Working on a Scrum Team
Description:
Working on a Scrum Team is designed for all team members, including Scrum Masters and product owners.
The course covers all topics essential to using Scrum—to deliver better solutions more quickly and efficiently. Participants will learn about and practice:
- Scrum meetings
- Product backlog creation and refinement, especially with user stories
- The rights and responsibilities of all three Scrum roles: Scrum Master, product owner, and developer
- How project managers and other managers fit into Scrum
- How to estimate with story points and turn estimates into a reliable plan
- And more
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:
- Agile
- Scrum
- Timeboxes
- No Changes Allowed
- Reciprocal Commitments
- Defining Done
- Sprint Types
- Introducing Change into a Sprint
- Rights & Responsibilities
- Self-Organizing
- Cross-Functional
- Collaborating
- Component and Feature Teams
- What is a Product Owner?
- Rights & Responsibilities
- Managing Stakeholders
- The Scrum Master
- Rights & Responsibilities
- Four Facilitation Techniques
- Coaching, Mentoring, Teaching & Facilitating
- The Scrum Master in Dual Roles
- Servant Leadership
- Project Managers
- Functional (Department) Managers
- Responsibilities & Attributes
- User & Job Stories
- Two Ways of Adding Detail
- Progressive Refinement
- Organizing the Backlog
- Story Splitting
- Fixed-Date Plans
- Fixed-Scope Plans
- Creating the Plan
- Technical Debt
- Relative Estimating
- Story Points
- Ideal Time
- Affinity Estimation
- Three Ways to Estimate Velocity
- 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
- Daily Scrum
- Sprint Review
- Sprint Retrospective
- Product Backlog Refinement
- Scaling Guidelines
- Scaling the Planning Meeting
- Scrum of Scrums
- Communities of Practice
The agenda for Working on a Scrum Team is based on the agenda for our Certified ScrumMaster course. But instead of taking it as-is, you will work with your instructor to select the modules that best meet your needs.
This agenda is a starting point. A Mountain Goat Software instructor will help you adjust the length of these modules as well as add and remove modules to match your needs.
Effective Product Owner
Description:
Participants will be introduced to the fundamental principles of agile and Scrum as well as the three roles of a Scrum team. They’ll learn how sprints are used to maximize the value delivered—by creating feedback cycles to amplify and accelerate learning.
All three roles of a Scrum project team are covered, with special emphasis on challenges and responsibilities of being an effective product owner. The course equips product owners to make better decisions and improve their relationships with stakeholders.
We’ll teach five techniques that product owners can use to create a shared, elevating vision of the product’s near- and long-term future. Practice creating a product backlog in story-writing workshops, especially with story mapping.
Participants gain practical experience with user, job, and technical stories.
Product backlog maintenance and refinement are fully covered, equipping participants with time-saving skills.
Multiple techniques are practiced for prioritizing a product backlog to maximize value delivery, improve flow, and eliminate bottlenecks that can delay progress.
Participants learn how to create accurate plans of when a product will be delivered with which features.
Starting with the content in our Certified Scrum Product Owner course, the Effective Product Owner course can be configured so that specific topics are shortened, lengthed, removed, or added to create the ideal course.
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 user stories and less on prioritizing the product backlog, you can easily make this the course for you.
Topics:
- Agile
- Scrum
- 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
- Specifying the Problem, Not the Solution
- Creating a Concise Vision
- Five Techniques for Communicating Vision
- Validating Assumptions
- User Roles
- User Role Modeling
- Personas
- Roles vs. Personas
- Decorated Roles & Extreme Characters
- 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
- Key Concepts in Prioritization
- Factors in Prioritization
- Formal Approaches
- What Different Stakeholders Value
- Collaborative Prioritization Techniques
- Accuracy and Precision
- Velocity
- Using a Velocity Range
- Fixed-Date Plans
- Fixed-Scope Plans
- Responsibilities
- Component and Feature Teams
- Responsibilities
- Description of Role
The agenda for the Effective Product Owner course is based on the agenda for our Certified Scrum Product Owner course. Instead of taking it as-is, you will work with your instructor to select the modules that best meet your needs.
This agenda is a starting point. A Mountain Goat Software instructor will help you adjust the length of these modules as well as add and remove modules to match your needs.
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:
- Four Times to Write Stories
- Focus on a Single, Significant Objective
- Agenda and Participants
- 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
- When Job Stories Are Appropriate
- Differences Between Job and User Stories
- Technical Stories
- Common Story Map Problems
- Sub Maps Improve Readability
- Creating a Story Map
- Roadmaps
- The Goal in Splitting Stories
- SPIDR
- Non-functionals and the Definition of Done
- Bugs
Certified ScrumMaster®
Description:
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.
For two days, Scrum is brought to life with lectures, lively discussions, and exercises that show participants how to use Scrum in their work. We’ll teach how to work with the product backlog and sprint backlog, run effective daily meetings and sprint planning meetings, as well as estimate and plan projects. Aside from learning how to apply Scrum to projects, participants who successfully complete the Certified ScrumMaster training are ready to take the Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Master exam and become a Certified ScrumMaster.
Topics:
- Agile
- Scrum
- Timeboxes
- No Changes Allowed
- Reciprocal Commitments
- Defining Done
- Sprint Types
- Introducing Change into a Sprint
- Rights & Responsibilities
- Self-Organizing
- Cross-Functional
- Collaborating
- Component and Feature Teams
- What is a Product Owner?
- Rights & Responsibilities
- Managing Stakeholders
- The Scrum Master
- Rights & Responsibilities
- Four Facilitation Techniques
- Coaching, Mentoring, Teaching & Facilitating
- The Scrum Master in Dual Roles
- Servant Leadership
- Project Managers
- Functional (Department) Managers
- Responsibilities & Attributes
- User & Job Stories
- Two Ways of Adding Detail
- Progressive Refinement
- Organizing the Backlog
- Story Splitting
- Fixed-Date Plans
- Fixed-Scope Plans
- Creating the Plan
- Technical Debt
- Relative Estimating
- Story Points
- Ideal Time
- Affinity Estimation
- Three Ways to Estimate Velocity
- 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
- Daily Scrum
- Sprint Review
- Sprint Retrospective
- Product Backlog Refinement
- Scaling Guidelines
- Scaling the Planning Meeting
- Scrum of Scrums
- Communities of Practice
This agenda 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 Working on a Scrum Team course.
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:
- Agile
- Scrum
- 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
- Specifying the Problem, Not the Solution
- Creating a Concise Vision
- Five Techniques for Communicating Vision
- Validating Assumptions
- User Roles
- User Role Modeling
- Personas
- Roles vs. Personas
- Decorated Roles & Extreme Characters
- 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
- Key Concepts in Prioritization
- Factors in Prioritization
- Formal Approaches
- What Different Stakeholders Value
- Collaborative Prioritization Techniques
- Accuracy and Precision
- Velocity
- Using a Velocity Range
- Fixed-Date Plans
- Fixed-Scope Plans
- Responsibilities
- Description of Role
- 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.
Agile for Leaders
Description:
This course ensures that leaders and executives can support agile and Scrum initiatives by understanding the fundamentals of these frameworks.
This session is designed for busy schedules—distilling content into actionable knowledge that leaders need to succeed.
By the end of this course, participants will have a solid understanding of Scrum and agile and know how to support teams to get the best results.
Topics:
- Demonstrate Your Commitment
- Keep Change out of Sprints
- Empower Teams
- Acknowledge Uncertainty
- Keep Consistent Teams
- Don’t Expect Teams to Finish Everything Every Sprint
- Don’t Expect Scrum to Fix All Problems
- Setting Priorities
- Setting a Good Example
- Encourage Experimentation
You can choose up to seven of the above topics to be covered during the session. We will work with you to select items, to have the greatest impact.
Introduction to Agile
Description:
This course provides an introduction to agile and some of the most popular agile frameworks.
The course helps participants:
- Understand the new roles on an agile team and how existing roles change
- Work in short, timeboxed iterations to deliver value every couple of weeks
- Run effective, efficient agile meetings
- Overcome some of the most common hurdles to becoming agile
After this course, teams will be sufficiently informed to decide if agile is a promising direction for their projects and will be equipped to begin. Teams with a greater commitment to agile may wish to consider the two-day Working on a Scrum Team course, which provides deeper coverage of these and additional topics.
Topics:
- Principles
- Leading Agile Approaches
- Scrum
- Kanban
- Extreme Programming
- Scaling Frameworks
- Timeboxed
- Collaboration
- Done Every Iteration
- Product Owner
- Coach or Scrum Master
- Developers
- How Existing Roles Change
- A Good Product Backlog Is DEEP
- User and Job Stories as Backlog Items
- Backlog Refinement
- Adding Just Enough Detail Just in Time
- Who, When, Why?
- Agenda
- Who, When, Why?
- Purpose
- Troubleshooting Common Problems
- What Challenges Do You Anticipate?
Accurate Agile Planning
Description:
This course provides proven estimating approaches in an easy-to-understand manner.
Teams will master the concept of story points, understand how 80% of the risk to a project's schedule often lies in 20% of the product backlog items, and learn how to produce reliable plans and communicate confidently about them.
This course helps teams:
- Understand agile estimation—and how it differs from traditional methods
- Create accurate estimates—even when facing uncertainty and unknowns
- Get buy-in from stakeholders—by communicating the plan itself
After this course, teams can create plans that are flexible, realistic, and based on best practices.
The course is interactive and practice-oriented, with plenty of examples, exercises, and real-world scenarios to help teams grasp the concepts and apply them effectively in their work.
Teams will leave not just with theoretical knowledge, but with practical skills and confidence to tackle agile estimation and planning in real-world projects.
Topics:
- Good Plans Lead to the Right Decisions
- Why Estimating in Person-Days Does Not Work
- What Story Points Are
- Using an Appropriate Scale
- Five Types of Estimates and Which Works
- Planning Poker and Affinity Estimating
- Fixed-Date Plans
- Fixed-Scope Plans
- Fixed-Everything Plans
- Estimating Velocity
- Estimating Velocity Without Data (or Even a Team)
- Why Your Product Backlog Is Bigger than You Think
- Estimating the Unknown Backlog
- Don’t Pad a Plan but Buffer What Matters
- Why Two Estimates Are Better (and Faster) than One
- Measuring Risk
- Creating the Buffered Plan
- Seven Things to Do to Get Better, Faster Estimates
- Four Things to Stop Doing
- Explaining Story Points
- Explaining What Makes a Good Estimate or Plan
- Answering Questions about the Plan
Story Writing Workshop
Description:
A story-writing workshop is tailored to meet the needs of the one to three teams participating. A typical workshop begins with an educational section devoted to topics selected during a pre-course call. Common topics include:
- Understanding user, job, and technical stories, including when and how to use each
- Splitting stories simply and easily using a proven framework
- Knowing how much detail needs to be included, when, and by whom
- Adding detail to user stories with acceptance criteria and sub-stories
- The six attributes (INVEST) of a good story
- Story mapping to visualize the relationships among stories
- Troubleshooting common problems
This workshop is perfect for:
- Teams constantly tackling distractions and struggling to deliver the value they know they are capable of
- Teams that find their own story-writing produces a lot of ideas, but few actionable results
- Teams that want to plan and write better stories
At the end of this session, teams will leave with stories for their own product backlog that are well written, refined, and clearly understood.
Topics:
Your story-writing workshop will be very practical with the majority of time spent writing, splitting, and adding acceptance criteria to your real stories as identified by participants.
In advance of the workshop, one of our experienced agile mentors will host a Zoom session with key team members in order to understand the specific challenges faced by the team.
The workshop will begin with educational content selected by your agile mentor based on the pre-workshop Zoom session.
Then the majority of the workshop will be spent writing, splitting, adding detail to, and discussing the team’s actual stories.
Retrospective Workshop
Description:
In this workshop, a trainer will facilitate a retrospective for the team so they can see how to run one successfully.
This workshop is perfect for:
- Teams struggling to get valuable feedback in retrospectives and reviews
- Scrum Masters and product owners whose teams are frustrated with (and tempted to skip) retrospectives
- Teams that simply list completed tasks during a review—failing to engage stakeholders.
They’ll learn how to:
- Avoid stale retrospectives
- Highlight areas for improvement during a retrospective and act on them
- Elicit actionable feedback in reviews—feedback that will help teams build better products
At the end of this session, teams will understand the importance of retrospectives and have a tool kit of techniques to increase engagement.
Topics:
Mountain Goat Software workshops are very practical—we spend the majority of time working directly on issues faced by your teams.
In advance of the workshop, one of our experienced agile mentors will host a Zoom session with key team members in order to understand the challenges faced by the team and expectations of a successful retrospective.
The retrospective will begin with a brief educational piece during which your mentor may present a few slides prepared as a result of the Zoom session.
Then the majority of the workshop will be spent conducting an actual retrospective.
The workshop will conclude with recommendations for conducting future retrospectives.
Estimating Workshop
Description:
We estimate product backlog items so that product owners can better prioritize the product backlog and teams can predict how much they’ll deliver by given dates. Story points—abstract, relative measures of effort—can lead to more accurate plans, but many teams struggle with them at first. Our estimating workshop is tailored to meet the needs of the one to three participating teams. A typical workshop begins with an educational section devoted to topics selected during a pre-course call. Common topics include:
- Understanding the subtle but critical relationship between story points and time
- Learning the four factors that determine an estimate
- Establishing a baseline that can be used for all later estimates
- Triangulating estimates to improve accuracy
- Estimating with Planning Poker® and Affinity Estimation
This workshop is perfect for:
- Teams that need to improve their ability to accurately predict what can be delivered when
- Teams suffering from different understandings of what a story point is
- Teams that want to provide estimates and plans the organization can trust
At the end of this session, teams will understand what story points are and how to use them to estimate more accurately. They will also estimate some of their actual product backlog items—and those estimated items can be used as a baseline for future estimates.
Topics:
The goal of an estimating workshop is for participants to gain practical experience by estimating their real product backlog items.
That’s why we provide a pre-workshop Zoom meeting with a Mountain Goat Software agile mentor and one or more of your key team members. We learn what your team needs, and then generally begin the workshop with an educational session to explain story points or correct misconceptions about them. The educational content may also be adjusted during the workshop if appropriate.
Once everyone understands story points and how to estimate them, your mentor will facilitate estimating actual product backlog items provided by team members.
The workshop will conclude with recommendations participants can follow in future estimating sessions.
Agile Assessment
Description:
Assess the current state of your organization using a proprietary Elements of Agile® framework that gives recommendations on the most promising areas for improvement.