The Scrum Master is a new role introduced when a team adopts Scrum. While a good Scrum Master is looked upon as a servant leader to the team, the Scrum Master has no direct authority over a self-organizing Scrum team, except to ensure it is following the Scrum process. An important responsibility in your new role as a Scrum Master is to help your team use Scrum and other agile practices to the best of its ability. You also remove any impediments to your team's success while encouraging the team to focus on continuous improvement. Some Scrum Masters face further challenges by splitting their time across multiple teams or by combining the work of being a Scrum Master with simultaneously working as a technical contributor on the team.
Which Course is Right for Me?
Core
Core courses are fundamental to your effective use of agile.
Certified ScrumMaster® or Working on a Scrum Team
These two courses cover the fundamental principles of Scrum. Both courses are suitable for all team members including Scrum Masters and product owners.
Advanced Certified ScrumMaster®
If you’re a Certified ScrumMaster® with 12 months of experience, take this next stage of training and deepen your facilitation and coaching skills as a ScrumMaster with this advanced certification.
Recommended
Recommended courses are a great way to expand your agile expertise.
Certified Scrum Product Owner®
This course will teach you how to excel as a product owner. You'll learn how to write user and job stories, prioritize a backlog, split backlog items, and develop a compelling product vision.
Better User Stories
Overcome the challenge of writing user stories to join the ranks of high-performing agile teams, deliver the right products to market, and delight your customers.
Accurate Agile Planning
This one-day deep-dive training shows teams how to make accurate, reliable, and realistic project plans.
Certified ScrumMaster® or Working on a Scrum Team
Description:
These two courses cover the fundamental principles of Scrum. Both courses are suitable for all team members including Scrum Masters and product owners.
Certified ScrumMaster®
A two-day class taught by one of our Certified Scrum Trainers, the Certified ScrumMaster course covers the fundamental principles of Scrum as well as detail about the different roles, meetings, and artifacts. Despite the name, it's perfect for anyone who wants to understand Scrum, not only ScrumMasters.
Working on a Scrum Team
Based on the content of our popular Certified ScrumMaster course, Working on a Scrum Team differs by being entirely configurable. Prior to the course, you will work with one of our instructors to identify the most important course content. If, for example, you want more time spent on estimating and less on the daily scrum, you can easily make this the course for you.
Topics:
Scrum Overview
- Agile
- Scrum
Sprinting
- Timeboxes
- No Changes Allowed
- Reciprocal Commitments
- Defining Done
- Sprint Types
- Introducing Change into a Sprint
The Development Team
- Rights & Responsibilities
- Self-Organizing
- Cross-Functional
- Collaborating
- Component and Feature Teams
The Product Owner
- What is a Product Owner?
- Rights & Responsibilities
- Managing Stakeholders
The Scrum Master
- The Scrum Master
- Rights & Responsibilities
- Four Facilitation Techniques
- Coaching, Mentoring, Teaching & Facilitating
- The Scrum Master in Dual Roles
- Servant Leadership
Managers
- Project Managers
- Functional (Department) Managers
Product Backlog
- Responsibilities & Attributes
- User & Job Stories
- Two Ways of Adding Detail
- Progressive Refinement
- Organizing the Backlog
- Story Splitting
Planning
- Fixed-Date Plans
- Fixed-Scope Plans
- Creating the Plan
- Technical Debt
Estimating
- Relative Estimating
- Story Points
- Ideal Time
- Affinity Estimation
- Three Ways to Estimate Velocity
Sprint Planning
- Meeting Responsibilities
- The Sprint Goal
- The Purpose
- Capacity-Driven Sprint Planning
- Velocity-Driven Sprint Planning
- Decomposing Stories into Tasks
- Working Out of Order
- What To Do When the Product Owner Is Missing
Other Scrum Meetings
- Daily Scrum
- Sprint Review
- Sprint Retrospective
- Product Backlog Refinement
Scaling Scrum
- Scaling Guidelines
- Scaling the Planning Meeting
- Scrum of Scrums
- Communities of Practice
Advanced Certified ScrumMaster®
Description:
In this two-day course you'll dive deep into the advanced skills you need to be a valuable Scrum Master including coaching, facilitation, and the day-to-day techniques that build strong teams. This goes beyond foundational learning and gives you much more nuanced skills that you’ll come to rely on in real life.
It includes pre-workshop video lessons to complete before the live class. You'll then have two days of live, online lessons and group discussions as well as breakout group exercises and individual exercises. You will be expected to participate in all exercises, as well as be prepared to do research and present your thoughts and findings to the class.
With this course you can
- Use advanced facilitation skills to improve communication between the team, product owner, and stakeholders
- Overcome resistance and skepticism with practical coaching techniques
- Motivate a team so that members actually want to achieve goals together
- Stand out from other Scrum Masters and showcase your value as a specialist.
Course Prerequisites
- Hold a CSM designation with the Scrum Alliance (your certification does not need to be active at the time you take the A-CSM course)
- Demonstrate 12 months of work experience as a Scrum Master within the last five years
Topics:
Agile and Scrum
A deep dive into understanding the development of agile, different agile frameworks, and recognizing violations.
The Scrum Master Role
Know what traits are essential to be a truly great Scrum Master
Facilitation
This key module walks you through many advanced facilitation techniques that you can apply whenever you’re working with a team—from understanding what it means to facilitate and how to guide a team through successful discussions to knowing when not to facilitate. This module alone can help transform the communication of any agile team.
Coaching
You’ll understand the difference between being a consultant and a coach, plus learn how to intervene as a coach, and deal effectively with conflict.
High-Performing Teams
This module shows you how to implement practices that take a team from good to great. This includes how to form an effective team, development practices, how to serve product owners, Story Mapping & Impact Mapping as well as backlog refinement.
Agile Organizations
Know how to serve the organization with your team, how to execute root cause analysis, how to scale scrum and understand complex systems.
Scrum Mastery
In this final module, you’ll have a chance to do some private, individual evaluation on how you are currently performing as a Scrum Master, including your strengths and the areas you’d like to continue developing.
Certified Scrum Product Owner®
Description:
Taught by one of our Certified Scrum Trainers, this two-day course is appropriate for new product owners, aspiring product owners, and analysts. Here, we fully equip participants with the knowledge and skills they need to excel.
The course begins with a Scrum overview, introducing the roles of a Scrum team and how products are developed using sprints.
Participants learn the responsibilities, characteristics, and different environments in which a product owner may work. They will practice five techniques for creating and communicating a clear, elevating goal that promotes team commitment and focus.
The product backlog is a central component of every product owner’s work. So they are equipped to write product backlog items for any product, course participants gain experience with user, job, and technical stories. We also cover story mapping, which can help engage stakeholders so that user needs are discovered early—avoiding the late surprises that can derail projects.
Product owners will go beyond knowing what to build, into ensuring features are developed in the optimal order, using the multiple prioritization techniques they’ll practice in this course.
Participants will learn how to produce accurate fixed-date and fixed-scope plans, enabling better decision-making throughout the organization.
Following the successful completion of this course, each participant will become a Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Product Owner.
Topics:
Scrum Overview
- Agile
- Scrum
The Product Owner
- What Is a Product Owner?
- Characteristics
- Responsibilities
- Product Owners in Different Contexts
- Quarterly Activities
- Involvement over Time
- Asking for Clarifications, Not Changes
- Dealing with Difficult Situations
- Business Analysts & Product Managers
- Scaling the Product Owner Role
Visioning
- Specifying the Problem, Not the Solution
- Creating a Concise Vision
- Five Techniques for Communicating Vision
Customers and Users
- Validating Assumptions
- User Roles
- User Role Modeling
- Personas
- Roles vs. Personas
- Decorated Roles & Extreme Characters
The Product Backlog
- What Is a Product Backlog?
- Progressive Elaboration
- Product Backlog Refinement
- User Stories
- Adding Detail to User Stories
- Job Stories
- Technical Stories
- Themes & Epics
- Splitting Stories with the SPIDR Approach
- Who Contributes Items?
- Story Writing Workshop
- Story Mapping
Prioritizing
- Key Concepts in Prioritization
- Factors in Prioritization
- Formal Approaches
- What Different Stakeholders Value
- Collaborative Prioritization Techniques
Planning
- Accuracy and Precision
- Velocity
- Using a Velocity Range
- Fixed-Date Plans
- Fixed-Scope Plans
The Scrum Master
- Responsibilities
- Description of Role
Developers
- Responsibilities
- Component and Feature Teams
The agenda for this course has been carefully defined to comply with Scrum Alliance learning objectives required for certification, so sections cannot be removed or shortened. For a configurable version of this course, consider the Effective Product Owner course.
Better User Stories
Description:
A great product begins with a great product backlog. User stories are by far the most common way of writing product backlog items, used by an increasing number of agile teams.
This course will help participants learn solutions to some of the most common problems with user stories and product backlogs. You will finish the course with known, proven techniques to overcome your current challenges, from spending too much time splitting stories to adding too much detail to managing the need for a requirements document.
During the course, participants will work on product ideas or features you provide. Or they can work on ones we’ve designed to maximize shared learning and bring out the subtle challenges teams can face. During the course, participants can also identify new products to work on throughout the day. This flexibility ensures they are always working on relevant ideas.
Participants will practice conducting a story-writing workshop and will learn how to create a story map to improve communication with stakeholders and to uncover user needs earlier—so last-minute requirements don’t derail a project.
The Better User Stories course goes beyond user stories to give participants practice writing job stories and technical stories, two exciting approaches that can immediately improve a team’s backlog-writing skills.
Knowing how much detail to include (and how early to add it) is a vital skill for agile team members to develop. Adding too much detail too early wastes precious time that could be used on higher priority features. Adding too little detail or adding it too late can jeopardize delivery. Through this course, participants learn simple questions to ask that will get them the right amount of detail every time.
Participants will learn how to split stories so that each can fit within an iteration. Our SPIDR story-splitting framework, taught in this class, will give participants a reliable, repeatable way to split any story.
After taking this course, teams will spend more time building features that deliver the most value to stakeholders each iteration.
Topics:
Common User Story Problems
Story-Writing Workshops
- Four Times to Write Stories
- Focus on a Single, Significant Objective
- Agenda and Participants
Backlog Refinement
- How Much Should Be Known and When
- Adding Detail to Stories
- Disagreements after a Story Is Done
- The Problems with Too Much Detail
- Sub-Stories and Acceptance Criteria
- The Full Lifecycle of a Story
Job and Tech Stories
- When Job Stories Are Appropriate
- Differences Between Job and User Stories
- Technical Stories
Story Mapping
- Common Story Map Problems
- Sub Maps Improve Readability
- Creating a Story Map
- Roadmaps
Splitting Stories
- The Goal in Splitting Stories
- SPIDR
Non-Functional Requirements and Bugs
- Non-functionals and the Definition of Done
- Bugs
Accurate Agile Planning
Description:
This course is for anyone who needs to answer the question:
“How much can be delivered… by when?”
If you’re working on contract-development or high-visibility projects, it’s critical to tell bosses, clients, and customers what can be delivered—and when.
But this isn’t easy when:
- Stakeholders often have unrealistic expectations (and don’t believe you when you say something isn’t possible)
- Teams get confused by story points and struggle to estimate accurately and quickly
- It’s not easy to plan for what you don’t know - some requirements may be hidden at the point of planning
This course shows you how to solve those problems.
You’ll learn proven estimating approaches in an easy-to-understand way so you can:
- Guide any team to estimate quickly and accurately
- Tackle risk and uncertainty upfront - and plan accordingly
- Communicate plans with confidence - answering questions and managing expectations
In just one day you can create accurate, agile plans for fixed scope, fixed date, and fixed everything projects.
This course is ideal for agile leaders at the team or group level including:
- Technical leads
- Team leads
- Scrum Masters
- Product owners
- Product managers
- Agile coaches
The course is intermediate. If you’re new to agile, you can still benefit from this course as long as you are familiar with iterations, product backlogs, velocity, and backlog items such as user stories.
Read the Course Outline below for more details.
Topics:
What Is Agile Planning?
- Good Plans Lead to the Right Decisions
- Why Estimating in Person-Days Does Not Work
Estimating with Story Points
- What Story Points Are
- Using an Appropriate Scale
- Five Types of Estimates and Which Works
- Planning Poker and Affinity Estimating
Milestone (Release) Planning
- Fixed-Date Plans
- Fixed-Scope Plans
- Fixed-Everything Plans
- Estimating Velocity
- Estimating Velocity Without Data (or Even a Team)
Planning for What You Don’t Know
- Why Your Product Backlog Is Bigger than You Think
- Estimating the Unknown Backlog
Buffering Critical Plans
- Don’t Pad a Plan but Buffer What Matters
- Why Two Estimates Are Better (and Faster) than One
- Measuring Risk
- Creating the Buffered Plan
Getting Faster and Better at Estimating
- Seven Things to Do to Get Better, Faster Estimates
- Four Things to Stop Doing
Communicating about Estimates and Plans
- Explaining Story Points
- Explaining What Makes a Good Estimate or Plan
- Answering Questions about the Plan