Advanced CSM Announcement

Several of us at Agile For All are now certified Path to CSP Educators with the Scrum Alliance.  We submitted an Advanced Certified ScrumMaster (ACSM) course and were approved while I was in London!!!

This means I have the pleasure of announcing our first ACSM in Denver on January 28-29, 2019.  The details about the course are located here.  I’m not going to restate what we highlight there.  Instead, I’m going to give a little insight into why we chose to build this course…

What should not be a surprise is that I feel very strongly that leaders have a depth of skills in training, mentoring, facilitating and coaching. For quite some time, I had been wanting to create a facilitation course that I felt really provided leaders a deeper understanding of the power and potential of facilitation tools/skills.  When we heard from Scrum Alliance that they were working on a set of learning objectives to advance the ScrumMaster abilities, I was ecstatic that they aligned with facilitation.

At one of our Agile For All team offsite meetings, four of us decided to collaborate together to build this course.  For the next six months, we would set up times to sync, collaborate and plan our next steps.  I’m always nervous about building a course in my “spare time” as we all had other work which was taking a good percentage of our time.  We couldn’t simply focus on this for a concentrated period of time, we had to build in spurts around our calendars.  Yet, while I was working with Scrum Alliance on final approval, I found myself incredibly proud of our training approach, content and overall learning experience.

For example, some of the things we made constraints in our course:

• No reuse of content from other courses.  If we cover a concept in another course, it would not be repeated in this course.  All new material was essential.
• We leveraged the Scrum Events to help teach facilitation techniques but you could still take this course with little to no scrum knowledge (you wouldn’t get the certification but you would still gain facilitation skills)
• We wanted application/practice of the techniques not just awareness.

I’m biased but I very much think you should join us for our kickoff ACSM!