Scrum & Agile Training

Description:

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.

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.
 

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.

Description:

During a release planning workshop, we help you turn an estimated product backlog into a release plan that’s useful for making decisions.

By the end of the workshop you will have:

• A plan looking 3–6 months ahead, and possibly further
• A plan on which you can base decisions
• An understanding of how planning changes when creating a fixed-date, fixed-scope, or fixed-price plan
• The best estimate of a team’s velocity range
• An understanding of how reliable the team members’ estimates are
• Possible action steps to improve your teams’ estimates
• Confidence in how to communicate about the plan with leaders and stakeholders

This workshop is perfect for:

• Product owners, Scrum Masters, coaches, or managers who are being asked to create and commit to plans

This workshop is most effective after a team has estimated product backlog items with our help in a guided Estimating Workshop

Description:

Backlog refinement is the act of ensuring the product backlog is well maintained. High priority items should be small, relatively well understood and achievable in a single iteration.

Agile teams typically conduct product backlog refinement meetings once per iteration—or shorter meetings weekly—to ensure high-priority product backlog items are ready to be brought into the next sprint.

Our backlog refinement workshop is tailored to meet the needs of the participating teams, which can number one to three. A typical workshop begins with an educational section devoted to topics selected during a pre-course call. Common topics include:

• Understanding how much detail is appropriate
• Understanding who is responsible for adding detail
• The purpose of estimating product backlog items
• How to know when an item is ready for a sprint
• How to stop spending so much time in backlog refinement
• When to do backlog refinement

Each three-hour, interactive backlog refinement workshop is led by an experienced Mountain Goat Software mentor.

At the end of this session, participants will be able to refine backlog items much more quickly with less disagreement over how much detail is appropriate. Participants will also be able to plan improvements to clean up messy product backlogs and ensure they remain in good shape.

This workshop is perfect for:

• Teams who spend too much time in product backlog refinement Teams and product owners who disagree on how much detail should be included before a sprint starts
• Teams whose product backlogs are a mess and need help improving them. We helped a company with over 2 million backlog items; we can help with yours.