Training: Professional Agile Leadership Essentials

Duration and language:

Onsite/online training - 16h - 2 days each 8 hours (including breaks).

Training is provided in English. A Polish version is also available.

Target group:

The training is intended for:

• organization management board,
• department/team leaders and managers,
• leaders sponsoring transformation,
• change agents, agile coaches,
• Scrum Masters, Product Owners,
• internal trainers, Agile consultants.

Those who want to grow the organization in the spirit of Agile and Lean.

Training preconditions:

Professional Agile Leadership Essentials™ training is designed for managers and people in leadership positions who are responsible for introducing Agile approaches, methods and techniques in the organization. Please note that this training is not an introduction to the Scrum framework or how to use Scrum. Those people who are familiar with the principles of Agile and the Scrum framework will experience the greatest benefits from participation.

For online training, it is required to be computer literate and meet technical requirements: https://valkir.pl/en/online-training/.

Price includes:

• Preparation and training performed by an expert, accredited Scrum.org Trainer (PST), an experienced Agile and Lean consultant.
• Effective training in a small group - on average 6-12 people.
• Accredited Scrum.org training materials and requisites.
• License for performing the training (payable to Scrum.org).
• A 200$ voucher for the PAL I assessment and certificate of training completion, issued by Valkir Academy (in English).
• In case of taking the PAL I assessment within 14 days and failing, the participant is entitled to a second attempt at no additional cost.
• 14 Personal Development Units (PDUs) for PMI PMP members.
• Lunch and catering (drinks and snacks). Not applicable to online training.
• Trainer’s travel and expenses (T&E). Not applicable to online training.

Certification:

Each participant completing the training will receive an non-expiring voucher to attempt the PAL I assessment. The assessment (in English) takes place online on Scrum.org website. In case of taking the PAL I exam within 14 days and failing, the participant is entitled to a second attempt at no additional cost.

Training description:

What is Professional Agile Leadership Essentials™ (PAL-E) training?

Professional Agile Leadership Essentials™ is an accredited training from Scrum.org, based on hands-on exercises, during which managers and leaders of agile teams will understand how to best support and teach teams and organization to create the desired environment for agility.

In an agile organization, leaders, managers, supervisors and members of agile teams are required to change the way they manage and measure work results. Agile teams might not be able to do it on their own. Help is needed from the organization. The way people think about how they approach work needs to become agile. Better results can be achieved by unifying goals and the ways of working.

During the training, participants delve into the role that leaders play in creating the proper environment for agility. The role of leader and manager in an agile organization can be very different from what leaders are used to. Through team exercises, participants will learn how to initiate and support agile teams to achieve better results and how to lead change in the area of organizational culture that must be introduced to bring the organization closer to agile product delivery.

Who’s behind this?

Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland are considered to be Scrum’s fathers, although the approach itself is based on self-organizing teams, popularized by the famous publication “The New New Product Development Game” written by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka, published in the Harvard Business Review in 1986.

Over 300 Scrum.org trainers around the world every day support the development of management by organizing practical training, learning through games, workshops and effective practices.

Training agenda:

1. Introduction to Agile management
   • An overview of what “Agility” is and what it is all about.
   • Agile Manifesto - how it should be understood and what impact it has on organization.
   • Discussion about the challenges related to the introduction of Agile in the organization.
   • Improving the concept of better predictability with Agile.
    
2. Culture models and the role of a manager
   • Presentation of factors influencing behavior in a changing and complex world.
   • Agile manager and his role in supporting change at the organization level.
   • Planning tools for strategic and tactical change leadership.
   • The aspect of organizational culture and the challenges of a change leader.
    
3. Team maturity levels
   • The concept of team maturity in an agile environment.
   • Analysis of maturity levels based on various models.
   • Recognizing behaviors appearing at specific stages of team maturity.
   • Discovering and monitoring situations where the team specifically needs support.
    
4. Delegation levels, accountability and trust
   • Presentation of delegation methods based on the expectations contract.
   • Definition of delegation levels and their relatedness to the maturity of the teams.
   • Examples of behaviors and situations in which a leader/manager can focus on strategic activities by empowering teams.
    
5. Measuring in Agile
   • Metrics in Scrum Teams, i.e. what and how to measure - case study.
   • An overview of measurement areas, pitfalls and dead ends of measurement.
   • Creating hypotheses and validating experiments for better decision making.
   • Discussion: The balance between metrics and fostering values on the example of Scrum.
    
6. Recruitment and teams formation
   • The role of a leader/manager in forming a team for product development.
   • Presentation of aspects that are worth considering during recruitment.
   • A brief introduction about what motivates people at work.
   • Values at work environment: How to talk about values at work?
    
7. Change in everyday work
   • Individual reflection on what our daily work looks like.
   • What can be improved, what can be changed, and what can be delegated
   • Discussion of what has changed in the approach to agility after this training.
   • What can we start doing “right away” to be change agents in our organizations?
    
8. Training summary

Training goals:

What are the challenges we address?

• How can your organization operate more efficiently thanks to agility?
• How to foster impediments removal on the way to agility with teams and an organization
• What changes in the area of management and the way of thinking about management should take place for a leader to become an “Agile leader”?
• What is the role of a leader in a self-organizing/self-managing team?
• How can you tell if your team is reaching agile maturity and becoming a high-performing team?
• What role do Scrum values and shared goals play in the development of agile teams?
• How to measure agility and its benefits?

What benefits do you get?

The training allows participants to better understand their organization, the challenges it faces and more effectively steer its growth. It contains theoretical knowledge and practical methods taken from the idea of ​​change management, complexity theory, self-organization/self-management, psychology of motivation, entrepreneurship and many other areas.

As a result of this training, participants from different areas of the organization will:

• know and understand aspects needed to effectively stimulate organization growth and teams towards agility,
• acquire skills necessary to apply mentioned methods in practice,
• understand how and why new methods can positively affect their work.

Whenever possible, topics presented during the training are explained through a game/exercise that allows to apply the learned practice or principle in the business context. Exercise or game usually ends with a debrief and discussion on how to adapt the presented practices to the participants’ context.