption within learning organizations? How do we amplify what enhances adoption and break down barriers that inhibit it?

Traditional roadmap vs goal-oriented roadmap

Use Wardley mapping and create a goal-oriented roadmap which should be a combination of business goals with the progressive use of technology.

Product ownership

What is product ownership. How Product Owner is different from Product Manager?

Disney Method of innovation

The Disney Method, developed by Robert Dilts in 1994, is a complex creativity strategy in which a group uses four specific thinking styles in turn. It involves parallel thinking to analyze a problem, generate ideas, evaluate ideas, construct and critique a plan of action.

Using Lean Start-up to launch a product

Launch a product using lean start-up concepts, and the learn some agile principles along the way.

Audience & Prerequisites

While the workshop has obvious appeal for Scrum Masters, RTEs, and Agile Coaches, other roles that can benefit from the workshop include tech leads, project managers, managers, and product owners. All of the skills in the workshop are useful for anyone looking to increase their organization’s level of Agility or to become even more effective when working within an Agile environment. A working knowledge of Agile and at least one Agile methodology is required. Recent experience on an Agile team is highly recommended.

What will you get?

• 14 Category B PDUs (courses from other third-party providers) upon completion of the class
• Practices, tools, skills and stances make an effective Scrum Master or an agile coach
• Ways to bring change to your environment making it conducive for greater agility
• Scrum framework in detail with implementation patterns
• Using agile empirical metrics to measure progress and quality
• Participants learn why, when and how to use agile practices effectively to improve quality of deliverables
• To apply agile estimation and release planning by points technique to better forecast their work
• To structure your teams to facilitate collaboration, and self-organization to maximize business value to the clients
• How to set-up successful distributed agile teams and address communication, trust, and quality issues

Registration

An important point to remember – your learning will not end with this 2-day workshop but will really begin with it. We’ll keep mentoring you as you face real-world challenges in your workplace as you go out of this workshop.

Workshop Fee: For people outside India the fee is $150. For people in India this is Rs 5000 per person, a discounted price from Rs 6500 for regular booking. You can also make payment through GPay or PhonePe at +91-9350162648.

To book your seat for this workshop (for people in India)

People outside India can book the workshop on PayPal to @vashishthask and let us know the payment on hello@malonus.in or on WhatsApp at +91-9350162648

Kindly book your seat at the earliest since bookings will close as soon as 20 seats get full.