Building Agile Distributed Teams -- Chicago April 8, 2009

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Building Agile Distributed Teams

Leverage the power of Scrum, remotely

Create synergies between distant teams

Improve your team's tools and protocols

Who Should Attend and Prerequisites
This course is suited for people who need to leverage the cost-saving potential of distance/distributed work, while depending on the speed and quality of Agile:

Product Managers/Owners and Project Champions / Department Heads facing projects depending on the expertise of distributed staff. Project Managers, Team Leads/Coaches, ScrumMasters with teams of geographically distant members. Business Analysts, Software Analysts, Architects, QA Analysts, Developers and Testers who want to maximize their productivity on distributed teams. Process Advocates who want to fit the needs of distributed teams with the process standards of their organization.Co-located teams who need strong interactions with remote vendors, clients, or other resources.

Attendees will learn
techniques for joining and setting up "hyper-performing" Agile teams across
distances, and apply these techniques in experiential exercises.

Participants should have some experience with team-based development of a deliverable product.

Why?
Agile methodologies warn how critical it is to co-locate teams in the same room, but this is not always practical. Distributed, distant, or "virtual" teams are a reality of business today. Offshoring, flex-work schedules, multiple corporate offices, and other forces create pressures to achieve results even when team members are scattered across the globe.But most of these distributed teams seem to prove the Agile warnings right by demonstrating old habits of waterfall behavior. Long cycle times and endless revision of requirements churn are the norm, status reporting takes up far too much time, and individual leaders dominate the team. Management direction gets lost in a sea of process and tools instead of manifesting as tangible, quality product.This is the challenge of business in the 21st century: how to work effectively at a distance. This course is where you will meet that challenge: how to create and sustain tightly-knit, effective Agile distributed teams.

What You Will Learn
This course cuts to the heart of Agile behavior, leveraging foundational principles and the power of Scrum (an Agile framework) to help those facing the unique challenges of their distributed teams. You will learn:

Enabling the power of self-organization - empowering the team to
be "pulled" by their product rather than "pushed" by a dictatorial
leader; critical roles for distributed product development
Tools -- good, bad, how to use them, and how not to abuse them (or your team!)
Agile attractors - the universal forces of effective product development, values for basic human interaction, and how to negotiate the complexities of team interaction face-to-face or miles apart
Creating distributed teams for maximum effectiveness - choosing initial members for a new distributed team, joining the team as a new member, and scaling; while boosting productivity, quality, and creativity
Setting up and improving your team's protocols - examples of protocols that work for collocated teams vs. those that work for distributed teams, and criteria for evaluating your own team protocols
How to thrive instead of merely survive - leveraging "feedback loops of trust," both within the team and with those outside the team, to actually increase team effectiveness over time

This course is based on experiential learning. Participants will practice in applied simulations and pull out real-life examples and case studies. This will involve participants totally in the experience of applying these topics to their own unique challenges.

Course Details
Length: 2 daysSize: Class will be strictly limited to a minimum of 5 and maximum of 21 participants.

Specific Event Details

Morning and Afternoon breaks -- snacks will be served.
Lunch will be served.
This event is onsite at the hotel.
Special questions? Please contact Mary.



Organized by 3Back LLC
For invoicing options, large group rates or questions please inquire.

eMail: Mary
Call: 1.414.617.7073
WebForm: Contact Us

About Us
Through a comprehensive offering of training, coaching, and consulting services, 3Back will guide your organization to a new level of business perception and action.

Product is Developed by People
The problem with product development is not motivation - your team works hard. The problem is not workload - there is enough capacity. Repeatedly, we observe hard-working teams that just cannot seem to apply their collective skills in the right ways.

At 3Back we believe in human-powered methodologies for developing complex products such as software systems. Our primary focus is on helping teams apply their effort more effectively. We train and coach on Agile development, with an emphasis on the importance of engaging the human side of the equation.

Better teams make better products, faster.

We make teams better.

Please review our policies.

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Ticket Info:  

• Early Bird Registration (limited seats), $920.00
• Regular Registration, $1,080.00

Official Website: http://chicago-agile-distributed-teams-upcoming.eventbrite.com