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We are now offering coaching and training that summarize our years of experience in making agile distribute teams work for successful product development efforts.&...

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Agile Distributed Teams
Leverage the power of Scrum, remotely Create synergies between distant teams Improve your team's tools and protocols

Brief
Attendees will have a unique, challenging, and rewarding experience.  This course goes beyond presentation of theory by allowing attendees to internalize the ideas via a powerful combination of applied exercises, reflection, and learning.  Attendees will learn techniques for joining and setting up "well-formed agile teams" across distances, and apply these techniques in experiential exercises.  This course is built on proven principles of systems thinking, team process concepts, agile product development, human interaction and creativity.  Attendees will have numerous opportunities for interactive discussion with the instructor and each other.  You will not find this course elsewhere!
 
Why?
Agile methodologies warn how critical it is to co-locate teams in the same room, but this is not always practical.  Distributed, distant, or "virtual" teams are a reality of business today.  Offshoring, flex-work schedules, multiple corporate offices, and other forces create pressures to achieve results even when team members are scattered across the globe.

But most of these distributed teams seem to prove the Agile warnings right by demonstrating old habits of waterfall behavior.  Long cycle times and endless revision of requirements churn are the norm, status reporting takes up far too much time, and individual leaders dominate the team.  Management direction gets lost in a sea of process and tools instead of manifesting as tangible, quality product. 

How can we realize the benefits of Agile product development - hyperproductivity, high-quality products, self-organization, elimination of waste, and rapid releases - when team members are not sitting next to each other? 

This is the challenge of business in the 21st century: how to work effectively at a distance.  This course is where you will meet that challenge:  how to create and sustain tightly-knit, effective Agile distributed teams.
 
Goals
This course cuts to the heart of Agile behavior, leveraging foundational principles and the power of Scrum (an Agile framework) to help those facing the unique challenges of their distributed teams.  You will learn:
  • Agile attractors - the universal forces of effective product development, values for basic human interaction, and how to negotiate the complexities of team interaction face-to-face or miles apart
  • Creating distributed teams for maximum effectiveness - choosing initial members for a new distributed team, joining the team as a new member, and scaling; while boosting productivity, quality, and creativity
  • Setting up and improving your team's protocols - examples of protocols that work for collocated teams vs. those that work for distributed teams, and criteria for evaluating your own team protocols
  • Enabling the power of self-organization - empowering the team to be "pulled" by their product rather than "pushed" by a dictatorial leader;  critical roles for distributed product development
  • How to thrive instead of merely survive - leveraging "feedback loops of trust," both within the team and with those outside the team, to actually increase team effectiveness over time
This course is based on experiential learning.  Participants will practice in applied simulations and pull out real-life examples and case studies.  This will involve participants totally in the experience of applying these topics to their own unique challenges.
 
Who Is This For
  • Product Managers / Product Owners and Project Champions / Department Heads facing projects depending on the expertise of distributed staff
  • Project Managers, Team Leads / Team Coaches, ScrumMasters with teams of geographically distant members
  • Business Analysts, Software Analysts, Architects, QA Analysts, Developers and Testers who want to maximize their productivity on distributed teams
  • Process Advocates who want to fit the needs of distributed teams with the process standards of their organization
  • Co-located teams who need strong interactions with remote vendors, clients, or other resources
Prerequisites
Participants should have some experience with team-based development of a deliverable product.
 
Course Details
Length: 2 days
Size:  Class will be strictly limited to 21 participants for one Instructor. Other ratios can apply for our applied tailored events
 
Exclusive Offerings and Services

Our events can be setup as exclusive offerings. When we do this we typically offer them directly to companies that are interested in an applied application targeting a team, department or organization. 

  • Morning and Afternoon breaks -- snacks will be served.
  • Lunch will be served.
  • Hosted locallay near you - often a hotel with facilities
  • Interested in more? Please Contact Us.
 
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Seminars

Seminars Details

We offer seminars and executive briefings on agile software development.
•    Introduction to Scrum
•    Leading the Change to Agile in a Lean Six Sigma Organization
•    Agile Use Cases
•    Introduction to Agile Thinking
•    and more...

These are content filled seminars and are the pedigrees of the same high quality seminars we deliver at conferences nationwide.

Formats
•    Excutive Briefing
•    Lunch&Learns
•    Introductory
•    Key Notes
•    Select User Groups

Delivery Mechanisms

If this is delivered presented to a large audience (50+) then it would be classic presentation with light Q&A encouraged throughout.

 

Our preference is to break this up into small group discussions (5-7 at a table) and then shift back to larger group summary. This format allows participants to personalize the information presented with a stronger feeling of value. One presenter can orchestrate this well only for groups less than 45. 

 

Ideal, would be to add a co-presenter for delivery. Then we would demonstrate agile behaviors through an interactive dialog and we could handle a larger number of people with small group discussion break out  and large group summary (60-70 folks with small group discussions and large group sumamry).

 

Groups larger than 70+ would be done via a lively interactive dialog with the  two presenters and light Q&A from the audience.