Training: Scrum Master Toolkit

Duration and language:

Onsite training - 14h - 2 days each 7 hours (including breaks).

Online training - 15h - 3 days each 5 hours (including breaks). Online training schedule:

• 09:00 - 11:00 CET online session,
• 11:00 - 12:00 CET break,
• 12:00 - 14:00 CET online session,

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

Target group:

The training is intended for:

• Scrum Masters, members of Scrum Teams,
• change agents, internal trainers,
• agile coaches, Agile consultants,
• specialists, members of operational teams,
• department/team leaders and managers.

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

Training preconditions:

Scrum Master Toolkit training is intended for people with at least one year of experience in Scrum or who have already participated in an introductory course. Prior participation in Scrum Essentials, Applying Professional Scrum, Professional Scrum Master training is a good introduction, but it is not mandatory.

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, an experienced Agile and Lean consultant.
• Effective training in a small group - on average 6-12 people.
• Training materials, requisites and a certificate of training completion issued by Valkir Academy.
• Lunch and catering (drinks and snacks). Not applicable to online training.
• Trainer’s travel and expenses (T&E). Not applicable to online training.

Certification:

The price of the authorial training includes certificates of training completion issued by Valkir Academy (in English). If you want to obtain Scrum.org certification, we invite you to our accredited Applying Professional Scrum, Professional Scrum Master training, or to purchase a voucher (additional fee) for the PSM I assessment.

Training description:

What is the Scrum Master Toolkit training?

Whether you are a novice Scrum Master or have several years of experience, this training program is a safe space to hone your skills. This authorial program has been prepared for people who build their toolbox, but remember that tools without appropriate stances and behavior can be counterproductive.

The Scrum Master Toolkit starts with a solid discussion of stances and anti-stances, thanks to which the participants will build an appropriate context, a kind of foundation on which various practical tools will be presented. Thanks to this, your knowledge will be embedded in the context of a given stance, which will allow you to support teams, managers/leaders and the environment of the organization much more effectively.

The role and accountability of a Scrum Master will get an additional shape after this training. The person who adjusts the tools to the appropriate situation and is able to work at different levels of the organization, using the newly acquired knowledge, i.a. in social and communication areas, facilitation, formation and stimulation of effective teams, development of products and services, promotion of systematic improvements of organizational processes.

Who is 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. Stances and anti-stances of a Scrum Master
   • The most common SM dysfunctions and anti-stances.
   • Discussion related to the participants’ experiences, consequences for the organization.
   • Recommended stances based on Scrum.org and experiences from Agile transformation.
   • When and how to consciously use the right stances depending on the situation and context?
    
2. Fundamental interpersonal and social skills
   • Active listening - what is it and how can it help in effective communication?
   • Ability to establish and build relationships in culturally diverse organizations.
   • Assertiveness, pointing your own arguments and thinking with questions.
   • Ability to resolve conflicts using Nonviolent Communication.
    
3. Basics of facilitation
   • What is facilitation and how to use it in practice?
   • Forms (hierarchical, cooperative, autonomous), when it is worth using.
   • 6 activities of a facilitator acc. John Heron. How to use them as SM?
   • Diagnostic Intervention Cycle according to Roger Schwarz. How to weave it into the work of SM?
    
4. Effective, transparent processes and events
   • Schemes and recipes for achieving the goal of Scrum events and processes.
   • Techniques supporting the perspective of Developers, PO and the SM itself.
   • Metrics used during Scrum events. Measuring value, quality, effectiveness.
   • Tools for metrics and their visualization.
    
5. High-performing teams in a supportive work environment
   • 5 dysfunctions of teamwork and methods of addressing them.
   • Introducing tools to strengthen motivation and engagement, e.g. Belbin, RMP.
   • Organizational culture: what is it, how to assess it (OCAI model) and how to shape it?
   • Basics of Agile at scale: Scrum with multiple teams.
    
6. Product Management best practices
   • Formulating the Product vision and initiating the first Product Discovery sessions.
   • Agile roadmap and product goals using the essence of EBM and OKRs.
   • Supporting Product Owner in estimation and forecasting methods based on the following techniques: Affinity estimation, Magic Estimation, NO estimates.
    
7. Training summary

Training goals:

What are the challenges we address?

• What stance should a Scrum Master embody and which should he/she avoid?
• What tools should be used to strengthen the effectiveness of Developers and achieve self-management?
• How can facilitation techniques improve the quality of Scrum events and processes?
• What practices can be used to support a Product Owner and increase business value delivery?
• What social skills will be useful to me when working with individuals and groups?
• What tools should be used to discover and address the challenges of the management?
• How to remove obstacles on the way to agility in working with Scrum teams and the organization?
• How to avoid sticking to patterns and choose tools for the particular situation?

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 psychology of motivation, social psychology, leadership, facilitation, complexity theory, self-organization/self-management, change management 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.