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Looking for an Agile training course for handling unknowns
Not sure how to best phrase this question.
I am a new Scrum Master for a small software development team only managing one Project (which is our Product). Currently, the two company founders are the Product Owners, but they don’t have time for it and want me to take on that role as well as the Scrum Master.
I am looking for professional courses class or online that will help me run extremely dynamic Sprints where there are a lot of unknown factors involved.For example, we will have a Sprint planning session where we as a Scrum team define all the tasks needed to complete the Sprint. However, we end up creating new tasks as we go due to technical issues which can cause us to change course and create all new tasks. This results and having to extend the Sprint because due to all the unknown factors that creep up during development.
So I as the Project Manager/Scrum Master am looking for a course or courses that will help me better use the Agile method to run Sprints using Jira?
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9 Replies
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@Baylor What you are looking for is really a Certified ScrumMaster course. While what you are doing sounds like Scrum, it really isn’t. Having that many issues pop up during a sprint is usually a sign of a team not doing sufficient backlog refinement prior to the sprint starting. You would learn about this topic and many more in the class. Our list of classes can be found by clicking on Agile For All then Upcoming Courses in the top menu of every page on this site. Or you can go directly there by clicking this link (at least I hope it becomes a link!) http://agileforall.com/upcoming-courses
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Thank you for responding:) I am looking into that course, but I have concerns that I might still be in the same boat based on certain scenarios.
How would backlog refinement prevent an unknown technical issue? For example, we have an issue where we had everything laid out in the backlog on the tasks required to develop the product (which is a integration into another system).
Everything was going smoothly but we ran into a major roadblock because the external system we are integrating into required development tasks that are unknown to our development team. Essentially, there were undisclosed incompatibilities we were unaware of until we ran into them.
So with that said, would Scrum Master Certification help me with this?
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During backlog refinement the team is trying to fully understand the backlog item. If there is a dependency, then it should be brought out during backlog refinement so it can be examined and determined how to handle it. This situation sounds like the team is using something completely foreign to them, in which case backlog refinement would have pointed out the risk and perhaps a solution would have been to do some research into what would be required. It should be a rare occurrence when a team is surprised during a sprint, not a common occurrence (as it seems to be in your case).
If you aren’t doing backlog refinement today, then you would not have experienced the power of it. It is a piece of core Scrum for a reason.
Here is a video I did about it over a year ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M06U2wo6s0s
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Does it matter what timezone I am in, if the training course is virtual?
Also, would I be able to ask questions and situational issues to the instructor during the course?:)
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We put the timezone in because the class is live, instructor-led and will be during general business hours in whatever timezone is listed. So yes, it does matter.
The course is instructor led with plenty of time for questions.
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I am heavily leaning towards taking your virtual PSM course (if timezone isn’t an issue – then I can take it earlier than later).
That said, I am going to explain our scenario on what is happening right now with our development team:
The client tasked us with building an integration into their platform so we can deploy our custom product. They need this deployed by the end of the end of the year. This is a very custom integration that our dev team does not know how to do and it involves days of research and working with the client to integrate into their APIs (because they don’t even know how their stuff works, etc), So the onus is completely on our team to figure out how to integrate our product into their system.
I recently joined the team to learn the Agile process (I come from more of a IT and Project Management background) and utilize Scrum to make us more efficient in our development to deployment process. My boss wants me to figure what the best way is for our team to go about this, how we can use Scrum and have Sprints when we don’t know what the tasks are until after the team does the research to figure out how to develop those tasks?
So, would going through this class help me achieve our goals?:)
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You may also find courses on Udemy or Coursera. Check out the reviews and opinions on sites like Reddit. You can’t go wrong with this kind of feedback 🙂
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It’s been a while since your post, but I wanted to offer some insight. I was juggling a lot of unknowns in our Sprints, and it was tough to keep things on track.
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What helped me was checking out some Microsoft Applied Skills https://trainocate.com.my/top-microsoft-applied-skills/ courses. They focus on solving real-world problems, which ended up being really useful when I had to handle unexpected issues during a Sprint. Basically, it gave me a better way to manage tasks that popped up out of nowhere without throwing off the whole project.
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