Training
We have been training our own internal coaches for some time now, and are now offering what we have found to be a successful mentoring approach to growing coaches for our clients. This is divided into two categories or service: Training and Practice. The training is a great way to introduce the methodology and its value proposition to your organization and your team. To help you do that, we offer several classes including the 5 day course that was offered at the University of Buenos Aires this past year during Escuela de Ciencias Informáticas 2007 (Information Sciences Intersession 2007).

1. Introduction to Agility (Executive Agile 101)
This is a ½ day class for Organizational Leaders
• Value Proposition to the Business
• Process Optimization
• Scrum as an Agile Framework
• Portfolio Management
• Agile within the CMMi
• Steps Forward
• Q&A and Case Studies

2. Agile Startup
This is a 2 day class for Project and Program Managers
• What is this thing called Agile?
• Project and Team Chartering
• Release Planning Overview
   - Planning Game
   - Sprint Planning and Estimating
   - Understanding yesterday’s weather and velocity
• Feeling the drag of multi-tasking
• Writing Good Stories
• The Power of Stand-ups and Retrospectives
• Means of Visibility
• Agile Readiness Assessment

3. Introduction to Agile for the Practitioner (from ECI-2007)
This was our 5 day class offered at University of Buenos Aires
• Introduction to Agility
   - The manifesto, the practices and the benefits
   - Why do I want to be Agile?
   - How do we really figure the value proposition?
• The Planning Game
   - Planning, Estimating, Velocity
   - What does it feel like to be agile
• The Deming Cycle
   - Planning
   - Doing
   - Checking
   - Acting
• The Chartering Game
   - Experience is the best teacher
• Agile Applied and Lesson's Learned
   - Agile in real life
   - Retrospection
   - Questions and answers

Mentoring
The step after training is to help your teams really grok the concepts and put them to use. Many of the practices within Agile are simple to practice, however often times they are hard to master. Like any challenging game, it is easy to execute even the complex moves on their own, but orchestrating an entire team to execute the most appropriate actions in all the various dynamic situations requires a muscle memory that is not generated from mere class room training. For organizations who would like some professional coaching so as to both see and feel what it is like to execute following the methodology in a clear and concise way, we offer an Agile Jump Start. This is typically 3 Iterations in length and includes a chartering exercise up front to help the organization look at their project’s business case from an agile perspective.

The Agile Quick Start covers:
• Initial Team Training
• Project and Team Chartering
   - Developing the actual Project Charter
• Roles and Responsibilities
• Release Planning
• Sprint Planning
• Stand-Ups
• Retrospectives and Visibility

The participants of the Quick Start must include all of the direct project team members (PM, Analysts, Developers, QA/QC, etc.).