Amplio Development Masterclass
Learn how to Create, Coach, and Coordinate Lean-Agile Teams. Create a free SMU account to see the course preview.
What to expect
This workshop takes teams that are either using Scrum or some Agile approach loosely based on it. It starts with a quick way to be effective by attending to quick feedback cycles. This enables quick improvement and focuses teams on what’s important to be effective.
It then provides some essential theories in the form of Flow, Lean, and Theory of Constraints. This enables an assessment of how well the team is working. Throughout the workshop, some innovative concepts are woven into the learning. These include new team structures and the concept of the Minimum Business Increment.
The workshop closes with teams constructing their way of working based on what it’s learned. Finally, it uses these techniques to continue improving.
On completion of this course, participants will:
The biggest costs of most workshops are not the fees paid, but the time lost by participants in taking the workshop and the lack of knowledge transfer. It’s easy to convey information in a workshop but most of it is lost quickly. The Amplio Development Masterclass is designed in a different way. It is organized around thirteen, one-hour lessons. These have 3 parts:
Pre-reading. A 1-5 page document to be read prior to the live session.
A live session going over the content to be learned. Pre-recorded versions of this are available as well. This session concludes with Q&A
Exercises. People learn best by doing. Each lesson includes exercises for participants to do with people in the workshop, peers, people they mentor and who they report to. These enable participants to apply what they’ve learned. Quick learn with quick doing means quick improvement.
There are significant advantages to the consistency of teams across an organization. Getting teams to align to the same items and shifting from I to the team to the organization is essential. However, different teams have different challenges, abilities, and constraints. By presenting the objectives needed, the why they are, and options to manifest them, teams can work towards the same goals but in ways that work for them.
It’s easy to say every team needs to be autonomous and cross-functional. That’s the ideal situation. However, most teams can’t reach this. By designing from Flow, Lean, and Theories of constraints, teams can determine how to best work within their constraints.
BLAST is a framework pattern used to coordinate the work of 3-9 teams. Each team can use any Agile method (Scrum, Kanban, eXtreme Programming, …). BLAST provides guidance for the teams to work together in either a flow or timeboxed manner.
It is based on Flow, Lean, and Theory of Constraint theories. It takes well-performing Agile teams and shows them how to work efficiently together. The beauty of BLAST is that it takes less effort to coordinate these teams than might be imagined. This is because teams that understand value streams, Flow, and key Lean product management concepts will naturally work together.
BLAST is included in Amplio Development Masterclass because few teams work in isolation, and knowing how to coordinate a few teams is essential. BLAST is called a framework pattern because it is not immutable but rather a suggested way for teams to work together. As all patterns do, it provides for multiple ways of implementing the framework so that the result is achieved without having to attend to particulars that may or may not fit your situation.
How the workshop can be used.
Individuals learning how to be more effective.
Individuals running lunch and learns by having their team watch the live sessions together and doing the exercises together.
Teams taking the workshop together, where each person is enrolled.
Companies having multiple teams taking the workshop as lunch and learns or as full teams enrolled.