10 Resources That Will Make You a Better Agile Leader

Leading an Agile team, or an entire Agile organization, can be very rewarding. But it’s also a challenging job. Staying abreast of the best practices for Agile leadership at the team, program, and portfolio levels can be demanding, especially with all the other work on your plate.

To help ease the demand for your time a bit, we’ve pulled together the following list of powerful, valuable resources guaranteed to help make you a better Agile leader. Enjoy!

SAFe Program Consultant Training and Certification Course

The goal of this four-day course is to prepare internal change agents and external consultants to lead an enterprise Agile transformation.

By the end of this course, attendees will be able to:

•Apply lean, Agile and product development flow principles to improve productivity, employee engagement, time to market, and quality

•Apply the Scaled Agile Framework based on lecture, real-world examples, and insights by Scaled Agile experts

•Understand the skills necessary for an enterprise transformation based on the information and examples presented, and additional recommended readings and resources

•Gain the insights into the leadership skill most effective in unlocking the intrinsic motivation of software development knowledge workers, and begin applying them in your context

•Find the value streams around which to organize the enterprise’s Agile Release Trains

•Prepare the organization and the teams to launch the trains

•Run the first Release Planning Meeting

•Interact at key program touch-points to “help keep the train on the tracks”

•Run Inspect and Adapt workshops for continuous program improvement

•Introduce the organization to the principles of program portfolio management and Agile architecture

•Grow the leadership skills necessary to support the transformation

Agile Leadership Online Workshop

This four-hour course is designed to teach leaders in an Agile organization to:

•Motivate and Support Agile Teams

•Influence the Environment to Enable Change and Improvement

•Support the Complex Nature of Product Development

•Uncover Gaps between Vision of Teams, Leaders and Current Reality

•Remove Barriers to Achieve the Organization’s Vision

Change Management Services

One of our flagship services, cPrime’s Change Management Services help you eliminate the most common reasons why Agile transformations fail, including a company culture at odds with core Agile values, lack of understanding of Agile methods, and lack of management support.

Key among these services are Executive ramp-up sessions in which leadership receives the support it needs to effectively guide an Agile transformation from within.

Your Team May be Agile, But is it Performing? (Online Training)

A must-have resource for Agile team leaders and HR professionals, this three-hour interactive online training course will help you:

• Learn about a research-based approach to team collaboration, predicting team success and optimizing all the individual resources available in the team

• Discover your most (and least) preferred roles on a team and understand how to play to your strengths and manage your weaknesses

• Learn how Belbin Team Roles provides a common, shared language to discuss the difficult interpersonal issues on a team without creating a defensive reaction.

• Use Team Mapping as a way to optimize the contribution of every member of your team

Essential Patterns of Agile Leaders (Online Training)

In this workshop, you will explore the patterns of mature Agile managers and leaders, training and standards for Agile adoption, situations and guidelines for when to trust the team and when to step in and provide guidance and direction, the leader’s role in Agile at-scale and with distributed Agile teams.

Good leadership is a central ingredient to sustaining your Agile adoption. Bad leadership can render it irrelevant or a failure. Here we’ll walk the path of the good, but also examine the bad patterns in an effort to inspire you and your teams.

Professional Agile Coach Training

This two-day training course for experienced Agile practitioners (such as Scrum Masters and Product Owners) is focused on helping individuals within your organization take on the role of professional Agile coach to help lead transformations and maintain ongoing Agile refinements, but it also appropriate for external coaches helping organizations on a freelance basis. It includes:

•An overview of common Agile practices and when each is appropriate to use

•Assessing your experience level as a coach

•Choosing the right client

•Making an initial assessment of a client’s Agile readiness

•Developing an Agile toolkit

•Creating working agreements

•Tying Agile practices to business value

•Tailoring your message – how to get everyone from team members to executives excited about Agile

•Coaching across cultures

•Dealing with conflict

•Growing your skillset as an Agile coach

•Building and promoting your coaching practice

Team Optimization Online Workshop

This three-hour interactive online course is designed to help you:

•Learn about a research-based approach to team collaboration, predicting team success and optimizing all the individual resources available in the team

•Discover your most (and least) preferred roles on a team and understand how to play to your strengths and manage your weaknesses

•Learn how Belbin Team Roles provides a common, shared language to discuss the difficult interpersonal issues on a team without creating a defensive reaction

•Use Team Mapping as a way to optimize the contribution of every member of your team

Leading SAFe

This two-day training course will help you lead an enterprise Agile transformation by teaching you to:

• Apply lean, Agile and product development flow principles to improve productivity, employee engagement, time to market, and quality

• Apply the Scaled Agile Framework based on lecture, real-world examples, and insights by Scaled Agile experts

• Understand the skills necessary for an enterprise transformation based on the information and examples presented, and additional recommended readings and resources

• Gain the insights into the leadership skill most effective in unlocking the intrinsic motivation of software development knowledge workers, and begin applying them in your context

Agile for ScrumMasters

This modular training course can be customized to fit your specific organizational needs and includes hands-on application of the course principles using an actual project you are currently working on.

In part, it includes the following:

•ScrumMaster & Leadership Concepts

•Agile Leadership

•Servant Leadership

•From Project Manager to ScrumMaster

•Conflict Management

•Facilitation Techniques

•Team Concepts

•Team Definition drivers

•Team evolution (Tuckman model)

•Collaboration and Communication

•Distributed Teams

Executive Briefing on Agile Development

This interactive presentation offers a brief overview of Agile concepts with a focus specifically on audience members at the executive level who wish to learn the value of Agile and the benefits of adopting Agile methodologies.

You will benefit if you are:

• Project Managers, Program Managers, PMO Directors and staff who manage projects and processes

• Executives interested in integrating Scrum processes with the business to improve product development

• Software development, QA, and Product Management personnel who will do the hands-on work in a Scrum process

• Anyone who wants to know how Scrum really works

We would love to answer any questions or suggestions you have regarding any of these resources. Contact us at your convenience!