Online training is now available from HotPMO
At HotPMO, we pride ourselves on helping organizations deliver the right things, faster. We achieve this in a number of ways. We provide coaching services to people in the PMO and portfolio management space. We work with organizations to optimize portfolios and to optimize delivery. We provide training in Kanban, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), and other approaches that can help organizations organize themselves to deliver faster than ever before.
Now you can access that training from the comfort of your own living room, through our self-paced learning offerings on our training platform https://learn.hotpmo.com.
Free Online Agile Training
Our very first course offering is a free agile training course. The course is designed to help you learn the agile ceremonies and get the most out of them. It includes an overview and history of the Agile Manifesto and provides a guide to Scrum.
If you consume it all in one sitting, you will find it takes you just under 90 minutes to complete. We share some best practices for each of the scrum ceremonies (or events) and give you actionable tips. Learning with HotPMO will help your scrum teams get the more out of the scrum framework than ever before.
The free course is led by a certified scrum master. During the course, you will learn how mastering four of the agile ceremonies will help you support your software development team, improve alignment to goals and vision, and accelerate delivery on your agile projects.
The course starts by taking you on a journey through agile history. We’ll guide you through the evolution of software delivery approaches in the 1980s, through the early days of Scrum, to the formation of the Agile Manifesto at Snowbird, Utah in 2001.
During the course we show you:
- How to massively improve your sprint reviews by placing less emphasis on ‘demos”;
- Why product backlog refinements throughout the sprint duration will make your Sprint Planning meetings flow more smoothly;
- How there is so much more to retrospectives than sticking notes to a wall;
- How to mix up your daily scrum / daily standup formats to keep them relevant and engaging.
On completion of the course, you’ll be awarded a certificate of completion which you can share on LinkedIn, and with future employers. We keep a record of all certificates issued and can provide evidence of completion to employers seeking validation of your achievements.
The five Scrum Events
The Scrum Guide describes five Scrum Events, often referred to as Agile Ceremonies:
Sprint Planning
The Sprint Planning ceremony is a timeboxed Scrum Event that occurs at the start of a sprint. It is where the team comes together to agree on the work from the product backlog that is most valuable to be done next, and to build a sprint backlog of tasks to be completed during the sprint.
Daily Scrum (often referred to as the Daily Standup)
This daily meeting is only 15 minutes long but serves a vital purpose. It affords the development team a chance to come together at the same time every day to plan out how they are going to move closer to achieving their sprint goal.
Sprint Review
The Sprint review concludes the development of one sprint and is an opportunity for the team and stakeholders to assess the work done so far, and affords them an opportunity to update the product backlog to maximize value in the subsequent iterations.
Sprint Retrospective
Learning and refining your approach is an important part of most agile frameworks. The retrospective is an event where the team come together to reflect on the sprint and plan for experiments that are likely to improve delivery for the future
The Sprint
The Sprint itself is not really a ceremony, but it is one of the five Scrum Events. It is the container that all the other events and activities sit within. There is no break between sprints – as one sprint finishes with a review and retrospective, the next sprint begins with the subsequent round of planning.
During this training course, we will take you through the four ceremonies:
- Sprint Planning
- The daily scrum / daily standup
- Sprint Review
- Sprint Retrospective
Explaining the Agile Ceremonies
To outsiders, these ceremonies may sound like just another series of reoccurring meetings. But they are much more than that. Agile delivery is continuous and sustainable, which makes having a regular rhythm or cadence an important part of achieving success. The ceremonies are also an important part of transitioning to a DevOps culture with continuous integration and continuous delivery.
Forget about Jira and the road map, It is the regular ceremonies that hold everything together and form the regular heartbeat of software delivery. Learning these ceremonies will help you understand their significance, and how they can help your software delivery teams become even more effective.
Scrum Facilitating
Facilitating Scrum events is an important part of the role of the Scrum Master. But it is also an important skill for others to master, including digital project manager, agile coaches, line managers, and members of PMO teams who work with teams and coach them. By learning to master agile and scrum, you will help your self-organizing teams become better and prioritizing work, agreeing on goals, working together, and developing a culture of continuous improvement.
Learning Agile for free
Agile Ceremonies Explained is a free training course provided by HotPMO. It covers the important things you need to know about each of the agile ceremonies and gives you practical advice that you take away and apply immediately with your own team, or within your own organization.
This is only the first of several free courses that will be made available at HotPMO over the coming months, along with more detailed premium courses.
Whether you are new to agile and are looking to add agile to your skillset, or whether you are familiar with agile delivery, but are looking to get even more out of your agile ceremonies, you’ve come to the right place.
Head over to our training pages Learn @ HotPMO and get starting on your learning journey today
