Advanced CSM (A-CSM) is coming to Cedar Rapids, Iowa!

Agile For All has a new course offering that is gaining momentum. I get to be the lucky one to share a little information!! On April 28-29, 2020 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, we will be providing a public Advanced CSM.

Let’s first quickly cover the basic question.

What’s the Advanced CSM (ACSM or A-CSM)?
From the Scrum Alliance website:

• Facilitate better dialogue between the Product Owner, Scrum Team members, customers, stakeholders, and executives
• Respond confidently when encountering resistance to change, lack of engagement, low motivation, and unavailability of key people
• Increase engagement to encourage greater accountability, commitment, and buy-in
• Scale Scrum and Agile beyond a single team

At Agile For All here’s our explanation:
When working in organization, we often hear the question, “So what does a ScrumMaster do?” ScrumMasters play a crucial role in helping teams improve, yet they help in more subtle and lasting ways than telling people what to do by positional power. One of the key challenges is learning how to help bring people together to deliver value, without taking ownership. Bringing people together goes beyond getting consensus; instead, getting to collaboration means tapping into the knowledge and wisdom of the entire team.

Advanced Certified ScrumMaster (A-CSM) picks up where Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) leaves off, aiding ScrumMasters with the real day-to-day challenges of helping teams and organizations grow and improve. Throughout the course, you will use hands-on, engaging exercises to learn and expand your knowledge. We will explore how to have challenging conversations, confront and resolve conflicts, deal with impediments, address real facilitation challenges, and uncover what drives you and your team for long-term wins.

Now let’s get into the really good stuff, you know, my opinions. ☺

Why Agile For All’s A-CSM?
The course rocks. Ok, you shouldn’t just accept that. I can say this because we built this course with these top three key elements:

1. We feel very strongly that leaders have a depth of skills in training, mentoring, facilitating, and coaching. For quite some time, we wanted to create a facilitation course that we felt really provided leaders a deeper understanding of the power and potential of facilitation tools/skills. When we heard from Scrum Alliance that they were working on a set of learning objectives to advance the ScrumMaster abilities, I was ecstatic that they heavily aligned with building facilitation skills.
2. We didn’t build the course to meet the learning objectives. We built a course of content and practicing skills that we believe benefit all leaders (not just ScrumMasters). Sure, we had to add a few minor elements to meet certification requirements, but we built for value first. This is why we subtitled this course “Facilitating Amazing Humans.” As a result, even if you are not a ScrumMaster, you can still benefit from this course. If you don’t care about certifications, you will still benefit from this course.
3. The quality of materials/delivery has to be stellar. There is no reuse of content from other Agile For All courses. If we cover a concept in another course, it will not be repeated in this course. We limit the class size, as we wanted application/practice of the various techniques not just awareness. We leverage the Training from the Back of the Room learning approach. We share our personal experiences even if the story is slightly embarrassing. I mean, that’s what learning sometimes is. We constantly update and improve with each delivery.

Why Cedar Rapids, Iowa?
There were several factors in selecting Cedar Rapids as one of the locations for our public offerings:

• Agile For All has a few clients specifically in Cedar Rapids. As a result, we have been giving CSM and CSPO courses there for quite some time. The request to add this course to options came as aligned in supporting (speaking at) the ICR Agile Conference in Iowa.
• On a personal front, I have never been there and look forward to my first visit.

If we can answer any additional questions, please do not hesitate to comment below (or message). Hope to see you there!

–Tricia

If you can’t join us in Cedar Rapids, be sure to look at other course locations for the A-CSM course, as well as other offerings from Tricia.