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How does the APS course help people apply scrum effectively?

Discover how the APS course transforms Scrum learning into a hands-on experience, empowering teams to tackle complex challenges effectively.

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How does the APS course help people apply scrum effectively?

The APS (Applying Professional Scrum) course helps people apply scrum effectively in a number of ways.

A practical encounter with Scrum.

The APS course is incredibly practical and hands-on by design. So, during the course, people develop a deep understanding of what scrum is, how it works, and how it would work for them.

By the end of the second half-day training session, people have a firm grasp on scrum and how it works. There are still 2 more sessions after that, but by this time, they get what scrum is and how it works in the context of navigating complexity and solving complex problems.

A practical encounter with dysfunction

We kick the class off with an assignment that allows people to solve a complex problem or organize themselves around the creation of a product in the way they traditionally have.

They have no insight into scrum, nor do they have a framework within which to organize themselves, so they generally revert to what they know or what the have been taught in the past.

This makes traditional dysfunctions visible and visceral.

People see how a traditional mindset and way of working hinders collaboration, prevents creative solutions being generated, and impedes progress.

Differentiation between people who have experience with scrum and those that don’t.

We sometimes have people attending the course who are part of a scrum team and work in a so-called agile environment. They are looking to understand how to apply scrum effectively because their current setup or application of scrum is not delivering results.

So, for these people, we create a simulation that tests their capability and reveals the dysfunction in their current application of scrum. A simulation that provides a benchmark of current capability and allows them to assess how different the outcomes are when they apply scrum effectively.

For those who have never worked with scrum, we have a separate simulation that allows them to develop a clear understanding of how scrum helps them solve complex problems and organize themselves effectively to create or capture value for customers and the organization.

So, there is a great deal of flexibility and several different simulations we can run to cater for people’s varying experience and capability when it comes to scrum.

Each delegate will learn how to apply scrum effectively regardless of their experience and encounters with agile.

A practical encounter with the challenges of scrum in a traditional organization.

Most of our delegates attend the APS course because they have pockets of agility in the organization, but are still bound by the constraints of the organization and its traditional management practices and policies.

In an ideal world, your organization embraces agility and everything in the environment, from remuneration to policies, are designed to unleash business agility and tap into the power of scrum.

This just isn’t the case in 90% of applications so people need to know how to apply scrum effectively despite the constraints and challenges of their environment.

The simulations we run mirror the challenges they experience in the traditional project management and micro-management setup, and are designed to help highlight how their current approach and practices fall apart under duress.

We then focus on teaching how to apply scrum effectively, within the constraints of a traditional organization, with the objective of teaching teams how to navigate complexity effectively and achieve their desired outcomes.

Effective problem-solving capabilities.

Under pressure, individuals can seek to prioritize their own problems or prioritize the jobs that they need to get done in order to keep their job or meet their quotas.

The APS course demonstrates why this kind of thinking, across multiple individuals and multiple teams, leads to dysfunction and ineffectiveness.

When we teach people how to anchor themselves in the core values, principles, and practices of agile and scrum, we allow them to see for themselves how different their decision-making becomes and how their priorities align with great problem-solving capabilities.

In many ways, a shift from optimizing at the local level and thinking in alignment with customer and organizational objectives over the short, medium, and long term. A shift that allows them to solve complex problems effectively, and create an environment where the team can improve with each iteration.

It’s said that scrum doesn’t solve problems, it highlights them.

That is something we see in the APS course too. Sometimes, leadership teams who are a part of the course begin to understand how policies, procedures, and red tape block teams from achieving their goals.

They witness how management decisions, organizational policies, or power plays by senior managers prevent teams from doing great work. It is often a massive eye-opener for them and we frequently see those items being included in a backlog to be addressed when they return to work.

I would really encourage anyone who is attending the APS course to convince a relevant manager or leader in their organization to attend because it really does have an impact on how that person will make decisions in the future.

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How does the APS course help people apply Scrum effectively? Well, it kind of helps in a number of ways. So because it’s a practical class, they get experience during the class understanding what is Scrum, why it works, and how it would work for them. Right, so you’ve the people that are participating in the class by the end of, let’s say, the second half have a firm grasp of Scrum and there’s still two more Sprints after that.

One’s a dysfunctional people attributes discovery session, and then the one after that’s a kind of scaling session if we get to that. Don’t always get to that. But the last part of the class that we do after we’ve done all of those things is we’ve kind of got two main exercises. One is a choice and the other one is we I kind of always do. The choice one is, is this a group of people who have been doing Scrum already? And if they’ve been doing Scrum already, then we do like a Scrum tune-up exercise where they’re effectively doing a diffing exercise between the Scrum they just learned and the Scrum they’re doing in their organisation.

So do a kind of diffing exercise, kind of what’s different, how they feel about those changes, get that information down. We have a little exercise around that. The other option for that one is if they’ve not been doing Scrum, then we have a Scrum startup exercise. And in the Scrum startup exercise, they’re, you know, who’s going to be your product owner, who’s going to be your Scrum master, and where are you going to store your backlog? How are you going to manage it? Just to get them started and thinking about how that’s going to work in their organisation.

So those two things alone, it’s one or the other. I don’t do both. Is really good. But then the last one of the last exercises that I do with groups is creating an organisational change backlog because the people that know most about how organisations need to be different in doing Agile are the people that are actually doing the work that are struggling within the bounds of the processes that the organisations created.

So by asking them to create that organisational change backlog or add things to the organisational change backlog, they’re thinking about all the things that affect them. Whereas when leadership adds things to the organisational change backlog, they’re probably thinking about things that affect them, right? And they’re proxying the things that affect other people, what they think is going to be a problem for other people.

But when you get the people that have just gone through this Scrum class and they realise what needs to be different, they start adding all sorts of things to the class. And sometimes it’s, you know, they’ll add we need more people trained in this so that more people understand what it is we’re talking about. That’s always good for me, right? But most of the time they’re adding things like, well, we’ve got this policy in the organisation, this needs to change, or leadership’s not engaged enough in the story that we’re trying to create, this needs to change.

And it’s very enlightening for leadership if they’re attending, and I do recommend that. The time when I’ve seen the APS be most effective, I did a class for a number of classes for a company in the US called Backcountry. There are clothing apparel, ski type place in Utah, and we trained everybody in the company from the CEO all the way down to the guy who drives the forklift in the warehouse. It was fantastic.

And what was really interesting was the guy that drives a forklift in the warehouse, at the end of the first half day, we did two full days for the class, but at the end of the first half day, he went to his boss and said, “By the way, why the hell am I here? I don’t want to be here. What is this crap you’re having me learn? I don’t see why it’s valuable for me. Can I just go back to driving my forklift in the warehouse?”

But by the end of that day, he was the one standing at the board engaging with the team, asking them questions, “Do we have this? Do we have that? How would this work?” Because he started to realise how the work that these engineers were doing that he didn’t have any connection with before, he started to understand how the work that they were doing affected his world.

Because he’s driving the forklift in the warehouse, he’s got an iPad attached to the forklift that’s telling him where all the stuff is in the warehouse and what needs to go in the truck and what order he needs to get things out and pack it and all of those kind of things. And they’re the ones that are writing that software. And he happened to have people at his table because we just self-select into teams that were responsible for some of the things that directly affected him.

So he understood why it was important that he’d be part of that process, why he needed to engage in that process, and it brought another dimension. He’s the customer was in the class right inside of this company. But even the view that the people in the room had of the CEOs sitting there and the CEOs participating in the class and actually focusing for two full days on the class because he saw how important it was to that discussion.

And then when you’re having that discussion at the end, the organisational change backlog, what needs to change, who’s in the room that can deal with it, the CEO is sitting right there and can hear the organisational change backlog. This is yours now, you need to do something with it. And that whole thing really helps. Now that’s different in a public class, right? You’re not going to get everybody in a company in the public class, but you get quite a lot of the things that I’ve talked about there all the way to that point.

There’s maybe not the epiphany moment at the end when you’re creating the organisational change backlog for the organisation as a whole, but it’s still a great experience.

Agile Project Management Scrum Product Development People and Process Agile Frameworks Pragmatic Thinking Team Performance Software Development Practical Techniques and Tooling Professional Scrum Scrum Master
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