Mark provides clarity into the mystical world of Agile and Scrum with practical examples and Jedi Wisdom. Add some psychosocial games into the batch and you’re in for an adventure. Training will leave you pondering the cavernous opportunities for the scrum master to be an agent of organizational change
Group Support
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Success
You’ve coached your Product Owner on how to collaborate with them more effectively.
You’re starting to address (or maybe wrestle with) organizational challenges.
Now you want to take this all up another level.
You’ve found the right place. Become a Scrum Jedi.
- Team members attend Scrum Events but with limited energy and enthusiasm.
- Morale isn’t bad, but it isn’t amazing, and you can’t put your finger on why.
- There is confusion around Product Ownership. Who talks to the customer? Who writes the acceptance criteria?
- Sometimes your features delight customers and sometimes they don’t. It feels akin to magic.
- Cross-skilling sounds great in theory but how do you make it happen?
- It’s a struggle to facilitate meetings that people want to attend. Have you had anyone snooze through your retrospectives?
- You know that your team is better than last year, but you don’t know how to measure that success.
- Do you feel that you’re playing whack-a-mole with problems?
Apples to Oranges
Mark doesn’t like to teach.
Mark loves to help people learn how to solve their own problems.
Those are two totally different things. And that’s why our training is very different as well.
What’s Different?
“If you want training where you just sit in a Zoom room and listen for two days then get a certificate, this workshop isn’t for you. If you want theory without practice, don’t take this course.”
We tried offering the same classroom-based approach that everyone else offers, but we stopped because it felt too rushed. Attendees struggled to absorb all the information and memorize the theory, and didn’t have enough time to gain a solid understanding what it means to practice critical elements, like facilitation. “Drinking from a fire hose” was something we heard often.
We Listened. We Learned.
Mark has been doing Scrum since 2001, long before it was popular, and he’s been coaching since before there were designations for it. His focus is on team success so, over the years, he’s devoted tremendous amounts of time and resources to study how people learn. If you’ve trained with him, you won’t be at all surprised by this picture of his current office library. There’s at least another shelf or two worth of books on his Kindle as well.
Advanced Certified ScrumMaster training v.2.0
So we’ve slowed things down, but still kept a pace that is engaging and effective. We redesigned our A-CSM from the ground up to be cohort-based, group learning that results in more bang for your buck and greater results for your efforts. Instead of dying from boredom sitting in a 2-3 day theory class, you will learn new material and be coached over an extended period how to build a sustainable improvement process.
Here’s the Kicker, It’s Cohort-Based
Cohort-based learning means that you aren’t sitting in a class as an individual, trying to process everything on your own. Instead, you’re in a team who will provide support—and accountability—to one
another. You encourage your team members not to silo, so why would you struggle through your own education by yourself?
Our workshop sessions offer six weeks of training time. Each week we meet for roughly 90-120 minutes of learning, and then an additional 60 minutes of coaching on things we learned and are starting to apply.
In addition, you will receive a manageable amount (roughly an hour) of weekly homework that gets tailored to you as an individual, and focuses on the challenges you’re facing. That will help ensure your understanding of a topic area, gain you quick and relevant feedback and tips, and help reinforce your memory.
At the end of the workshop, we will continue to have monthly coaching calls where we can work together to tackle the difficult challenges you face back at work
TLDR
- You’re joining a team, not signing up for a workshop.
- The formal portion of the course is completed in 6 weeks.
- You get homework hand-selected for you, to ensure that your learning is effective and addresses your unique needs.
- There are learning sessions as well as coaching sessions, and together they help you put the training to practical use right away and get results.
- You will still get your Advanced ScrumMaster certification, but it won’t be crammed into a short, intense time of theory and memorization, but instead will be practice and coaching at a managable pace.
Mark Levison is an awesome instructor. He’s patient and welcomes all questions. He is definitely the Yoda of the Scrum universe.
Improve Your Skills to:
Grow a More Effective Team
Measure Success
Solve Systemic Problems
Benefit the Whole Organization
Become Certified
Who is the course for?
- Certified ScrumMasters with at least 12 months of experience.
- The ScrumMaster who is doing well and sees challenges outside of their team.
- The ScrumMaster whose team is trying to get better, but don’t know how.
- Team Leads, Tech Leads, and Team members who wish to grow their skills and help improve their team.
- Project Managers and Directors of Development.
Don’t take this course if:
- – you want to get your A-CSM in 2-3 days
- – you hate solving real problems in your organization
- – you don’t want to practice actually applying the concepts
- – you only want to cover the official learning objectives
Upcoming Workshops
A-CSM
You Have My Attention but I Want Even More Bullet Points
You’ll Advance Your Skills with:
- Facilitation – what it is and how it can help with effective meetings.
- Coaching vs Facilitation – the difference between two of the major ScrumMaster stances and when to take each.
- How to run a retrospective that people want to attend.
- How to make Daily Scrum work for the attendees.
- Tools to take Backlog Refinement from a humdrum repetitive event to one that engages the team.
- Product Ownership tools for the ScrumMaster to introduce to their PO.
- Solving real team problems, using tools like Systems Thinking to help find the issues that cause the problems to keep reoccurring.
- Various human motivation models to understand why motivation schemes fail and what does work instead.
- Learning how to help your teams become 3% more effective a Sprint while playing games.
- The three main ways teams get better.
- Improving team dynamics
- Improving how the Product Owner works with the team
- Improving the team’s engineering practice – Don’t worry if you’re not a software person, you will rapidly discover…
- Improving your Team’s Definition of Done and practicing using Done outside of your day to day work.
- Learning about the various Agile Scaling models that exist and forming your own opinion about trade-offs between each.
- Having a good idea what measurements you can safely use in the context of an Agile team.
- Knowing about more flavours of Agile than just Scrum.
Anyone looking to do this course…do it with Mark! He’s a scrum realist with a fantastic sense of humour. The material is relevant today and Mark gives us a glimpse of what we can expect 5 years from now. The post class support is fantastic and shows how passionate and knowledgeable Mark is about learning! A true educator.
