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10 Steps to Get the Professional Development Training You and Your Team Need

By: Resalin Gurka | Nov 02, 2023 |  Agile Training

A picture of someone doing their professional development

 

We all want it. We all need it. But, it can still be hard to ask your boss for professional development opportunities. 

According to the 2022 report on workplace learning and development trends by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), professional learning and development serve two vital functions to the organization: 

  1. Maintain and gain new knowledge and skills to respond to business needs
  2. Recruit and retain talented employees

Over half (55%) of those interviewed for the survey believe that they need additional training to perform the duties of their role. So how do employees get the training they need and deserve? 

The following will help you ask for professional development. By the time you work through these steps, you’ll have the talking points needed to meet with your leader and come prepared to answer questions that might surface. 

Here are 10 steps to get you on your path to continuous improvement and learning. 

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Getting Better Because of Conflict Management: A Conflict-hating Scrum Master’s Story

By: Shelby Turk | Aug 12, 2020 |  Agile,  Agile Training,  Leadership,  Scrum,  ScrumMaster,  Team

The issue.

Conflict. 

It makes me nervous just thinking about conflict in the workplace. It brings to the surface old insecurities, hurt feelings, and power struggles. Through my education there was a constant mantra–No one likes a pot-stirrer, don’t rock the boat, grin and bear it –here are a million different phrases, but they all boil down to basic conflict avoidance. Moving into the professional world it is repeated in different ways, often under the umbrella of creating good workplace culture. Conflict is an unavoidable part of life and it will find you in the workplace. 

 A close friend once told me that all conflict comes from an expectation not being met. At first, this seemed like a gross oversimplification and I blew it off as idle conversation but it stuck in my brain as I began a new chapter in my career, becoming a Certified Scrum Master. Servant leadership, being the buffer between my team and our stakeholders, helping set and meet goals… it all entranced me. I wanted to be good at my job and be liked within the team. Conflict wouldn’t have a place in my team, we would be a well-oiled machine running through Kanban tickets like a dream. All decisions would be unanimous and in the best interest of the company. Laughter would fill all our meetings. It would be like a Hallmark movie. 

Please, take a moment to laugh at how ridiculous that image was.

Introduce the next player in this story, March 2020 along with its trusty sidekick. Covid 19. Our team went from meeting daily in the office to meeting over Zoom, and the Scrum Master role went from an interesting idea to an official role in my life and a very important part of keeping my team together.

The solution.

Our team decided to split into two teams, consisting of six members each. The Scrum Master for the other team had more experience leading than I did, she is well respected in the company and is often referred to as the glue of our group. Those old insecurities kicked into high gear and fueled my determination to be the best. 

I did what most people do, I took to the internet to find ways to help guide my team through the upcoming months. I poured through articles on Scrum and Kanban, videos on women in leadership positions, dug into the Thomas-Killman Strategy, read David Marquet’s Turn the Ship Around, and reached out directly to my trusted coworkers for guidance. It became obvious that my fear of conflict was not going to do the team justice and I was going to have to step far out of my comfort zone.

I reached out to people in the company and practiced interactions–we ran through scenarios of conflict management and I tried different ways to handle it until they sounded natural. I worked with my husband on long monologues of reassurance, collaborative language, and repetitive goals. I forced myself to allow silence when it felt deafening to me and opened the door for criticism on my abilities to facilitate our retro and planning sessions. I put our goals high on the Kanban board so they wouldn’t be forgotten. I got used to playing the devil’s advocate and finding holes in plans that I thought were the best course of action.

Still, my team was struggling. Each day I saw the tension building and I felt the let down of the situation in my core. I expected to work hard and to have struggles, but I didn’t expect it to be quite this hard or this personal. The other team had their share of storming, but they were coming out on the other side. And the better they did, the more pressure I felt and the more personal I took each ceremony. I set my own expectations too high, and they were not being met on any front. 

After a particularly bad week, I packed up my car and drove to West Texas to see an old friend. The whole way there and throughout my stay, I contemplated if I was right for the Scrum Master role at all. Maybe this was a sign that I should run, and that my team would be better off without me involved. My friend allowed me to wallow for about a day, and then did what friends do best and brought me out of my own head. She reminded me why I was drawn to the role to begin with. She pointed out how many of the conflicts within the team had nothing to do with me, the work, or the company. The more I distanced myself from the conflict the easier it was to see how I could use the strategies I learned in each situation. I was no longer the center of the problem. I was an observer.

Slowly, it got better. We reorganized the teams to remove some of the conflict between members. Eventually, we compressed into one large team and I handed off the role of Scrum Master to my colleague. As she took over the role I continued to learn and observe how she handled conflict.  

What I Learned.

I still struggle with conflict management at work. My nerves creep in at every furrowed brow or sharp tone, but I’ve realized that as I continue in my career and through different roles I will look back on this time and use these lessons to grow. It’s not uncommon for the Scrum Master role to attract a helper personality like mine–the ones who want to be the fixer in a situation and shrink away from conflict. As those people, we have a lot of learning to do in order to successfully fill the role and serve our teams. Through research, continued education, and practice helpers can be some of the best Scrum Masters. Check out our Advanced Certified ScrumMaster workshop to learn how to level up your conflict management and facilitation skills. 

Thomas-Killman Conflict Resolution Strategy Cheat Sheet:

Avoiding – Sidestepping the conflict with the hope it will resolve itself and go away.

    • This was my go-to. Avoid, avoid, avoid. Laugh it off. Leave the room. Don’t make anyone know you are uncomfortable. This has its place in some aspects of life but in the virtual workspace, it created more stress and anxiety for me. I quickly scratched that one off my list of tactics.

Accommodating – Going out of your way to satisfy the other party’s concerns, often at your own expense. 

    • Another go-to! Take on extra tasks and work to make everyone else happy and feel heard. This is a short-term fix, but long term it leads to 12 hour-days, burn out, and sleep-deprived work. We all have to accommodate every day, it cannot be a one-way street to resolving conflict at work.

Compromising – Finding an acceptable resolution that partly satisfies both parties, but neither is fully satisfied.  

    • We learned this style as children and it has its place. The problem with compromise on a high-stress team is that someone gets the short end of the stick. When there are daily conflicts, that stick gets shorter and shorter until all that is left are disgruntled team members.

Competing – Trying to satisfy your desires at the expense of the other parties. 

    • Finish the project first. Make the most money. Have the highest NPS. Competition drives success and it can make a team soar. But it also can tear a team apart from the inside and negatively impact the whole business. Competition is only healthy if it’s checked frequently.

Collaborating – Finding a solution that entirely satisfies all parties involved.

    •  The golden ticket. The win-win-win model. Collaboration is wonderful, necessary, and needed in every part of life. It’s hard to achieve and requires all members to be willing to talk and to come to an agreement. For example, if Larry refuses to speak to John and John refuses to see Jessica’s point of view, the team cannot collaborate.

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An Outcomes-Driven Approach To Business Agility

By: Andy Cleff | May 19, 2020 |  Agile Training,  Agile Transformation,  Leadership,  Webinar

A free, 1-hour webinar on the Path to Agility® – Introducing a simple yet powerful way to profoundly better outcomes

  • See firsthand how Path to Agility makes sense of Agile transformations
  • Get specific answers to your chronic transformation challenges
  • See potential impediments that have been stealing your momentum
  • Uncover capabilities to accelerate your progress

Path to Agility® - Introducing a simple yet powerful way to profoundly better outcomesBusiness leaders have seen enough to believe that agility is the path to better business results. An empirical model that builds in continual improvement and consistent measures? That’s a powerful promise and explains why Agile is attractive. So attractive, in fact, that it’s hard to find a company today that doesn’t claim it’s agile or going agile.

Our experience and research have shown that the vast majority of organizations who take on an Agile transformation will either experience “superficial agility” which usually results in failure and reverting back to old, ineffective behaviors, or “pocket agility,” where some things may improve, but falls short of the true organizational improvements needed to be more resilient. Companies are stuck in transformation with no way out.

This is why we created the Path to Agility — a proven framework designed to help guide organizations through their Agile transformation journey. It helps by providing a clear approach for identifying the capabilities necessary to move forward and the visibility needed to resolve obstacles along the way.

Exit the agile transformation spin cycle and clear your path to better business results – RSVP now for this free 1-hour webinar.

Who Uses the Path to Agility

The Path to Agility is designed for change agents and leaders who need to improve transformation consistency, quality, and results. For example:

  • Scrum Masters who are serving teams adopting agility
  • Coaches and consultants supporting Agile transformations
  • Leaders and executives who are guiding their organizations through transformation
  • Companies who demand predictable and measurable business outcomes

Why Business Outcomes Matter

Using business outcomes as a “north star,” the Path to Agility helps both teams and organizations evaluate where they are on the journey to business agility and map out what they should focus on next. It equips organizations with a simple yet powerful roadmap to profoundly better business outcomes.

Exit the agile transformation spin cycle and clear your path to better business results – RSVP now for this free 1-hour webinar.

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7 Lessons To Help Transitioning to Virtual Workshops Easier

By: Steve Martin | Mar 30, 2020 |  Agile Coaching,  Agile Training,  Leadership,  Process

An image of a person taking notes during a virtual workshop.As a person who has a high preference for in-person workshops, transitioning to a 100% virtual delivery and facilitation has been an experience to say the least. However, there are a few things I learned in the last few weeks that helped make our workshops more fun and engaging. I’m sure there are many more things to learn, but I wanted to share sooner than later with all my colleagues and folks who are interested in delivering or taking a virtual training course or workshop. In no order of priority, my lessons learned include:

  1. Take a break every hour. I like a 10-min break. It’s enough time to check in on the other housemates (children, pets, etc) who may be a little too quiet (what are they doing…), grab a snack, take a bio-break, etc. Have a timer on the screen to show how much time is remaining.
  2. Video is a must. While some have resisted being on camera in the past, seeing people and their reactions helps establish a sense of community in a time of isolation.
  3. Keep your energy high, yet authentic. The people in my in-person classes give me my mojo. However, with everyone on mute and seeing faces, you don’t get the usual body language cues to keep you going. Talking to the camera takes energy. The 10-min break above helps restore some of that energy for me.
  4. Use breakout rooms. There’s a fantastic feature in Zoom where you can put participants into smaller groups (say, 4 or 5 persons) in their own private mini-virtual conference room to do small activities and discussions. This helps with engagement and deeper discussions, and helps break up an instructor talking for, say, 50 minutes straight…(yikes!).
  5. Use the voting icons in the participant window (if using Zoom) to gain feedback. Do they understand the directions for an activity before they head into a breakout room? Have they had experience in topic A, B, or C? Use the hand raise icon to get a sense of who wants to ask a question.
  6. Have a co-pilot. Things go wrong. My internet connection dropped three times in the final 30 mins of a two-day workshop. Having the co-pilot there helped continuity for the unexpected. As a co-pilot, we also can put helpful hints, tips, and links to further/deeper readings and videos to supplement what the main speaker is discussing. So, those that want more have a list of further resources available to them.
  7. Don’t just try to recreate what you do in the in-person workshops online. I think this is the most important lesson I learned. There are certain activities that just won’t work online (i.e. airplane game, etc.). Go back to your learning objectives. What do you want them to know or realize? Then, go from there. Get creative. We’ve had to introduce new activities and tweak old ones. While the new activities may not be all that sexy with the latest tools, they do help illustrate the learning needed.
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6 Signs Your Agile Teams Might Need Training

By: Joe Mills | Feb 12, 2020 |  Agile,  Agile Training,  Product Owner,  ScrumMaster

When going through an Agile transformation, Agile teams often feel like they have a good handle on Agile and Scrum. But when asked about their progress toward the business outcomes their organization hopes to achieve by implementing Agile, their answer is not as confident.

This is not unusual. More often than not, leadership has not fully considered what business outcomes they hope to achieve through Agile. However, when pressed, they usually agree that their real interest isn’t in doing Agile. It’s actually rooted in the need to achieve important business outcomes like increased speed, customer satisfaction, market responsiveness, etc. Focusing on business outcomes enables the organization to look at the transformation from a broader perspective and understand that it impacts all levels of their organization. So how do you ensure teams are working towards your organization’s desired outcomes??

In this article, I have identified 6 signs that indicate your Agile teams and leaders need additional training to effectively identify and achieve your organization’s desired outcomes via Agile.  

Sign #1 : Teams lack clear team purpose

Teams that are unable to articulate the organization’s customer-focused vision and how their work ties into the greater whole (organizational strategy, vision, roadmaps, etc.) are  disconnected from the urgency and business outcomes driving the change. Without focus on desired business outcomes, teams won’t operate with their stakeholders and customers in mind. 

Through training, leadership and team members can learn how to clearly define which factors determine their success and how to implement effective feedback loops to validate the value or their work with customers.

Sign #2: Teams lack clarity regarding roles, responsibilities, and working agreements

Setting expectations around the way the members of an Agile team or group of teams prefer to work together creates a foundation of openness and accountability from the start. Organizations requiring teams to work with other teams often lack best practices for effective multi-team coordination and collaboration. 

In training, Agile teams gain clarity around roles and responsibilities, a shared and accepted set of working agreements, definitions of when work is ready to start, and what constitutes being “done” which can help teams get empowered to implement this new way of working.

Sign #3 : Inconsistent alignment on Agile experiences, best-practices, and terminology

Agile practices are often translated from multiple team members with different experiences implementing Agile. This can result in a lack of consistency on practices and terminology, and create hybrid mashups of various practices such as Waterfall, Scrum, ScrumBan, Kanban, XP, etc. This lack of consistency in understanding and practice impacts team effectiveness and is further amplified when operating at scale in large solutions.

Creating and maintaining a common foundation of knowledge can minimize the negative impacts of this and allow Agile teams and leaders to focus on what matters most. 

Sign #4: Practices are disconnected from the underlying Agile principles

When teams and leadership are disconnected from the underlying Lean-Agile Principles and practices, they don’t understand the “why” behind Agile practices and ceremonies. Rather than embracing them, these principles and practices are often viewed as overhead and micromanaging, which often results in teams just going through the motions with low engagement and a lack of transparency.

This disconnect from a deep-rooted appreciation of the desired Lean-Agile mindsets and value of building self-organized and empowered teams, leads to organizations not moving past command and control project-based thinking and practicing Scrum in name only.  

Sign #5: Ineffective story writing and work prioritization practices

In an Agile pull-based system of incremental delivery, it is very important that teams and the Product Owner constantly refine and prioritize work. This requires the Product Owner to work closely with their stakeholders and teams to make tough choices. The Product Owner should be taught effective techniques to help them make these choices based on highest business value delivery.

This pull-based system requires good story and feature writing skills, continuous refinement, and transparency at all levels of the organization and results in appropriately detailed, estimated, emergent, and prioritized backlogs. 

Sign #6 Teams are not delivering potentially shippable product increments frequently

An essential Agile principle is that teams should deliver working software frequently–ideally every couple weeks. If teams are not regularly demoing their fully integrated and potentially shippable solution in a production-like environment your organization likely suffers from development silos, lack of automation, and immature continuous integration and deployment practices. To be a market-responsive organization, the capabilities to deliver frequently and quickly get feedback are critical. 

However, teams often lack necessary skills to implement development best practices such as pair-programming, refactoring, Test-Driven Development, emergent architectures, and Agile automated deployment strategies. Without the infrastructure in place to remove obstacles and enable frictionless promotion of code to deployment and eventually to customers, teams will be unable to deliver frequently.

Conclusion

If your teams exhibit any of the signs above, Agile training is a simple, cost-effective solution to get your organization working towards your desired business outcomes. Explore our Agile training services to learn how we can help address your Agile teams’ specific challenge.

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Training and Return on Investment

By: Agile Velocity | Apr 25, 2019 |  Agile Training,  Article

A graph showing increased returns for a business. This graph is meant to emphasize the ROI of training, particularly in regards to Agile training.

Leaders and managers know the development and training of their employees is critical to the growth and success of their organization. However, as leaders are pressured with time and cost constraints, the training budget is often the first to go. It can be difficult to justify training costs without the hard numbers to back up the value of education.

The research gathered below demonstrates the ROI of training and its positive impact on organizations as a whole.

The ROI of Training

Exhaustive research by Dr. Laurie Bassi, a human capital analysis specialist, found that training and development has a 300% return on investment. The ROI of training out-returns many other investment options like R&D.

The research found companies that invested in training and development had:

  • 21% increase in productivity
  • 24% higher profit margin
  • 300% reduction in employee turnover
  • 218% higher income per employee
  • 86% higher company value, and
  • A return per dollar invested of $6.72

Training and Financial Performance

Jack Welch calculated the impact of training and development on his executives and described the return on investment as infinite. GE continues to get returns on the leaders trained in the 1980s.

Research presented to The Association for Talent Development further supports this. According to this research, investment in employee training enhances a company’s financial performance. Research showed that an increase of $680 in a company’s training expenditures per employee generates, on average, a 6 percent improvement in total shareholder return.

Over a period of three years, the researchers studied more than 500 companies and found that firms investing the most in training and development (measured by total investment per employee and percentage of total gross payroll) yielded a 36.9 percent total shareholder return as compared with a 25.5 percent weighted return for the S&P 500 index for the same period.

 

Professional training is an investment that’s a win-win for companies and their employees. In fact, it is one of the first steps on the path to real, lasting change.

When it comes to Agile training, workshops and classes don’t make your organization automatically agile. Many factors play into organizational agility–from processes to culture–and some of them can’t be taught in a 2-day class. It takes commitment, practice and oftentimes, strong guidance.

However, it is vital your teams, managers, and leaders are all on the same page (language, practices, processes) when it comes to Agile frameworks and methodologies. That’s where training comes in.

Whether you’re just getting started with Agile or your teams need to advance their skills or need a reset, we have the right Agile training solution for you. Go here to view our catalog.

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Story Mapping 101

By: David Hawks | Aug 09, 2017 |  Agile,  Agile Marketing,  Agile Technical Practices,  Agile Tools,  Agile Training,  Kanban,  Process,  Product Owner,  Scrum,  ScrumMaster,  Team

Traditional product backlogs can get confusing. They typically start off with a high-level list of features, called “epics”. However, as the team starts decomposing the epics during refinement down to sprintable user stories, it’s easy to “lose the plot” and the only person with the decoder ring is the Product Owner (PO). The PO is the only one who knows how all the stories tie back up to the feature and how they relate to each other. One resulting failure pattern is incremental deliveries that create poor user experiences. This is because the release was composed of stories that in principle were of high business value but were functionally dependent on stories that were of lower value and were therefore deferred to future releases.

Picture of a product backlog with color coded user stories

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Role of a Coach starts with Building Team Trust and Alignment

By: Agile Velocity | May 12, 2015 |  Agile Coaching,  Agile Training,  Article

David Hawks, CST, CSC, presented the Coach Role starts with Building Trust and Alignment at the Scrum Alliance’s Scrum Gathering.

Coach Role starts with building Team trust and Alignment The Coach Role presentation includes:

  • Understand the role of coaching
  • Learn five dysfunctions of a team
  • Realize 3 tips to improve trust with a team
  • Understand team alignment
  • How to establish team values
  • Learn a tool to motivate individuals and teams

Click here to view the slide deck presentation.

Other articles about the Role of Coaching:

How to Fight the Chaos Phase of Agile Adoption and Win with an Agile Coach

Agile Team Coaches: What Do They Even Do?

7 Agile Coaching Roles besides Agile Coach