We are happy and excited to announce our Coach’s Guide Series!
This series provides a collection of training and workshop plans for a variety of agile topics. The series is aimed at agile coaches, trainers and ScrumMasters who often find themselves needing to help teams understand agile concepts. Each book in the series provides the plans, slides, workbooks and activity instructions to run a number of workshops on each topic. The interactive workshops are all created using techniques from Training from the Back of the Room, to ensure participants are engaged and remember their learnings after the workshop.
The series is available in a bundle on Leanpub, else you can purchase the books individually.
Books in the series:
Growing Agile: A Coach’s Guide to Training Scrum
Part of the ScrumMaster role is to ensure that everyone on their team is educated about Scrum and to evangelise Scrum to their organisation. Over the past few years we have come across many ScrumMasters who have great intentions of running training but then get bogged down in the planning and preparation and don’t ever get round to actually doing it.
We have been training teams in Scrum for about three years. Over the past year we have trained Certified ScrumMaster classes worldwide. During this time we have spent many hours preparing training plans and creating workbooks, flipcharts and slides. Our materials have been continually refined from feedback after each course. All our training uses Training from the Back of the Room principles.
This book will help you plan and deliver interactive, fun Scrum training for anything from a short workshop on a particular topic to a full two-day course.
Growing Agile: A Coach’s Guide to Training Scrum is available on Leanpub.
Growing Agile: A Coach’s Guide to Agile Requirements
Have you ever looked at a requirement document thats 50 plus pages long and wondered if there was an easier way to communicate? Or have you ever received a 1 liner story without any context and thought ‘huh?’.
We have and in our years of work in traditional waterfall organisations and newer agile organisations the trend continues. Very seldom is the sweet spot in the middle achieved. In every single case the path to the sweet spot started with conversations.
Over the last 3 years we have developed a number of workshops to help people start these conversation. The workshops are aimed at different stakeholders raging from business, to Product Owners and teams. This book is a collection of some of those workshop and can be used to help improve the way you think about and communicate agile requirements.
Although we talk about Product Owners, this book isn’t just for Scrum teams. You can apply most of the lessons in here to any project you are on. We have used these techniques and ideas for renovating houses, redesigning websites and even writing this book!
Growing Agile: A Coach’s Guide to Agile Requirements is available on Leanpub.
Growing Agile: A Coach’s Guide to Mastering Backlogs
Scrum is great for getting teams to deliver good quality software regularly, but that doesn’t really help if you are building the wrong thing! The Product Backlog is a key artefact to helping steer the team in the right direction. Yet sometimes the Product Backlog is just a long list of tickets logged by the business. Often Product Owners can’t see the forest for the trees and there are so many items in their backlog the team have no idea what direction the product is actually headed. Even if you know what your backlog should look like, finding the time to get it in order seems impossible.
If this sounds familiar, this book is for you. We have worked with a number of business analysts and Product Owners who feel the same way. We found that sending Product Owners on 2 day theoretical training courses is not the answer. Instead we run short workshops where we work with the Product Owner’s actual backlog. The workshop is a working session, and an hour later the Product Owners emerge with an improved backlog.
We have combined a number of these workshops into this book. We provide all our workshop plans, tips for facilitation, and teaching points to cover for each topic. Use these workshops to help the Product Owners you work with to master their backlogs.
Growing Agile: A Coach’s Guide to Mastering Backlogs is available on Leanpub.
Growing Agile: A Coach’s Guide to Release Planning
We often hear people say “We’re agile, we don’t need a plan”! or even worse “We can’t plan”. This is just not true. Release Planning in agile is as important as it is in traditional projects, the only difference is there are a few techniques that help make sure the plans bear some relation to reality. We’ve all worked on projects where you know from day 1 you will be late, and yet no one does anything about it. Agile planning is different. We give up the illusion of control of traditional rigid plans, and replace it with a clear view of where we actually are, even if it’s badly behind schedule, so that together we can make decisions based on what is actually possible.
We have run Release Planning workshops with many organisations. Sometimes starting with C-level executives to set the direction and vision for a product suite, other times starting with teams and making sense of what they are currently working on. This book is a collection of our workshops that will help you run similar workshops to create agile release plans. We include teaching points on a range of techniques like Story Mapping and release burnups to help you explain to other’s how to use these methods effectively.
Growing Agile: A Coach’s Guide to Release Planning is available on Leanpub.
Growing Agile: A Coach’s Guide to Agile Testing
If a team believes they are agile, but nothing has changed about the way they test, then there is still much to learn. We teach 5 key principles that explain why agile testing is fundamentally different to traditional testing.
This books includes a collection of workshops to help teams grasp these principles and adopt an agile testing mindset. It’s not just for testers. A key part of agile testing is that the whole team is involved, so we always run these workshops with everyone in the team.
If your team is ready for the next level we highly recommend running through the workshops in this book, it will teach them a number of simple but valuable techniques to help prevent bugs and dramatically increase the quality of your products. We provide everything you need to run the workshops, from facilitation plans, to teaching points, and even the slides you might use.
Growing Agile: A Coach’s Guide to Agile Testing is available on Leanpub.