When is an APS course appropriate for a scrum team?

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Empowering Teams with the APS Approach: Elevating Your Scrum Journey

In the dynamic and ever-evolving realm of Scrum, where teams and organisations strive to harness their full potential, the Applied Professional Scrum (APS) stands out as a guiding light for authentic Scrum Mastery.  💡

Through years of hands-on involvement and traversing diverse Scrum landscapes, I’ve had the privilege of discovering the many benefits and intricacies of APS.

My Agile journey has been filled with both challenges and triumphs and has enriched my understanding and highlighted the profound capabilities of APS.

These insights reveal its unmatched depth, offering transformative strategies and practices that serve as invaluable assets for individuals ardently pursuing the path of Scrum mastery.  🚀

A Firm Footing in Scrum’s Core Principles

A principle I have steadfastly anchored to and often share is this: You must have a working, usable product at the end of every iteration.

Veering away from this ethos means we’re straying from the core of agility.

We absolutely need these tangible, working products as they allow us to test, iterate, and gain pivotal feedback.  🚀

The Tale of Scrum and its Barnacles

My frequent analogy draws parallels from the sailing realm and describes Scrum teams as boats. Over time, boats will accumulate barnacles that, while appearing minuscule, can dramatically hamper their speed.

Similarly, seasoned Scrum teams often pick up a bunch of barnacles in the form of practices that were perhaps introduced to solve a fleeting issue or satisfy a specific organisational need.

In its wisdom, APS equips us with a discerning eye to scrape off those barnacles, helping us discern between the essential pillars of Scrum and the redundant ones we might have unconsciously adopted.

APS’s Signature: The Barnacle Exercise 🔄

Among the myriad of APS sessions I’ve facilitated, the “Barnacle Exercise” still holds a special place with me and remains extremely effective.

Through this introspective task, teams—be they newbies or veterans—are empowered to recognise and shed their own ‘barnacles’. When diving deep into Agile practices within their organisations, as this exercise evolves, leading to the creation of an organisational change backlog.

This blueprint, an agile transformation roadmap, is a testament to the hands-on, collaborative essence of APS.  🎯

APS: Nurturing Authentic, Proficient Scrum Teams

At its heart, APS is unwavering in its mission, which is to equip teams with the precise tools and insights to excel.

The ultimate aim is to foster teams that are not merely superficially performing Scrum but truly embody its spirit—authentically and adeptly.  🎯

Embark on Your APS Journey with Insight and Mastery

For those set on the Scrum path, aiming to extract the maximum value from every stride, I wholeheartedly invite you to immerse yourself in the APS experience.

Engage, reflect, and elevate.   🌟

I’m here to guide and collaborate with you along your Agile journey.

Let’s connect through Naked Agility and script your unique Scrum success narrative.

An APS class is appropriate for a Scrum team if they are, in fact, a Scrum team. Right? That’s in my book. If you’re a Scrum team, then the APS class is a great way to both get started and get those barnacles off your ship. But also, I think there’s a difference between the traditional APS class all the way through to the immersive APS class.

So, if you think about the traditional APS class, it’s usually two full days or four consecutive half days. That’s usually the traditional format, and that’s really appropriate when, man, we just don’t have time as an organization to really invest in our change. We just need a quick punch, right? A quick one-two. Let’s get started, let’s get going, let’s solve a couple of those problems.

You’re probably not going to solve a lot of the problems, right? From the class, the people that are attending will pick particular things that they’re like, “That’s the thing that really annoys me,” and they’ll help you fix that. It’ll probably be only a couple of things, but that’s still valuable, right? Super valuable in organisations that are getting started.

The immersive class is more the longer-term investment in change for your team and your organisation. It enables you to have a continuously adaptive learning process so that you can close those feedback loops and have that double-loop learning, right? So that you can get feedback on the things that you tried.

If you’re doing it as an APS, your whole team can get feedback rather than it being an individual assignment, which a lot of the other immersive classes have. If you’re doing it as a private class inside of your organisation, it’s more like it’s a team assignment. What is your team going to try this week to help them be more effective? What are they going to try next week to be more effective?

All come back together. Let’s have a retrospective, right? A debrief on, “We tried this. Did it work out? Could we have done better? Is there stuff we want to keep? Stuff we want to stop doing?” Right? And you can then continuously, over 10 weeks, improve the capability of your team, identify some of the impediments in your organisation as you go through, and perhaps you can fix them during the class.

Getting feedback from the trainer, the trainer providing some consulting for your organisation to help them deal with some of those issues, that’s really what the APS class is appropriate for. Any team, if you want a hard one-two, let’s get some stuff sorted, get some crap out of my team’s way.

The probably the two-day APS class in a private company is the one to go to. But if you really want to solve as many problems as you possibly can within your organisation, have as much learning as you possibly can within your organisation, and close as many of those feedback loops, right? Have it in as empirical a process as you can, then I would definitely suggest the immersive APS.

Thanks for watching the video! If you enjoyed it, please like, follow, and subscribe. I always reply to comments, and if you want to have a chat about this or anything else Agile, Scrum, or DevOps, then please book a coffee with me through Naked Agility.

People and Process Discovery and Learning Team Performance Team Collaboration Continuous Learning Agile Frameworks Pragmatic Thinking Empirical Process Control Scrum Team Customer Feedback Loops

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