Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) Training

Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) Training

This course is an intense introduction to Agile Product Management, requirements definition and the Scrum framework.

The Product Owner Journey
  • Duration: 16h
  • Delivery: Remote / Face-to-face
  • Certifications: CSPO Certification (Scrum Alliance)
  • PDU: You can claim 14 PDUs for this training

Overview

Our Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) training class is a learning experience that provides students a full immersion into what it takes to be a great Product Owner. You will learn the theory of the Scrum Framework and then we work through tools to enable great Product Ownership. 

The class is presented in a highly interactive and collaborative format with elements of lecture, classroom discussion, exercises, games and simulations, smoothly blended throughout the class. We will approach the class at a sustainable pace and endeavour to take breaks often, to allow our brain to stay focused and our body to recharge when necessary. 

Upon completion of the class, students will receive their Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) certification and badges from the Scrum Alliance.

“The training reinforced for me the paradigm shift from the waterfall approach in a monolithic organization to Agile’s concept of servant leadership. Yes, I’m leading the team, but I’m here to enable your success.”

Michael M.

Pre-requisites

There is no pre-requisite for attending this class.

Target audience

The Certified Scrum Product Owner course is appropriate for aspiring Product Owners, business analysts, managers, project managers, and organizational team leaders seeking a deeper understanding of the Product Owner role, and how to improve Product Ownership in their organizations

Training topics

  • Scrum in a Nutshell
  • Understanding the role of the Product Owner
  • Techniques for building a compelling product vision 
  • Expressing the Product Goal using Opportunity Canvas
  • Models and techniques for prioritizing product features
  • Practical methods to understand your key customer segments
  • User Story Mapping: creating a shared understanding of customer needs
  • User Stories: eliciting and clearly defining stakeholder needs
  • Effective ways to create and refine a Product Backlog
  • How Product Ownership works with multiple teams

Included in the training

  • Product Owner Certification
  • Certificate + two-year membership to the Scrum Alliance
  • Slack channel to continue collaborating with your classmates after the class and access trainers to ask questions
  • Link to the Do Better Scrum booklet
  • Option to join the agile42 Community and get access to a number of free learning resources, like books, articles and videos
  • Life-long warranty on the course: e-mail access to the trainers

In case of a remote training

  • We will use Zoom as a video conferencing platform. 
  • We will use Slack as an additional messaging channel.
  • We will use Miro as an online whiteboard for digital collaboration.

Why agile42?

  • Experience: Over the years, agile42 has delivered Scrum & Agile training to thousands of professionals worldwide. Our instructors have decades of experience using and coaching Scrum in hundreds of organizations large and small.
  • Excellent ratings: We consistently receive excellent ratings from our participants. 
  • Techniques: In all of our classes, we use techniques from Accelerated Learning and in particular principles and concepts from Training from the Back of the Room
  • Engaging: Our courses are highly interactive and fun – not a PowerPoint assault, and our participants stay engaged throughout the class, learn by doing, and have fun along the way. When learners talk and teach, they learn. -Sharon Bowman
  • Practical and Memorable: Participants learn through hands-on exercises – creating high knowledge retention.
  • Sustainable: We are contributing to a greener planet by decreasing our carbon footprint by not having people travel to the venue, and less paper usage in terms of flipcharts and post-it notes.

Upcoming training

A decision making approach for resilience

Decision-making is an essential process in every organization and can be used as a proxy for the level of resilience and agility. There aren't any right or wrong ways to decide and there are trade-offs involved in each approach.

For example, centralized decision-making processes lead to more coherent decisions at the cost of longer information flows and synchronization delays. If decisions are distributed and frequent, the organization might instead be more autonomous and responsive at the cost of process coherence. In both cases the downsides can be partially offset, e.g. by deploying information systems or by increasing the cultural coherence.

In our latest webinar on November 16th, called “A decision making approach for resilience”, continuing the series on ORGANIC agility topics, we explored Principle #2 and how to use a common and transparent framework for decision-making processes which adapts to each specific context.

Using the Cynefin framework as a guide, we have created a specialized approach to decision-making based on the Cynefin domains, separating out two processes, which are both critical for resilience:

  • Situational analysis: this is how the people making the decision perceive the context in which the decision needs to be made.
  • Decision-making: how the actual decision-making is carried out, based on the situational analysis.

Both parts of the decision-making process are critical for resilience. In order to quickly recover from failure and adapt to changing circumstances, the organization must have the ability to manage the trade-off between speed, risk, and anticipated consequences.

We explored how a situational analysis can be done, through both individual and group sense-making, and we provided an overview of possible decision-making based on context:

  • When the problem at hand is self-evident and doesn’t require specific knowledge or expertise, the organization must have defined policies, processes or tools in place, so that every employee knows when such constraints apply, either because they are common sense or because they are explicitly taught as part of the organization's on-boarding process. The way to improve decision making in this context is to hold regular reviews of those policies and see if small changes can improve the quality of decisions. 
  • When some sort of expertise or analysis is necessary to make a decision, then the approach to decision making is to identify the experts in the specific domain, allow them to provide options (vetted through peer review) and then decide based on those options. To improve decision quality, multiple experts can collaborate, facilitated by a non-expert who can introduce naive questions, avoiding the risk of analysis paralysis and a limited expert point of view. If the experts cannot decide between multiple coherent options within a reasonable amount of time, we might follow into the next scenario.
  • When it is impossible to analyze a situation given the high level of volatility and uncertainty, then the approach to decision making is to run multiple parallel probes, in the hope that certain patterns will emerge that will help decision making. Under such conditions expertise doesn’t play a role, and in fact can hinder if experts cannot see beyond the scope of their expertise, and instead of exploring potential patterns they see every new input through their pre-existing mental models (to an expert in hammers every problem will be a nail).
  • When in a true crisis, it is impossible to analyze the situation, because the volatility is so high that even experimentation won’t help. The only way to proceed is to make decisions with authority as fast as possible. A bad decision is better than no decision at all, as it will create some constraints that will allow patterns to emerge in the system. We recognize such situations as chaotic and very energy-draining, but the presence of constraints and creation of coherence will allow us to move back into a context where experimentation is possible.

Last we discussed how organizational Archetypes can influence the way these decision making patterns are implemented in practice.

 

If you want to know more, you are welcome to join one of our upcoming trainings ORGANIC agility Foundation valid for Certified Agile Leadership - Essentials, Teams & Organizations

  • 08 - 11 February 2021
  • 06 - 09 April 2021
  • There is a BLACK FRIDAY discount valid until 27.11.2020

 

 

You are also welcome to have a look at our book ORGANIC agility Foundations: Leadership and Organization!

 

 

The recording is available online. Feel free to watch it again and share with your network. It is also available on YouTube.

 

Below you will find the slides, with some further content. Please also feel free to share the slides around.

 

Connect with us on social media, to stay updated with blogs, webinars, training and other events which support your learning journey :) We hope to see you in the webinar regarding Principle #3 in January

From here you can check out post and upcoming webinars! The list is updated frequently.

 

Have a great week everyone!

Growing as a Scrum Master and Beyond

Last Wednesday, the 11th of November, we ran our webinar "Growing as a Scrum Master and Beyond"! This topic clearly resonated with many, as we set a new record number of participants. We spotted familiar names who have been following us over the years, and many new names we hope to see again. It makes us happy to see our webinar network growing! 

We had the great honour of welcoming two guests on this webinar, Jelena Vucinic and Bob Stomp, who joined our CSP-SM training this fall. Together with agile42 trainers & coaches, Giuseppe De Simone and Niels Verdonk, we hope they provided you with the content you were after. 

As the coaches mentioned early on in the webinar, being a Scrum Master in a company is much more than just attending a 2-day training to get certified. Whilst your role is to primarily coach the team, it is also to teach, give advice, be a mentor and role model of the Agile and Scrum values and principles. This is not always an easy task. The knowledge and skills you need as a Scrum Master will grow through education, perhaps some additional coaching and most of all the experience and support of other Scrum Masters in your organization and network. 

As Jelena mentioned during the webinar, a typical day for a Scrum Master is not only to facilitate Scrum meetings, however a multitude of other undertakings. You observe the team, prepare for meetings, follow-up action points from meetings, handle impediments, have 1-on-1 meetings with the team members and stakeholders when needed and think about new ways in which you can help your team.

The webinar attendees were particularly interested in the ways you can grow as a Scrum Master, for which there are various paths. You can of course take the training provided on the Scrum Master growth path as visualised in the diagram below. Each training goes deeper into the content of the Scrum Master, and you will gain valuable new skills and learnings to add to your toolbox. The below diagram shows the steps to become a CSP-SM: 

 

We recommended reading The Hitchhikers Guide to Agile Coaching and checking out the post on 5 books we believe every Scrum Master should read.

Other training we offer is the Advanced Team Coaching Course which we recommend for those who already have CSM certification. There is also the ICAgile Team Facilitation Certification to support you as a Scrum Master. Furthermore you could consider coaching from one of our Agile coaches, for example, to grow you or your team of Scrum Masters.

Many of you listening asked us about the whole CSP path, how to grow skills and mindset as well as next steps after CSP-SM certification, and we feel that depends on what skills you wish to deepen. Below you can see examples of next steps, and our Mentoring programme can assist you on these paths. Mentoring is a long term commitment both from your side and the Mentors side, and this is a great opportunity to meet like-minded people, and to grow and learn together. 

If you would like to explore next steps on your individual growth path and/or like to enquire about our Mentoring programme after the CSP-SM, please get in touch with us and we would be happy to help.

Our upcoming trainings can be found here - take the next step on your journey with us!

The recording is available online. Feel free to watch it again and share with your network. It is also available on YouTube.

 

Below you will find the slides, with some further content. Please also feel free to share the slides around.

 

Connect with us on social media, to stay updated with blogs, webinars, training and other events which support your learning journey :) 

 

Have a great weekend, and don't forget to check out post and upcoming webinars!

Achieving Flow in Remote Meetings

Remote meetings can suffer from what we refer to as "traffic jam effects." Maybe someone's internet is dropping, and you keep having to repeat something, or maybe the general pace seems that much slower. These kinds of experiences impact our ability to collaborate remotely.

In our webinar, on the 6th of November, we looked at this problem from a few different angles. We began by looking at some high-level information on the trends of remote work, pre and post COVID. We briefly mentioned our 7 principles for remote facilitation and narrowed in on one, Enable Flow, which was the focus of this webinar. 

Many things can happen in a remote meeting which contribute to the feeling of “stuckness”. For example; technical challenges can interrupt flow as the group waits while information needs to be repeated. Similarly people speaking at the same time or feeling like they can't speak up can create a sense of getting “stuck”. 

If we look outside of meetings to better understand this experience, traffic jams provide a helpful analogy. Sometimes we can see the destination, but progress towards it is painfully slow, and when that happens, it can be super frustrating. It can cause us to feel like getting out of the car and just leaving it there in favour of walking to our destination. Maybe we get frustrated and angry; maybe our chest starts to tighten. It turns out that when we get stuck in remote meetings, our brain might be experiencing some of these same things. 

Our brains are wired to make the experience of closing feedback loops rewarding: it feels good to reach resolutions/achieve “aha” moments. However, if something inhibits us from this closure, the opposite becomes true, frustration, disengagement and fatigue often creep in. 

This is why it's so important to think about enabling flow in remote meetings. And what happens when we get stuck: we want to avoid conditions which lead to disengagement, fatigue, and frustration. We examined the 4 categories of stuckness, and gave some practical methods which can be used to achieve flow in remote meetings. 

Technical 

  1. Agree on a back channel before hand
  2. Co-create visual documentation
  3. Troubleshoot e.g (maybe switching off camera works) 

Ambiguity

  1. Make agenda and session rules visible
  2. Visible instructions
  3. Visually validate outcomes
  4. Root participants in the present

Comprehension

  1. Allow people quiet time to think
  2. Provide participation via writing
  3. Make meeting artifacts visual
  4. Pause and check understanding

Digital fatigue

  1. Make space for breaks
  2. Use energy queues
  3. Consider async

 

Here you can find the slides from the presentation.

The recording is available on YouTube. Please feel free to share around with your network:)

 

In our Remote Facilitation Practitioner training kicking off on the 17th November 2020, we will deep dive into more of the principles for remote design and offer real practices that you can put to use immediately. The training includes practical sessions and feedback to help you improve. We look forward to seeing you there!

 

*Follow this link to view upcoming & past webinars on our website*

Effective Large-Scale Learning

Last week we shared our Corporate Learning Program with our network in a webinar. It was a great pleasure to welcome Katrin Birrer from JTI (Japan Tobacco International) to the session who shared her insights and experience from collaborating with agile42 on JTI’s Agile Champion program, a learning experience which is being rolled out to 10,000 employees. From agile42’s side, our experts Simon Sablowski and Lothar Fischmann, presented the Corporate Learning Program.

More and more large corporates want and need to embrace agility. Becoming agile starts with achieving a shared understanding of the values, principles, and key practices. The challenge is to provide learning to thousands of employees. Agile is existing in many parts of organisations, but having every person attend a stand-alone training, probably with different providers, comes with some problems. The learning is different, in as many ways as there are providers. It takes time to coordinate the training, along with it potentially being a significant investment. 

We’re finding that corporations are seeking solutions that are more cost-effective than sending individuals to training here and there. The Corporate Learning Program, co-created with the client, is more effective, in many ways. 

In the webinar last week we got to take part in JTI’s story and their experience of working with us on their program. We both learnt a great deal through co-creating the program, and we're very pleased with the outcome. You can hear more about this from the recording. 

 

Picture: An example of JTI's program

 

Our Corporate Learning Program offers large-scale learning by:

  • allowing individuals to familiarise themselves with key concepts at their own pace
  • providing everyone with a coherent learning experience
  • customising the learning journey to your company’s needs
  • blending virtual self-learning (understanding key concepts) with experiential learning (putting things into practice)

 

If this sparks your interest, how should you start?

The first step is to get in touch with us, so that we can gain an understanding of your situation - how big of an organisation you are; what your needs are.

Once we understand the needs, we can start to co-create the Corporate Learning Program to ensure the program is tailor-made for your needs and context.

From the picture below, you can see the next steps that follow when we have a program that is ready for employees to start exploring.

 

 

 

Here you can find the slides from the presentation.

 

The recording is available online. You can watch it again or share it with your network as you see fit. It is also available on YouTube.

 

We hope that you get in touch with us so that we can start to explore your needs!

 

*Follow this link to view upcoming & past webinars on our website*

agile42 meets Swedbank – in a webinar

As many of you might have seen, agile42, along with our long-standing client, Swedbank, wrote a Success Story about our journey together. Ever since we've been keen to host a webinar on this, to tell the story! We had the honour of inviting Cecilia Kåhrström to join the webinar with us, where she, together with agile42Sweden's, Giuseppe De Simone, walked the audience through the work we did together. 

The journey has been long: some parts of the work with Swedbank began back in 2014. This webinar and the Success Story, specifically focused on the work with Group IT, which started in 2018. A lot has been done together since then, and we are happy to say that we today can call Cecilia and all Group IT leaders and employees, not clients, but friends. 

In the picture below, Cecilia summarized all the activities that supported the achievement of their current level of agility and we are particularly proud of the bubbles on the right. In fact they show the things which Swedbank continued on their own after we left, witnessing the accomplishment of our mission: grow our clients’ capabilities so that they are able to persevere on their path to agility sustainably after we leave.

The discussion between Cecilia and Giuseppe opened up these topics. 

A particular focus was given to one of the most important factors in this Success Story: how the leaders understood early on that agility could not be achieved just by buying and deploying a predefined process. It was amazing to observe how fast they got this clear understanding compared to other leaders we've met that are just looking for a pre-packaged solution. Every organization that is interested in becoming sustainably agile needs to make this journey on their own: you should not worry about reinventing the wheel, because the journey is more important than the goal.

The slides from the webinar can be found here. You are welcome to have a look at them, and for any questions you have, you can turn to us.

This webinar broke our record with questions from the audience. We had more questions than we could answer. From the recording you can hear the answers that we managed to get to live.

If you missed the live webinar, the recording is available here! It is also available on YouTube. Please have a look at it and feel free to share it around with friends and colleagues.

We hope that you enjoyed this Success Story. For any questions, feel free to reach out to us!

*Follow this link to view upcoming & past webinars on our website*

agile42 and Divimove

agile42 + Divimove reference video

agile42's CEO and Founder, Andrea Tomasini, spoke with Tobias Schiwek, the CEO of Divimove, about how Divimove has grown in resilience through agility, with the help of agile42. This discussion has been recorded as a reference video. A fun way to share client experiences and the work that we do!

Divimove, Europes leading digital studio, has recently gone through a major merge, and as a result has had to overcome challenges within the new organization. One of the hurdles was the merging of teams and finding a way of working together. Divimove's aim was not only to grow in numbers, however, also to grow in a coherent way.

The video covers the early days of agile42 & Divimove's collaboration, along with how we helped them visualise their work as well as tools we used to support their transition. Alignment and getting people on the same page was one particular challenge. We found that supporting the new culture and structure became critical, and in the video you will hear in more detail what the outcome of working with agile42 in only 6 months looks like.

Check out the video and listen to the story of Divimove!

Prioritising with Cost of Delay

This week the “Meet the Coach” webinar series delved into the interesting topic of “Prioritising with Cost of Delay”. The presentation went really well and we had many people listening, once again. It makes us happy to see so many people returning to our webinars, with new faces joining all the time. We hope to see you all again soon! 

Whether it is for large initiatives or items on the product backlog, prioritising work is something many organisations are struggling with. Some choices will have different impacts for certain stakeholders. Often it is hard to keep things objective, since there are opinions, ego’s, status and emotions involved. Ordering by value is not always as linear as you would expect. In many cases we are comparing apples with oranges, for example how do you compare an initiative to attract new users with quality improvements?

In the webinar we looked at different aspects related to comparing items and I explained the concept of Cost of Delay and how it can be used as a prioritisation technique. Below you can find some of my suggestions from the webinar. 

 

 

 

If you missed out on the webinar, don’t worry! We have the recording available for you. Feel free to share it around with friends and colleagues. The recording of the session is available on YouTube. If there is anything we can help you with regarding this topic, feel free to contact us.

 

 

As mentioned in the webinar, if you want to learn more about Cost of Delay, or how to work with stakeholders, how to make choices and how to be a good Product Owner – join a training with us! 

The Product Owner journey starts here.

Take the first step on the journey by attending Certified Scrum Product Owner training.

In this training you will learn the theory of the Scrum Framework and work through tools to enable great Product Ownership. The CSPO course is appropriate for aspiring Product Owners, business analysts, managers, project managers, and organizational team leaders seeking a deeper understanding of the Product Owner role, and how to improve Product Ownership in their organization. 

If you are already a CSPO, take the next step and deep dive with Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner training . All upcoming trainings can be found online. Please bare in mind that in order to receive an A-CSPO certification it’s required to hold a valid CSPO certification with Scrum Alliance and validate at least 12 months of work experience specific to the role of Product Owner (within the past five years).

We run all our trainings both remotely and in-person! If your organization would prefer a private training, we can even look at customising the training for you. Get in touch and we can discuss the best solution! 

And don’t forget about the coaching. At agile42 we do a lot of role coaching, and the support we can give your Product Owners will help their daily work. 

I have shared the slides used during the webinar below: 

 

Here you can learn more about the Business Value Game. The Business Value Game is a tool for estimating the Business Value in software development projects, it helps Product Owners and Stakeholders in sharing information related to Business Values in a relatively short time. It avoids anchoring by asking each Stakeholder to play their estimate card so that it cannot be seen by the others and then all cards are exposed at once.

Here you can order the Planning Poker Cards. Planning poker is mostly used to estimate the effort or the relative size of tasks in software development. The members of the project team come together and estimate each item in a few rounds using the planning poker cards until the team reaches consensus on the size of each item or task.

 

For more webinars and recordings, please look here!
Hope to see you in the next ones! 

 

Starting a Scrum Team

This blogpost will give you insights into starting a Scrum team, with a recording from the webinar and some additional information to support you with this journey.

As with Scrum in general, starting a team is easy to understand but difficult to master. I presented a webinar on this topic where I wanted to run you through the finer points of starting a team. Starting a team is not just explaining Scrum and proclaiming: “Go!”. It is a process in which the level of complexity needs to be evaluated in order to determine the right approach to move forward. Will Scrum really benefit you? Once this has been established it’s time to get into the nuts and bolts. I discussed what steps need to be taken in the first few weeks and what to expect while establishing a healthy team. 

Since we are progressively stepping into a world where remote collaboration is becoming the standard, I created the opportunity for Q&A during the webinar where we discussed some interesting questions regarding remote collaboration as well as other pain points. This can be heard in the recording of the webinar.

For those who missed the live session, don't panic! Here you can find the recording, and it is also available on YouTube.  Have a look and feel free to share with friends and colleagues. If there is anything we can help you with regarding this topic, feel free to contact us

 

 

We would also like to share a few links that may be of interest to you. We have a Scrum start-up package for kicking off new Scrum teams, and this link gives you some insights into this service. We would be more than happy to walk through with you how we can help support your teams. Please keep in mind that e.g. the Team Kickoff can be done every now and then with the teams, and we strongly recommend this e.g. after summer vacations or winter breaks. 

As we mentioned in the webinar, if you want to take your basic learnings to the next level, we recommend Certified Scrum Master (CSM) training. At agile42 we are currently running this training remotely, and dates can be found from the listing. 

For more on the topic of team dynamics, you can always book sessions with a coach, and if you want to learn how to support your teams with this, please have a look at the Advanced Certified Scrum Master (A-CSM) training or the Advanced Team Coaching Course (ATCC) where you can boost your own skills. These trainings give you, as an Agile Coach or Scrum Master, valuable support to help you with your teams. 

We have all kinds of support for the Agile teams, and many of the steps that I listed in the webinar are services we can provide, so please connect with us and we would be more than happy to help.

 

For more webinars and recordings, please look here! More  webinars!