Training Services from New Synergy Group

New Synergy Group offers training services in four complementary areas:

1. How to improve effectiveness of people and build high-performance, agile teams.
2. How to practice Agile project and process management (such as the SCRUM framework) for software-intensive projects.
3. How to educate organizational stakeholders and manage interfaces with agile development teams.
   
4. How to apply systems thinking and system dynamics technique in order to develop enduring solutions to systemic problems in software development organizations
   

Training services in four areas (called TS-1, TS-2, TS-3 and TS-4) are offered.  Training material and topics can be combined from these four areas and customized to client-specific needs.  Many training topics are additionally supplemented and strengthened by simulation experiences, and workshops based on client-specific projects and work examples. 

TS-1.    Improving effectiveness of people and building high-performance, agile teams

Professional or technical knowledge learned in colleges and later with self-education is essential, but not enough, to work smart and achieve results. Training and effective application of several important behavior patterns and competencies (listed below) are needed for developing high-performance team members and teams in an agile development environment. New Synergy Group offers training on these topics, customized to client-specific needs.

Behavior patterns for effective individuals, such as:

• Work Ethics and professionalism
• Self-accountability and self-discipline
  
• Passion for success and focus on results
  

Competencies for individuals and teams, such as:

• Cross-functional and cross-component teams that take shared ownership of results
  
• Motivation
  
• Effective action management
• Effective problem solving
• Effective communication
• Zero defect closures
• Team work
• Root cause mindset
• Interpersonal skills
• Conflict resolution
  
• Exception management
• Multi-threading capabilities
• Effective decision making
• Self-organized teams of self-disciplined team members
  

Effective and high performance interfaces between agile teams and the rest of organization:

An agile team consists of team members, project manager (often called iteration manager or Scrum Master) and product manager (often called product owner).  Multiple agile teams must collaborate to work on a larger product or software solution effort.  This requires scaling up agile methods with techniques, such as Scrum-of-Scrum, Meta-Scrum or Distributed Scrum that call for highly effective communication, synchronization and collaboration among multiple agile teams towards a common goal.

Agile development teams do not operate in vacuum or isolation.  They must interface effectively with rest of the organization consisting of multiple agencies, such as: Program Management Office (PMO), IT Infrastructure, Business managers and senior executives, Marketing, Customer Support, Human Resources, Regulatory staff, Legal staff, etc.

New Synergy Group offers training to agile team members and agile teams to manage interfaces and information flow with many other stakeholders in other organizations.

TS-2. Agile project and process management 

Agile methods and process framework are best suited to get rapid feedback from customers; this is essential for iterative, incremental product delivery.  Agile processes and methods are also well suited for volatile environments where requirements change frequently and exploratory approach is essential to deal with uncertainties. 

The training material covers topics such as:

• Need and rationale for agile product, project and process management

• Agile core values and core principles

• Agile software process framework

• SCRUM framework -- the industry-leading agile development process  

• Scrum Overview

• Project Setup and Business Discovery
• Sprint Planning
• Daily Scrum Meetings
• The Sprint Burn-up and Burn-down charts
  
• Sprint Preparation
• Sprint Review
• Sprint Retrospective
• Backlogs management

• Agile product management: Product and release backlogs, value-based feature prioritization

• Agile practices covering product management, project management, analysis, architecture and design, development, QA, documentation

• Industry survey data for agile software practices

• How to determine when agile software project management techniques fit well to a specific situation, and equally importantly, when they don't.

• How to use agile development methods and process for a global software development and delivery model

• Application of lean methods and systems thinking for scalability Scalability issues and scalability techniques for agile methods, and other advanced topics. 

TS-3.  Agile stakeholders education

An enterprise will get only limited benefits from its agile development teams if stakeholders in the results produced by agile development teams are not properly educated about how agile teams work and produce results, and how to properly interface with them and manage the information flow and workflow. 

For example, if the Project Management Office (PMO) is used to measure the progress of projects with artifacts, documents and intermediate deliverables (such as percentage of design tasks completed), the interface between the PMO and agile teams will not work well because agile teams track and measure their output by project burn-down rates, sprint velocity, and working code produced (and not by documents and artifacts).  If senior executives are used to give direct action items (bypassing the project manager or Scrum Master) to developers to crank out and demonstrate a "cool" new feature to a "hot prospect", it will severely harm the agile iteration rhythm (Scrum sprint); such cool new features need to wait for the next sprint (only at most 30 days away), or some features need to be removed from the current sprint backlog in order to honor the fixed time-box iteration sanctity or the current sprint needs to be cancelled and planning for a new sprint started.  

Agile stakeholders (such as PMO, regulators, compliance staff, legal staff, senior executives, marketing, etc.) need to be educated to the agile methods and proper interactions/interfaces with agile teams.   Human Resources staff also need to be educated on career planning and career management for agile team members; career development may no longer be based on functional silos (developer, QA, project manager, etc.).   New Synergy Group offers training services for educating agile stakeholders -- all highly customized to your organization.

TS-4. Lean Methods and Systems thinking for software process and project improvements

This training material covers topics such as:

• Lean thinking and methods and their application to agile software project management and development:

• Systems thinking techniques and their application to agile software project management and development:
  

• Fundamentals of systems, feedback, delays
• Causal Loop Diagrams
• Stock-and-Flow Networks
• System archetypes encountered in
  
• Software projects
• Software processes
• Software people and team dynamics
  
• Leverage points for addressing system archetypes in software projects, software processes, and people and team dynamics, and their use in developing solutions
• How to use Systems Thinking and System Dynamics to complement and improve agile project management, process framework and practices

Benefits of training services: Your enterprise will receive the following benefits from customized training programs offered by New Synergy Group:

• Common vocabulary and lingua-franca for communication among all stakeholders: product managers, project managers, software development teams, quality assurance teams, customer delivery and support teams, and business executives
• Improved collaboration and decision making among all stake holders.
  
• Basic knowledge about agile product management, agile project management, SCRUM framework, lean thinking and methods, systems thinking and system dynamics and their application for improving organizational dynamics and addressing systemic problems (system archetypes)
• Build the foundation for improving effectiveness, self-discipline and productivity of people
  
• Lay the foundation for building high performance, self-organized teams
• Ensure smoother interactions among agile development teams and all other stakeholders by educating the stakeholders
  

All these benefits can be further enhanced and additional new benefits can be obtained by using consulting services from New Synergy Group.

Services: Training | Workshops | Consulting | Management | IP Development

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