Certified Scrum Product Owner Course

 

This is the CSPO course.  We usually do it as an intermediate course that assumes all attendees have the CSM certification or equivalent in experience doing Scrum “pretty well.”

The focus is on the Product Owner and the flow of business information into the team. And what it means to deliver higher and higher business value.

Summary of the Course:

This is usually an intermediate course, for people with some knowledge and experience.  As an intermediate course, we still spend some time reviewing the basic principles of Scrum to ensure a clear and unified understanding. Experience shows that practitioners frequently need to explain the principles to co-workers; you will become familiar in the course explaining the basics.

Overall, we use a combination of  team-based learning, exercises, and real-world case studies to help you learn how to become a better Product Owner.

Topics and/or exercises include:

  • Plan, initiate and lead a Scrum project
  • Release Planning: what & how & why
  • Develop the initial Product Backlog
  • Breaking down user stories (epics)
  • The different sources of PBIs in the Product Backlog
  • Improving the identification of Business Value
  • Story point estimation: how the PO plays, why he cares
  • Managing the Gap between customer expectations and the Team’s ability to deliver
  • Improving business value engineering: theory, tools, exercises
  • Balancing new features against digging out of technical debt
  • Refactoring the Release Plan continuously
  • Leading the Team and yet have the Team remain self-managing
  • Working with Business Stakeholders to make them more effective
  • Using the 80-20 rule
  • Fixing Product Owner impediments
  • Scaling & the Chief Product Owner role
  • Managing urgent items
  • You have to slow down to go fast
  • “Things aren’t perfect at my place; what do I do when…?”
  • The PO’s goals and actions in the basic Scrum meetings
  • Managing the flow of business information into the Team
  • Using the Release Burndown and other reporting

We will also get questions and issues from the group, prioritize them, and cover them.

This CSPO course is unique in that we are moving beyond theory, and applying the Scrum framework in the course and the workshop in more real-world circumstances. It is designed to bring attendees to a level where they feel comfortable experimenting and improvising in Scrum. Thus, you can help the team be more creative and release more business value.

Who Should Attend:

The CSPO course is for managers, analysts, product/project managers, business stakeholders, business analysts, and ScrumMasters.  The Product Owner is integral to the Team, therefore we recommend that the Team also attend the Workshop.

You will leave with a solid knowledge of how and why Scrum works. Through practical, hands-on exercises and small-group discussion you will be prepared to plan your first (or next) sprint immediately after this class. ScrumMasters need this course, as they must coach Product Owners in these skills.

Additional benefits: You can receive 15 Professional Development Units (PDUs) for this 2-day course plus an additional 7 PDUs for a 1-day Workshop. The course also fulfills the Agile PDU requirements of the PMI-ACP.

Course Material:

Participants will receive a copy of the slide deck at the course. In addition, participants should obtain  Agile Project Management with Scrum, by Ken Schwaber, which is required reading for the course. You may also wish to obtain the primary Scrum book, Agile Software Development with Scrum by Schwaber and Beedle, on which the course is also based. There are updated materials and training exercises in the course which are invaluable.

Additional Information:

Following successful completion of the course, each participant is enrolled as a CSPO, which includes a two-year membership in Scrum Alliance, where additional Scrum materials and information are available.

Information on the Workshop is provided in a separate section below.

The course typically runs from 8:30am-5:10pm each day. Breaks and lunch are provided.