Agile / Scrum Training should cover the fundamentals in every course. Agility is a deep practice that requires years of effort to master and maintain mastery. The fundamentals are the underpinnings that enable a practitioner to manifest deep applied skill and technique in the face of day to day complex work.
We are regularly asked questions like the following section in green.
We would like to sign up a group of people that do have some working knowledge of SCRUM. They are currently in the Product Owner, ScrumMaster or Team role.Is your course advanced enough to give us value or is it meant more for beginners? We want to know more about how to properly create and manage our stories, prioritize, etc….do our jobs better and more effectively…but we already do understand the high level scrum process.
Our response typically goes something like …
The difference between advanced and beginners is a concept that we work to break down as follows. By asking for advanced or beginner agile training you are already driving thought in an unnecessary and limiting way, which is not agile! Agile training should always cover the fundamentals, which never go away and you will always need to work on. So an agile course should hit the fundamentals of agility and exploring agility using a Scrum Framework (or other agile method). The course should be built and driven by an experienced practitioner that also trains. Experienced practitioners should be able to coach as well as train so that the deep skills of agility are manifested and show up in practice. Our curriculum is designed to bring out the deep practice of Scrum as it relates to the Product Owner, ScrumMaster or Team role and help the practitioner pick up real skills / techniques that they can put to valued use. Our course is not about basic scrum mechanics / process.
Our goal with this post is to raise awareness that Agile / Scrum is a practice that requires agility for mastery. An agile pathway is needed to produce individuals with real skills that join teams that can enable real agility within an organization. Agile well formed teams are the key for product development and innovation within organizations.
When you look for agile training, look for training that comes from fundamentals.
Scrum makes an assumption that you have a dedicated team who can focus on something for a sustained period of time. Most highly cognitive products require sustained focus and a consistent team rhythm.
noisy time are synced so that team members don’t bother each other very much. People whose work is disconnected have different rhythms. Noise is a real problem when you’re trying to do something that is highly cogitative. So protecting the team from out-of-sync noise can be very important.
