Course 375:
Scrum Essentials with Kanban

(2 days)

 

Course Description

Scrum Essentials training provides an applied/hands-on understanding of the Scrum framework and helps participants begin to develop the tools, insights, and skills required to perform the role of ScrumMaster and apply Scrum on their projects and help their organizations adopt this new technique. We will review current methodologies your team uses (Agile, Waterfall, etc.) and help create a best practices checklist leveraging Scrum and Kanban as additional tools.

Learning Objectives

This course will teach you to perform the ScrumMaster role on any Scrum effort. Specifically, you will learn how to:

  • Initiate and lead a Scrum effort
  • Establish a shared vision for the entire team as you adopt the role of ‘Servant Leader’
  • Conduct Scrum Sprint planning utilizing user stories and story point estimation
  • Lead your Scrum team through planning, daily Scrums, review, and retrospective sessions
  • Utilize burndown charts to identify and manage team velocity
  • Create an environment in which self-managing, self-organizing teams can flourish
  • Identify, enroll, and engage business stakeholders in your project
  • Apply Kanban best practices using workshops

Who Should Attend

This course is designed for those who will lead, support, or participate in Scrum-driven projects; this includes project leaders and existing project managers, potential ScrumMasters, existing ScrumMasters, Product Owners, development managers, team members, architects and developers.

Course Outline

Chapter 1: History of Scrum

  • Activity I – Students will identify a list of ‘buzzwords’ that characterize Scrum as they know it today. This will be used to establish a common understanding of the course and what each student brings with them to the course. It will also be utilized each day as a review.
  • History – Simple Beginnings
  • Description of the New Product Development white paper. The early work of both Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, a definition of SCRUM and simple description of empirical control (how and why it works), ending with a simple description of Waterfall vs. Scrum and how Scrum is winning.
  • Overview of Scrum
    • Roles – Introduce ScrumMaster, product owner and the development team
    • Artifacts – Introduce the product backlog with stories, the Sprint backlog with tasks, the final product and the burndown chart
    • Ceremonies – Introduce the concept of timeboxing with the Sprint, the Sprint planning session, the daily Scrum, the Sprint review and the Sprint retrospective
    • The Framework – One page illustrating current thinking on the framework. This will be used as the structure slide for the remainder of the two days.
  • Resources you can use:
    • org
    • Scrum Alliance
    • Agile Alliance
  • Activity II – The students will be asked to visit www.scrum.org and download the current version of the Scrum guide. They will then be asked to peruse the article and identify the different roles, artifacts, and ceremonies within the body of the document.

Chapter 2: Vision

  • Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing
    • Developing self-managing, Self-Organizing Teams
    • The Servant Leader
    • Three Roles of Scrum Work Together

Chapter 3: Stories

  • Writing Stories
  • Evaluating Stories
  • Estimating Stories
  • Estimating Business Value
  • Activity IV – Writing and assessing stories with INVEST. Everyone writes and everyone evaluates with no specific case study yet.
  • Product Backlog
    • Product Backlog Items
    • Stories
    • Epics
    • Minimal Marketable Features
    • Activity V Ordered List – The students will develop an ordered list for their product backlog. The team will select a product owner based on interest in the case study and the instructor will assign a second student to play the ScrumMaster role. Each person will get to play the SM role throughout the two days so the instructor needs to plan this out a bit. The product owner will need to be worked in, but their interest will be used to help guide the story writing at first.

Chapter 4: Sprint Planning

  • Order of Events
  • Sprint Backlog vs. Product Backlog
  • The Task Board and Kanban
  • The Burndown Chart Explained
  • What Does the Scrum Master Do?
  • Activity VI – Conduct Sprint Planning
  • Activity VII – Perform first sprint and develop burndown chart

Chapter 5: Daily Scrum

  • Three Questions
  • Impediments and What To Do with Them
  • Corporate Change
  • Activity VIII – Perform second Sprint with a new ScrumMaster and compare results, specifically velocity, to Sprint #1. The ScrumMasters are expected to perform the daily with their team and identify impediments

Chapter 6: Sprint Review

  • Purpose and Steps of Sprint Review
  • Demo vs. Presentation
  • What About Integration Testing
  • Activity IX – Perform Sprint #3 with a new ScrumMaster and focus on having each team prepare a Sprint review of their work. One team will present and other teams’ ScrumMasters will critique

Chapter 7: Sprint Retrospective

  • Retrospective Recipe: Activity X (one large group) – Discuss lessons learned in the three Sprints thus far
  • Activity XI – Sprint #4 with a new ScrumMaster and focus on the retro. Ask each team to identify at least one thing they want to try differently on the next sprint. Key: Do the retro first based on our discussion with the large group, then perform the Sprint with the different techniques applied, then perform another retro. This second retro will be presented to the class.

Chapter 8: Lean and Kanban

  • Lean
  • MUDA
  • Continuous Improvement
  • Investment Ladders
  • Value Stream Maps
  • Cumulative Flow Diagrams
  • Drawing the Map
  • Where is the Muda?
  • KanBan = Sign Card
  • Cadence
  • Root Cause Analysis
  • Reducing WIP
  • Pull Systems
  • Activity – LEGO
  • Activity – Your process

Chapter 9: Change It Up

  • Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing
  • ScrumMaster vs. Product Owner Energy Level
  • Servant Leader Revisited
  • Activity XII – Current ScrumMasters will change teams and evaluate the existing teams by conducting another Sprint (Sprint #5). Let the teams run with what they already know, and have the ScrumMasters evaluate against several key items in a checklist. This is a good time to simply have the ScrumMaster observe the team and not inject themselves, then identify how well the team can perform on their own.

Chapter 10: Course Summary

Please Contact Your ROI Representative to Discuss Course Tailoring!