Optimizing Value Streams: Turn Friction into Flow

• What This Course Is About

  Most teams are getting faster. They're shipping more, delivering sooner, and hitting their velocity targets. The problem is, they're still not generating value.

  Speed without direction is just expensive movement.

  This course gives you the diagnostic tools to see your system as it actually is, not as it appears on a burndown chart. Using value stream mapping, you'll learn how to make work visible, trace where time disappears, and name the structural forces that keep even high-performing teams stuck.

  You cannot improve a system you cannot explain. This course starts there.

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  Who This Is For

  This course is designed for Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches who are ready to move beyond team-level facilitation and start improving the systems their teams work inside.

  You'll get the most out of this course if you're already working in an Agile environment and want to connect your coaching to measurable business outcomes.

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  What You'll Learn

  By the end of the course, you'll be able to:

  • Distinguish outputs from outcomes, and explain the structural reasons most organizations default to the wrong one

  • Read a value stream map and identify where value is created, delayed, or lost entirely

  • Recognize the Three Devils: handoffs, sign-offs, and friction points, the most common sources of systemic waste

  • Apply Lean principles to surface improvement opportunities across teams and functions

  • Choose the right improvement approach based on the nature of the problem, not habit

  • Communicate what you observe as a testable hypothesis that others can act on

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  Course Details

  • Duration: 8 hours

  • Format: Instructor-led, available virtually and in-person

  • Credential: Scrum Alliance Advanced Microcredential

  • Tools: Miro-based activities and a real-world case study

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  A Note on the Case Study

  Every concept in this course is grounded in a real engagement: a century-old insurance company whose data warehouse team couldn't understand why nothing moved. The numbers told the story. 65% wait time. Eight handoffs. Six formal sign-offs. Rework looping back to the start. Once the team could see the system, they could finally name what needed to change.

  That's the work this course prepares you for.

Your Instructor

Joel Bancroft-Connors, CST® | CTC® | PMP | PMI-ACP The Gorilla Coach, LLC Joel has been in that room, the one where a team stares at their own data and realizes that 65% of their time was spent waiting. Not working. Waiting. That moment, repeated across dozens of organizations over a decade of coaching, is what this course is built around. As a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST®) and Certified Team Coach (CTC®), Joel is a subject matter expert and co-creator of this course, developed with Scrum Alliance. He spent over a decade as a project and program manager at VMware, Symantec, EMC, and Hitachi before crossing over to coaching, which means he understands why organizations are structured the way they are, not just how to work around them. He's not teaching value stream mapping as a concept. He's teaching it as a diagnostic tool he has used in real systems, with real stakes. 4.92/5 on Trustpilot | 2,000+ professionals trained | Clients include BMW, Stanford, Visa, State and Federal Agencies in the US and Canada.

Consider taking Enterprise Agility next.

Optimizing Value Streams builds the diagnostic skill. You'll leave knowing how to read a system and name what's slowing value down. Enterprise Agility is where you learn what to do about it, working with change models, resistance patterns, and the culture-structure dynamics that keep problems in place. One course surfaces the friction. The other gives you the tools to address it.

Bundling options are available. Look for the Bundle option at checkout.

Enterprise Agility is scheduled for July 28