Facilitators

Tobias Mayer and Matt Smith

Course Description

The Scrum Master role is a challenging one; Scrum Masters are expected to be facilitators, servant-leaders, mentors, advisors and process gurus. It’s a tough job. As an organization progresses with Scrum, dysfunction begins to surface and many impediments are unearthed. This is inevitable. It is common at this time for the organization to want to drop Scrum and return to previous ways of working. It takes a strong Scrum Master to mentor both his team and the wider organization through such difficult times.

The Advanced Scrum Master training course offers a tool kit to Scrum Masters for navigating the turbulent waters of organizational change. The course is aimed at software professionals who have already taken the CSM training and are actively practicing Scrum.

This is not a quick-fix solution (those do not exist) but an in-depth exploration of facilitation and problem solving techniques. Through lecture, discussion, role-play and hands-on exercises participants will experience different ways of approaching problems and discover how to draw relevant solutions best suited to their own context.

Drawing from real-world Agile experience and a deep understanding of group dynamics and paradigm shifting within the workplace the facilitators will guide the participants through their own journey of discovery. At the end of the course the participants will have both a clearer vision of how to face their current challenges and an awareness of how to apply their own personal skills, qualities and experiences to their role of Scrum Master.

Course Content

The course will focus on the Scrum Master as a facilitator: listening, mentoring, problem solving and release skills will be developed as well as an understanding of how to "manage" a self-managing team. Over the two days we will cover such topics as co-ordinating distributed teams, scaling to multiple teams, using collaboration tools, handling common Scrum "smells", tracking sprints and using metrics. There will also be space to discuss issues specific to the participants' own context.

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Contact Agile Thinking for dates and locations.