Training: Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills

Duration and language:

Onsite/online training - 8h - 1 day (including breaks).

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

Target group:

The training is intended for:

• Scrum Masters, Scrum Team members,
• 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:

The Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills™ training is intended for people with experience in Scrum or who have already participated in an introductory course. Participation in initiatives to change management methods or shaping organizational culture that influence the work of a team of several people or many teams at the same time will be helpful. If you are looking for an introductory Scrum course, we recommend the Applying Professional Scrum™ training.

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 group of minimum 6, maximum 20 people.
• Accredited Scrum.org training materials and requisites.
• License for performing the training (payable to Scrum.org).
• A voucher for the PSFS assessment and certificate of training completion, issued by Valkir Academy (in English).
• In case of taking the PSFS assessment within 14 days and failing, the participant is entitled to a second attempt at no additional cost.
• 7 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 one attempt of PSFS assessment. The assessment (in English) takes place online on Scrum.org website. In case of taking the PSFS exam within 14 days and failing, the participant is entitled to a second attempt at no additional cost. Unlike other Scrum.org exams, in the case of PSFS, it is not possible to take the assessment without previous participation in the training.

Training description:

What is the Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills™ training?

Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills™ is an accredited training from Scrum.org, based on hands-on exercises, thanks to which participants can acquire knowledge and skills in the area of facilitation to improve the effectiveness of Scrum teams and organization. These skills also help guide the group through Scrum events more efficiently and increase value of other meetings across teams and the organization.

Scrum Teams are self-managing teams, which means they make their own decisions about how they solve problems and how they do their job. To make this possible, it is important that there are interactions in the team that serve this purpose. Team members may not always agree. With effective facilitation, the team can begin to achieve its goals and desired outcomes.   During the training, many situations from the real life of a Scrum Team will be discussed, on the basis of which participants will be able to practice facilitation techniques and tools. They will go through 16 essential techniques and over 10 ways to conduct meetings. They will learn how to embody one of the most important stances of the Scrum Master, i.e. the facilitator. Each participant will leave the training with their own ideas on how to improve their Scrum Teams and organization thanks to facilitation.

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. Characteristics of a good facilitation
   • An overview of what is and what is not facilitation.
   • In what situations and when can you be a facilitator
   • Brainstorming: the difference between moderation and facilitation.
    
2. Principles of facilitation and Scrum
   • Discussion: In which elements of Scrum and who can be a facilitator?
   • Become familiar with the 5 main principles of facilitation and how to apply them in everyday work.
   • Scrum values and facilitation.
    
3. Facilitation challenges
   • Facilitator challenges: What to look for? How to react?
   • Understanding what are undesirable situations and how to react.
   • Does everyone have to be 100% engaged?
   • Does everyone have to speak up?
    
4. Principles of facilitation and empiricism
   • Inspection and adaptation in facilitation.
   • Exercise: acting out scenes related to the so-called undesirable situations and discussion about possible reactions of the facilitator.
   • A look at facilitation through the prism of the principles, values and pillars of Scrum.
    
5. Facilitating skills
   • An overview of the facilitator skills needed for this job.
   • Getting acquainted with the facilitator's anti-stances.
   • Practicing specific ways of acting based on examples in a workshop form.
    
6. Improving facilitation skills
   • Individual reflection: in what areas can you develop as a facilitator? What are your strengths?
   • Participants will also leave with their own action plan, a specific map to achieve the goal set by themselves.
    
7. Training summary

Training goals:

What are the challenges we address?

• What are the characteristics of good facilitation, what should we avoid?
• How to navigate the group process for team collaboration?
• How to effectively facilitate Scrum events?
• How to involve the group in the facilitation process using different styles of cooperation?
• What are the challenges in facilitation and how to deal with undesirable situations?
• What are the importance of Scrum values, empiricism and principles in facilitation and how to use them?
• What skills should a facilitator have to be successful and effective
• What tools to use during facilitation?

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 group processes theory, complexity theory, self-organization/self-management, psychology of motivation, social psychology, 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.