Organizational Agility Training
 At Trail Ridge Consulting, we understand how enterprise organizational structures impact development processes. Our approach combines working closely with your organizational leadership together with your development teams to align the organization structures with the development process.
Trail Ridge believes in whole-team training. To create empowered, disciplined and self-organizing teams, each team member must be equipped with the proper tools. This includes development team members, functional managers, product managers, executives and other key stakeholders. Our training programs are highly interactive and support the various roles and levels engaged in the software development life cycle.
Our training is based on the Scrum Framework which focuses on developing and supporting high performing teams and identifying the organizational impediments preventing them from achieving their goals. We incorporate Lean Principles of optimizing the whole system, reducing waste, focusing on those producing software and shortening the software delivery cycle time. However, our key differentiator is applying the Scrum Framework in large distributed enterprise organizations with rich structures.
Trail Ridge Consulting creates customized training solutions for your organization with some or all of the following components:
Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) Training is the most recognized and  leading agile education program available today. Over 10,000 leaders have been certified by the Scrum Alliance, the non-profit organization behind the CSM program. This two-day course not only provides the fundamental principles of Scrum, it also gives participants hands-on experience using Scrum.
 Pete Behrens, Principle Trainer for Trail Ridge Consulting, is a Certified Scrum Trainer and leads private and public Certified ScrumMaster courses. Click here for more information.
Scrum Team Training
Scrum is Team-Driven Development. While the Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) Training is primarily focused on leadership, organizations that educate and engage the entire team see much higher results. Empowered, self-organizing, committed and disciplined teams require understanding and ownership from both leaders and team members.
This two-day highly interactive hands-on training program is designed for cross-functional teams and is customized to work with your project data. This course provides the foundations of Scrum and focuses on developing high-performing teams. You will come out of this training program with not only understanding Scrum, but having experienced it with your own teams and projects. You will also have an initial release and first sprint plan for your project. Multiple teams combined in a single session allow for cross-pollination of teamwork and project dependencies.
Additional 1/2 Day Training Sessions
Requirements through User Stories
Requirements elicitation and management using traditional product requirements documents and detailed specifications often leave little room for collaboration, prioritization, incremental delivery which tends to over produce solutions. An agile process requires agile requirements management.
User Stories are a proven tool to focus teams on delivering value, reduce the waste often associated with traditional specifications, support incremental development and increase collaboration between the business and development. Managing requirements through user stories will help align development with the business and drive a healthy agile process.
This training session provides a bridge from traditional requirements management to understanding and creating user stories to drive a more effective requirements management process. It leverages many industry examples and allows participants to create and critique user stories for their own projects.
Agile Estimating, Planning and Tracking
Traditional estimating and planning methods based on detailed requirements specifications have proven ineffective at delivering on time and on budget. And those projects that do meet the parameters often are less successful because they have achieved their goals through stringent change control which leads to ineffective product solutions.
Agile estimating, planning and tracking techniques provide a very simple, yet powerful way to increase visibility, flexibility, and predictability in your projects. They engage the whole team which builds buy-in, ownership, and commitment. They allow for change to support dynamic markets most companies find themselves in.
This highly interactive hands-on program will provide you team-based practices for project estimation and planning that build whole-team collaboration, ownership and commitment. It will demonstrate how using agile methods you can actually increase your predicatability over traditional project planning and tracking methods.
Agile Enterprise Architecture
Enterprise Architecture is a holistic perspective between the organizational architecture and the solution architecture. It provides alignment between the business and the IT systems to support and grow it. While there are many Enterprise Architecture frameworks available, they tend to produce heavy structures and processes which prevent agility. As breakdowns occur, additional structures and processes are added furthering the rigidness and slowness of the organization.
This course will demonstrate the link between organizational architecture and solution architecture and how both tend to disintegrate through growth. We will evaluate some real company communication patterns and how the organizational architectures impact their solution architectures. We will then discuss strategies for creating a flexible organization to increase business and IT alignment and speed the development of new solutions.
Agile Tooling: Team to Enterprise
At a team level, there are new tools for Scrum teams to leverage including product backlog lists, task boards and burn down charts. There are also new processes and practices that may require additional support such as release planning, sprint planning, reviews and retrospectives.
The tools the agile teams use to support their processes are as varied as the teams and organizations themselves. That is because each team and organization has unique needs based on their organizational structures.
This course takes participants through the Scrum process framework and identifies the various tools teams use to support it. It covers manual tools, office productivity tools, open source and free tools, mid-level enterprise tools and large enterprise tools including Rally and VersionOne. We will explore how teams are leveraging tools to support general process management, distributed teams, multiple teams, portfolio management, executive review and more.
Next Steps
Each of these courses can be provided and customized for your organization. If you are interested in learning more about a specific training or customization offering, please contact us. |
