ICAgile Certified Professional in Agile Team Facilitation

This workshop is more like a curated collection of interactive conference sessions than a typical certification course cramming you full of slides. There are 14 hours of live modules, most are one hour in length. Each module is offered on a regular basis. You can take most of the modules in any order. Take them whenever your schedule overlaps with ours.

The level of interactivity varies by module and includes Q&A, open discussion on specific topics, breakout rooms, individual and group activities, sharing experiences within your breakout room and with the full class, and the use of Zoom, Mural, and other tools.

Two thirds of the workshop is spent in fun group activities and games in zoom breakout rooms with 2-5 people depending on the activity. Most of the activities are also available as free downloads, professionally created boxed kits or both. We encourage you to have interesting materials on hand for use in some of the activities such as colored markers, Legos, pipe-cleaners, or whatever works for you. At the completion of the workshop you will have dozens of games, activities, and techniques for use with your teams and organization. Discover where you are in your Agile Coach journey and learn new skills and techniques to progress further and faster in that journey.

The focus of the workshop is applying the skills of group and individual facilitation within an Agile environment. Although there is a focus on some activities most commonly associated with Scrum, what you will learn is framework agnostic; applicable for coaching in any Agile-oriented environment whether people are using Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, LeSS, or any other Agile-oriented set of practices.

Here are short descriptions of each of the modules in the class. With the subscription options you can take each module as many times as you would like within the term of the subscription.

• Introduction – an introduction to the fundamentals of facilitation, its relationship to Professional Coaching, and an overview of how to apply facilitation in an Agile context. Also covers the multiple modes used by an Agilist involved in Agile adoption: facilitator, mentor, teacher, and coach.
• Fostering Collaborative Decision Making – the differences between people’s personalities, values, experience, talents, perspectives and other dimensions are both a strength and a potential source of disagreement. To help people work together as collaboratively and effectively as possible requires a combination of facilitation in the moment as well as pro-active preparation. We’ll look at ways to pro-actively increase collaboration and set the groundwork for the best results based on the diverse talents and experiences of the team.
• Acting as a Mirror – just as we need a mirror to see our whole selves, we need other to help us see blind spots in our thinking and actions. An important role of a coach is to act as a mirror for others. This goes beyond the traditional “levels of listening” associated with active listening. We will learn about and practice how to do this using intentional perception, presence, and the four skills of emotional intelligence. We’ll also explore the connection to rapport building.
• Feedback and expertise – giving and receiving feedback and sharing expertise can be daunting. We will look at how to spot blind spots (yours and theirs), what makes for successful feedback and sharing of expertise, and Non-Violent Communication. We’ll also cover a way to provide expertise (mentoring) via a coaching conversation that leverages a Professional Coaching mindset. We’ll also learn about the three levels of advice and play a game about advice.
• Shared vision – there are many things in an Agile ecosystem that work best when working towards a shared vision such as what it means to be Agile, product vision, team working agreement, and iteration goals. We will explore this concept with a group activity to design a shared online environment.
• Best Team Ever and Servant Leadership – great teams live and breathe the Agile principles and values, trust each other, have high morale, are self-organizing, and have the support of the organization to succeed. Learn new tools, techniques, and activities for how to instill these values and capabilities into individuals and teams and help to increase the organizational support for Agile. We’ll play the “Team with the Best Results Ever” and “Servant Leadership” games.
• ADKAR – an exploration of ADKAR, a change management model based on individual change. What it is, the benefits, and how to apply it in an Agile environment at the team and organizational levels. Useful for finding impediments and opportunities to affect change through facilitated group activities.
• The Principles and Values of Agile meetings – Agile is easy to describe, but hard to achieve. We’ll look at ways to help people connect with the principles and values of Agile in order to better participate in Agile meetings. We’ll play a fun game in small groups that demonstrates most of the Agile principles & values, Scrum, and Kanban in an experiential manner.
• Facilitating Agile Meetings – we’ll look at specific facilitation tools that help to maximize the effectiveness of each of the following Agile meetings: Product Visioning, Iteration Planning, standups, Iteration Review, and the Retrospective.
• Facilitating Retrospectives – a deep dive into the specifics of how to create the most effective retrospectives with the best outcomes. Looks at when and where to use specific retrospective formats.
• Leveraging Group Facilitation – Learn how to blend Professional Coaching and group facilitation to multiply the effectiveness of both disciplines and include and engage everyone. See how to shift from conducting Agile events to applying Professional Coaching to teams and organizations.
• Agile Team Environments – facilitating a collaborative environment is more than creating and conducting productive meetings. Helping the team create and maintain a collaborative environment facilitates the day to day work of the team. Everything we’ll cover on facilitation in general can also be applied to creating and maintaining a collaborative work environment. We’ll cover physical and non-tangible aspects as well as the role of tools.
• Build a Product – in the final module, you will form into small teams to build a product. You’ll use what you’ve learned to design facilitated meetings complete with facilitator guides. Each member of the team will facilitate one of the meetings in this module: Product Visioning, user story writing, backlog refinement, iteration planning, retrospective.