Course Description
In this ScrumMaster Certification training course you will learn, understand and execute on the three overarching principles behind Scrum: iterative development, self-management, and visibility.
Beginning with the history of agile development and moving through the disciplines promoted by Scrum, this ScrumMaster Certification training course will give you a comprehensive understanding of the Scrum methodology while specifically reviewing the behaviors expected of a ScrumMaster. This 2–day Scrum certification training course is suitable for those practicing or looking to practice the art of the ScrumMaster, but is highly valuable for anyone involved in Scrum (Managers, Team Members, Product Managers, etc.).
Even projects that have solid, well–defined project plans encounter some degree of change and waste. Shifting market conditions, budget cuts, staff restructuring, or any number of influences will disrupt the best plan while contributing to customer dissatisfaction and staff discouragement. Moreover, projects that begin with changing or unclear requirements make it difficult to even establish project expectations. Scrum is the agile development process that allows teams to deliver usable software periodically throughout the life of the project, absorbing change and new requirements as the project proceeds.
This course is backed by ASPE's Exam Pass Guarantee. Upon completion of our ScrumMaster Certification Course, if after two attempts within the 60–day evaluation period you have not passed the exam and obtained certification, ASPE will allow you to attend another session of our Scrum Master Certification Course free of charge and pay for you to retake your certification exam.
The Scrum Alliance®
The Scrum Alliance® is a nonprofit organization committed to delivering articles, resources, courses, and events that will help Scrum users be successful. The Scrum Alliance's mission is to promote increased awareness and understanding of Scrum, provide resources to individuals and organizations using Scrum, and support the iterative improvement of the software development profession.
The Scrum Alliance® has recently transformed the Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) certification into a more rigorous certificate program with updated content, increased difficulty and a pass/fail outcome. Previously all candidates were initially granted Scrum certification regardless of score, but this is no longer the case. To help ensure candidates' success, the Certified ScrumMaster Workshop provides participants with all the information required to take the new evaluation and become Scrum certified. You will gain a comprehensive understanding of the Scrum methodology while specifically reviewing the behaviors expected of a ScrumMaster through class interaction, case studies, group exercises and workshops. The evaluation is completed online at the end of training, and consists of 35 questions. Participants will also be registered with the Scrum Alliance, with online access to class training materials and any updates for two years.
Learn more about the Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) Evaluation
In–Class Group Exercises
This Scrum certification training course is a stimulating combination of class interaction, case studies, group exercises and workshops. Each is designed to allow you to easily grasp new concepts and techniques.
Specifically, you will cover:- The "Art of the Possible": learn how small change can have a large impact on productivity
- Product integrity: review various options employees use when faced with difficulty, learn the importance of delivering high quality products in Scrum
- Customer Expectations: Using a changing schedule and agile estimating and planning, assess the work to properly set customer expectations and manage customer satisfaction
- Running the Scrum Project: Run a full Scrum project that lasts 59 minutes. You will walk through all steps under the Scrum Framework
- Agile Estimating and Planning: Break into teams, and through decomposition and estimating plan out a project through delivery
- Team Dynamics: Since Scrum deals with change, conflict will happen. Learn methods to resolve problems in a self-managed environment
Key Benefits of Attending You Can Immediately Use:
- Learn the details on Scrum roles: Team Member, Product Owner, ScrumMaster
- Gain an understanding of the foundational/critical concepts of Scrum with our Certified Scrum Trainer® instructional program
- Understand how to apply empirical thinking to your project work
- Learn how a team's productivity can be adjusted to account for its composition
- Appreciate the importance of organizational agreement on software readiness
- Hear why the ScrumMaster role can be the most satisfying as well as the most difficult job on a project
- Discover how conflict resolution plays a critical role in Scrum
- Work on a real-world Scrum project live in the classroom
- Learn, practice and utilize the Scrum Framework
- Gain a detailed understanding of how to know when software is "Done" under Scrum
- Review and understand the critical characteristics a ScrumMaster must have to succeed
- Get to the heart of the matter with Scrum, coaching and team productivity
- Compare traditional and Agile project estimating and planning
- Conduct decomposition to estimate a Scrum project
- Practice Scrum meetings including; Sprint planning, Daily Scrum, Burndowns, Sprint review, and Sprint retrospective
- Achieve the first step in Scrum AllianceSM recognized certifications, enabling you to advance to higher levels of recognition
- Learn a framework to operate large projects using Scrum
- Implementing Scrum is about getting results, learn how to maximize your returns using Scrum
Certified Scrum Trainer® is a certification mark, and Scrum Alliance (sm) is a service mark, of Scrum Alliance, Inc. Any unauthorized use is strictly prohibited.
CEU: 15 PMI PDUs12 NASBA CPEsCEU: 15 PMI PDUs
12 NASBA CPEs
Substitution & Cancellation Policy:
You may cancel or reschedule up to 21 days prior to the start date of the class at no penalty. For any cancellation or reschedule requests within 21 days, the full course tuition is still due and not eligible for refund. Any paid tuition will be credited towards a future class and must be used within 12 months.
*Partner delivered courses may be subject to different cancellation terms
Agenda
Short, five-minute exercises will be scattered throughout the two-day session. Longer exercises are detailed below. Time spent on each topic will vary depending on the composition of the class and their interest in particular areas.
1. Agile Thinking
In order for us to understand the benefits of Scrum and the nuances behind its framework, we begin with the history of agile methods and how relatively new thoughts in software development have brought us to Scrum.
a. How manufacturing has influenced software development
b. The origins of agile thinking
c. The Agile Manifesto
d. The complexity of projects
e. Theoretical Vs. Empirical processes overview
f. The “Iron Triangle” of Project Management
Exercise: The “Art of the Possible.” This is an opportunity to understand how small changes in behavior can have a large impact on productivity. This also turns our thinking towards new ideas and a willingness to change for the better.
2. The Scrum Framework
Here we’ll ensure that we’re all working from the same foundational concepts that make up the Scrum Framework.
a. The different Scrum roles
b. Chickens and Pigs
c. Iterative Development vs. Waterfall
d. Self Management concepts
e. Full disclosure and visibility
f. The Scrum Framework Overview
3. Implementation Considerations
Moving beyond Scrum’s foundational concepts, we’ll use this time to dig deeper into the reasons for pursuing Scrum. The key concepts of “empirical thinking” and “done” will be presented. We’ll also use this time to begin a discussion of integrity in the marketplace and how this relates to software quality.
a. Why change our current development methods?
b. Traditional Defined methods explored
c. The “unveiling effect”
d. Empirical Methods explored
e. The Agile Skeleton
f. A Scrum launch checklist
Exercise: Integrity at a fast-food restaurant. During this exercise we’ll review various options regarding an employee faced with a difficult situation. The importance of providing high quality products to our customers will be explored.
Exercise: understanding customer expectations. This exercise is the beginning of an extended exercise involving agile estimating and planning. During this first portion of the exercise, we’ll work with a fictional customer who has a very demanding schedule and understand how our assessment of project work plays a significant role in customer satisfaction.
4. Scrum Roles
Who are the different players in the Scrum game? We’ll review checklists of role expectations in preparation for further detail later in our session.
a. The Team Member
b. The Product Owner
c. The Scrum Master
Exercise: The 59-minute Scrum Simulation. This popular exposure to Scrum asks us to work on a short project that lasts for just 59 minutes! We’ll walk through all of the key steps under the Scrum framework as we work in project teams to deliver a new product.
5. The ScrumMaster Explored
It’s easy to read about the role of the ScrumMaster and gain a better understanding of their responsibilities. The difficulty comes in the actual implementation. Being a ScrumMaster is a hard job, and we’ll talk about the characteristics of a good ScrumMaster that go beyond a simple job description.
a. Who is the ScrumMaster?
b. Characteristics of a ScrumMaster candidate
c. The ScrumMaster as a change agent
d. Effective listening
e. Scrum’s success depends on common sense
6. The Scrum Team Explored
Since the ScrumMaster is looking to protect the productivity of the team, we must investigate team behaviors so we can be prepared for the various behaviors exhibited by teams of different compositions. We’ll also include small exercises to help participants understand how to handle difficult situations.
a. The agile heart
b. Bruce Tuckman’s team life cycle
c. Team ground rules
d. Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team
e. Getting Human Resources involved
f. The MetaScrum
g. The impact of project switching
h. The Scrum of Scrums
- The importance of knowing when software is “done”
- “done” for multiple team integrations divided by function
- “done” for multiple team integrations divided by skill
- “done” for unsynchronized technologies
7. Meetings and Artifacts
During this time we will review the different Scrum meetings, understand the importance of planning under Scrum, and continue with the agile estimating and planning exercises.
a. Overview of the different Scrum meetings
- Sprint Planning
- The Daily Scrum and the dysfunctional team
- Burndowns and a warning about metrics
- Sprint Review
- Sprint Retrospective
b. Why do we need planning in Scrum?
c. The Ideal Team Day
d. Velocity
e. Scrum management tools
Exercise: agile estimating and planning. Although agile estimating and planning is an art unto itself, the concepts behind this method fit very well with the Scrum methodology an agile alternative to traditional estimating and planning. We’ll break into project teams that will work through decomposition and estimation of project work, and then plan out the project through delivery.
8. The Product Owner: Extracting Value
The driving force behind implementing Scrum is to obtain results, usually measured in terms of return on investment or value. How can we help ensure that we allow for project work to provide the best value for our customers and our organization? We’ll take a look at different factors that impact our ability to maximize returns.
a. The Product Backlog
b. Managing priorities
c. Estimation adjustments related to team factors
d. Fixed-date projects
e. Gating milestone-driven development
f. Refactoring
g. Management’s role in optimizing value
h. Managing the release
i. New ideas for earned value management
9. Advanced Considerations
This section of our class will touch on a variety of subjects in order to provide insight into how Scrum can be implemented in different environments. We also revisit the role of the ScrumMaster as the facilitator.
a.The ScrumMaster as referee
- Helping to define “done”
- The Scrum of Scrums ScrumMaster
b. Large projects under Scrum
c. Dispersed teams
d. Scaling Scrum
e. Developing architecture under Scrum
f. Inter- and Intra-project dependencies
g. Multi-team Resourcing
h. Scrum and CMM
i. Scum and XP
Exercise: Conflict resolution. Whenever we encounter change there is usually some degree of conflict that arises. Scrum operates in a changing environment, so conflict is inevitable. This exercise will provide one example of many resolution methods that help teams work through difficulties that negatively impact performance.
10. Closing Topics
We’ll wrap up with direction on where to go next with your Scrum experience, some Scrum reference sites, and our graduation ceremony.
Audience
All technical professionals associated with the specification, design, development and testing of products will benefit from this two-day program. Some of the professionals this will benefit include:
-Business Customer, user or partner
-Product Owners
-Team Members
-ScrumMaster
-Project Manager
-Project Lead
-Project Sponsors
-IT Manager/Directors
-Business Analyst
-Developers/Programmers
Comments
ASPE's Scrum instructors:
Peter Borsella is the founder of Winnow Management Corporation, based in Parkland, Florida. Peter is an IT professional with 24 years of experience in application development and IT leadership. He is also a Project Management Professional (certified by the PMI) and a Certified ScrumMaster Trainer (certified by the Scrum Alliance). His ability to contribute across a wide range of environments has taken him to companies such as First Data Corporation and eFunds Corporation, and outside the United States to India and Hungary. Peter is adept in administering all aspects of project management, as well as providing authentic leadership to create effective teams. An active and contributing member to both the PMI and the Scrum Alliance, Peter's speaking engagements focus on bridging the gap between traditional Project Management and Agile Project Management. His goal is to help others understand how to get the best return from any project by achieving higher levels of software quality, increased customer satisfaction, and cohesive teams that enjoy increased productivity.
Michael Vizdos is the creator of the popular website implementingscrum.com and is a Certified Scrum Trainer. He is based in Richmond, Virginia, and works with teams around the world in both training, consulting, and mentoring roles. Michael has over eighteen years experience as an IT professional in software development and consulting; he is co-author of, “The Enterprise Unified Process” (2005), and speaks regularly at user group meetings, conferences, and internal corporate meetings about transition from traditional to more agile software development techniques. He works with many of the Fortune 200 along with government agencies worldwide.
James Smith’s 30 year IT career began at IBM in mainframe sales and at AT&T in product development. James’s central focus is now on Scrum. First seeing the power of Scrum during a most dramatic of corporate turnarounds prompted his move to the role of ScrumMaster. Every one of the 26 Teams with whom he worked, taught him that Scrum was the most efficient and profitable way of developing software. As a member of Winnow Management, James is pleased with the opportunity to share all of his learnings assisting in the launch of new Agile Teams. He feels that Scrum, when properly implemented, makes life better for all involved. And at the end of the day, that is a very good thing of which to be a part. James is certified by the Scrum Alliance to bring Certified ScrumMaster training, and holds an MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management.