Certified Scrum Product Owner®

Charlotte, NC - Certified Product Owner Course (CSPO)

Our approach to this course is unique, in at least two ways: our approach to Scrum and the Agile Release Planning workshop as a third day.

We want you to have significantly better results from Scrum, in terms of more fun, more Velocity (productivity) and more Business Value. We use many ideas to help you make this significant paradigm shift. We use interaction, Q&A, exercises, improv, table discussions and other techniques to get you involved and to help you experience what it is like to be on a great Scrum Team.

Joe Little will lead this course. He has co-taught eight times with Jeff Sutherland. Joe is an experienced Agile Coach and Certified Scrum Trainer (CST).  He has been a CST for 17+ years. He has worked with other great Scrum trainers. He also has an MBA, which is fairly unique among trainers.

Following the three-half-day course, we have a two-half-day Agile Release Planning Workshop, which attendees strongly recommend.

This workshop covers Agile Release Planning, Release Plan Refactoring (a.k.a. Product Backlog grooming or Product Backlog refinement) and the shift from initial planning into starting the first Sprint. These topics are also covered in the course, briefly. The big difference is that you work in a team and you practice Agile Release Planning with real work. (Note: The ARP workshop is not included in the price quoted here.) 

Participants Will Learn:

• Practical, project-proven practices
• The PO’s key responsibilities
• How important the PO is to success
• Typical PO failure modes
• The essentials of getting a project off on the right foot
• How to write user stories for the product backlog
• How to help both new and experienced teams be more successful
• The basics of scaling Scrum, perhaps to large, multi-continent projects teams
• Tips and tricks from the instructor's 11 years of using Scrum in a wide variety of environments
• How to plan, initiate and lead a Scrum project
• How to establish a shared vision for the entire team
• To generate an Agile Release Plan utilizing user stories and Story Point estimation
• How to identify, engage and involve Business Stakeholders in your project
• Practical suggestions purchased expensively from the school of hard knocks

In this course, we typically mix in XP and Lean ideas. Having worked with Jeff Sutherland, Joe mixes in many of his ideas and stories. Having a business background and an MBA, Joe is oriented more than others toward the Product Owners and business issues. We want you to have a full business success, not a mere technical success.

You will get useful knowledge about how and why Scrum works.

Again, we strongly urge you to also register for the Agile Release Planning Workshop that immediately follows. This workshop makes you “ready to go” when you return to the office on Monday.

Additional Information:

• The course will run from 8:30 a.m. - 5:30 p.m. each day.
• Following successful completion of the course, a participant becomes enrolled as a Certified Scrum Product Owner. (We must also sign the license agreement.)
• All participants will also receive a two-year membership in Scrum Alliance, where additional ScrumMaster-only materials and information are available.
• You receive a copy of our book on Agile Release Planning.
• You receive a free pack of Fibonacci cards for priority poker and for planning poker.

Course Material:
Participants will receive a "book," which is a hardcopy of the slide deck. (We have many discussions and exercises outside the slide deck.) 

We offer a free download of our book, A Scrum Introduction.

In addition, participants should obtain (at their own expense) "Agile Project Management with Scrum" by Ken Schwaber, or "Scrum" by Jeff Sutherland. You may also wish to obtain the first Scrum book, "Agile Software Development with Scrum" by Schwaber and Beedle.

After class, you will be given a free copy of Joe’s book, Agile Release Planning, and a copy of all the drawings we do and notes we take in class.  

Of course, there will be updated material and training exercises in the course that you cannot get from books.