Professional Agile Leadership - Evidence Based Management

Measuring Value to Enable Improvement and Agility

With markets and customer needs constantly changing, organizations need information and evidence that helps them adapt quickly to new challenges and opportunities so that they can deliver greater value and achieve true business agility. Yet often organizations that use Agile product development techniques use traditional management approaches, expecting leaders to set firm long-term goals and manage progress toward them with dashboards of static metrics.

That is why Scrum.org created the Evidence-Based Management™ (EBM) framework which is an Agile approach to help leaders guide their teams toward continuously improving customer outcomes, organizational capabilities, and business results. EBM focuses on customer value and intentional experimentation to systematically improve an organization's performance and achieve their strategic goals. 

Course Overview

In the Professional Agile Leadership™ – Evidence-Based Management (PAL-EBM) course, participants learn what EBM is and how to apply it through hands-on, activity-based learning. Through a series of exercises participants learn techniques that support a more agile mindset:

• Use empiricism to set and achieve strategic goals, managing the unknown and complexity through experimentation and by adapting goals along the way
• Create a cultural environment using clear goals, appropriate measures, and trust to enable self-management and autonomy
• Shift the conversation away from measuring progress purely through team performance metrics, toward a focus on customer-centricity and improving customer outcomes
• Drive operational improvements by using four Key Value Areas (Unrealized Value, Current Value, Time to Market, and the Ability to Innovate) as lenses for evidence-based decision-making

Course Learning Objectives

• Understand the essential aspects of goals and measures and how they influence behaviors and an organization’s culture and values
• Help organizations embrace empiricism as a leadership approach. Using experimentation to incrementally steer toward the organization’s goals 
• An appreciation for how goals and trust act together to enable autonomy, transparency, and value delivery
• Correlate market leadership and sustainability to curiosity, adaptation, and empiricism
• Understand how to use EBM and its KVAs to focus measurements on improving market value and operational capabilities

Who Should Attend

PAL-EBM is for professionals in leadership roles (including executives, managers, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, coaches, and consultants) who:

• Are responsible for the success of their product delivery programs or Agile transformations and are seeking a means to measure and demonstrate that success
• Are looking for a framework that identifies improvement areas that increase their business agility, including their time to pivot to meet new challenges and deliver customer value
• Want to help their organization embrace empiricism and experimentation to find solutions for complex problems (where more is unknown than known or the situation changes rapidly)
• Want to articulate goals and measures in a way that fosters self-management and empower their teams to understand the connection between their work and the value their organization is providing and customer is receiving
• Want to be more effective in how they measure success by using Agile measures rather than traditional measurement models (including the use of velocity)

Attendees should have read the Evidence-Based Management Guide, have an understanding of Agile practices, and a desire to move away from traditional, plan-driven ways of working and measurement models, however, they do not need specific experience with Scrum. Our Professional Agile Leadership- Essentials course helps leaders understand how to best support their Agile teams and is ideal preparation for PAL-EBM, but is not a prerequisite. Our Professional Scrum Product Owner and Professional Scrum Product Owner - Advanced courses teach Product Owners how to deliver value and can be a great complement to the PAL-EBM course.

Professional Scrum Certification

All participants completing this course will receive a password to attempt the Professional Agile Leadership - Evidence-Based Management (PAL-EBM) assessment. The industry-recognized PAL-EBM certification requires a minimum passing score of 85%. PAL-EBM class participants who attempt the PAL-EBM assessment within 14 days of receiving their free password and do not score at least 85% will be granted a 2nd attempt at no additional cost.

PMI PDU Credits

Students of Scrum.org courses are able to claim Project Management Institute (PMI) PDU credit: 7 PDUs after attending a one-day Professional Agile Leadership - Evidence-Based Management (PAL-EBM) course. Please note that PMI PDUs are earned for course attendance and not for passing a Scrum.org assessment. Students can claim PDUs under PMI's "Education courses provided by other third-party providers” category. You can claim your PDUs online at https://ccrs.pmi.org.  Find instructions here.

Invoicing

To request a manual invoice simply email info@orderlydisruption.com with the subject "manual invoice" -- payment would then be made via an electronic transfer, a Paypal transaction, or an over-the-phone card payment. 

Profile of the trainer

​

John Coleman is an active practitioner with 15+ years of experience in growing sustainable agility. Learn from John's breadth & depth of current case studies with the "old reliable", the latest trends and some leading & not yet well-known patterns. 

Why John Coleman?

Every PST has his/her own strengths. John Coleman is one of the few LeSS-Friendly Scrum Trainers. He regularly interviews leading lights on his YouTube channel. His podcast, XAgility™, consists of wisdom from some of the most famous faces in the agile world. John is a prolific blogger on advanced topics, and he leads content creation for Scrum, Lean UX, measurement, Kanban, scaling, de-scaling, Executives, people & change. John teaches Marshall Goldsmith's techniques at all of his workshops in a #payitforward fashion. All of John's workshops feature Liberating Structures. John Coleman offers a number of practice tests where they are needed. John's client base consists mainly of non-native English speakers (English is the 3rd/4th language) in continental Europe. John's clients give rave reviews on Trustpilot, Google, and VocalReferences, and they get great results as long as they also put the effort in.

Review & Ratings for John Coleman of Orderly Disruption on Google, VocalReferences & Trustpilot

Reviews & Ratings for all of John Coleman's workshops are available on: 

• Google - http://bit.ly/GoogleJohnC
  ​
• TrustPilot - https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.ace.works
  
  ​
• Vocal References - http://bit.ly/VocalRJohnC
  
  ​

It's not just about Reviews & Ratings 

Reviews & ratings are limited by nature. John needs to understand if the learning made a real difference back in the office. So, John checks in up to 12-18 months later. He sees a pattern of improvement and regularly gets pleasant vibes from successful agility inspired by workshop ideas. For example, see this experience report.

Content writing

John Coleman is a Professional Scrum Trainer, a candidate LeSS trainer / LeSS Friendly Scrum Trainer, organizer of ELNA (Executive Leadership Network for Adaptiveness), co-author of Kanban Guide, and author of Kanban for Complexity™ aka Kanplexity™ with lots of attribution to Dave Snowden & Cognitive Edge for Cynefin and related theory. See https://kanbanguides.org. 

John made one of the most comprehensive comparisons/contrast of the scaling/descaling frameworks at https://valueglide.com/blog and https://orderlydisruption.com/blogs/grow-agility-for-your-why/mirror-mirror-on-the-wall-preamble-to-1-of-4  ("Mirror Mirror" series). John Coleman's blog posts on executives, Scrum, Kanban, Nexus Vs. LeSS, are available at https://bit.ly/JohnColemanBlog. John blogs prolifically at orderlydisruption.com, valueglide.com, Medium, CIO Water Cooler, and The Digital Transformation People. 

Practicing what he preaches, except he doesn't preach -- he doesn't sell, huh?

John helps teams, managers, leaders, change agents, and execs. He can answer all sorts of up-to-date questions with ease. John coaches, teaches, and consults for sustainable growth of agility in non-software and software. He created Broad and Deep agility (BaDa) on top of the shoulders of existing theory & practice. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUen2CeyTDk. John himself is broad & deep from the points of view of agility, people & change.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

John is a systems thinker who happens to be a huge fan of Cynefin and sees the benefits of both, erring on the side of Cynefin where they clash. Most importantly, John takes an independent view. John is also a people & change thinker; he uses Spiral Dynamics Integral (certified to level 2) and other models; even if they are criticized in some quarters as pseudoscience, John finds aspects of Spiral Dynamics helpful in structuring better conversations with people. 

More proof he knows what he's talking about and has done what he talks about

John's Scrum+Kanban Nexus+ case studies can be found (international payments company, European bank) at https://www.valueglide.com/blog/nexus-nexus-and-scrum.org-certifications. 

John is grateful to be part of Marshall Goldsmith's #payitforward campaign and, in so doing, offers free coaching/mentoring/co-training to a selection of potential agility chefs. John is a member of the #MarshallGoldsmithLead60 group, a cohort from the 16,000+ #MarshallGoldsmith100CoachesApplicants. It was a privilege for John to be one of a lucky group of 60 people; Marshall Goldsmith himself taught that group in Salt Lake City in February 2018. All of John's workshops #payitforward Marshall Goldsmith content, including Marshall's advice to John himself.

Client list

John typically practiced with many of his clients for 18+ months. He is switching to shorter-term engagements. John's client list (directly or indirectly) includes Japanese Tobacco International, Shell, Barclaycard, Vocalink Mastercard, Centrica / British Gas, the Musgrave Group, RR Donnelley, DELL, Nordic Aviation Services, 84.51, Intralinks, PaySafe, Vodafone, Ericsson, NASA, Sky, and BP. 

Workshop Environment

Assessment preparation tends not to be covered in the workshop. The workshop focuses on attendees getting ready to apply new skills back at work immediately after the workshop. There is an expectation that attendees will attend some free post-workshop Zoom calls and watch recordings of their own group (or previous groups) doing tough practice tests, sometimes including John Coleman's own practice tests, which address the same learning outcomes, albeit from a different angle. John expects attendees to attend the calls, as assessment preparation does not scale on a 1:1 basis. Signing up for this workshop is effectively signing up to attend these calls.

Sometimes, John Coleman will have a co-trainer, someone already qualified or building up experience. Please inform John Coleman if you need him to bring an assistant trainer who speaks your language via john@orderlydisruption.com; economics will hopefully be in our favor to allow that if there is enough demand.

Live Virtual

• Each segment is 60-75 mins long with 15-30 min breaks. Attendees can spread the workshop over several days if advertised or if other attendees are ok with that —no recording of the workshop to improve openness. The workshop size is limited to 20 attendees.
• Workshop attendees will use Zoom/Teams, Mural, Slack, StoriesOnBoard, Strategyzer, Kanbanize/SwiftKanban, and John's physical flipcharts.
• Learning online is almost as effective as face-to-face. The critical difference is working together online; it takes longer to do things. A "funnel" gets added to the Kanban Board for optional best efforts and additions to the official curriculum. Most questions will get answered to the attendees' satisfaction, one way or the other. 

Rules to follow:

• cameras on
• mics on - let's avoid delayed interventions
• be on time for every segment
• no meetings/phone calls/emails during the active segments
• be self-aware and conscious of the needs of others to have their say
• no hijacking of the agenda; a free coach session is on offer per attendee, use that instead.

A Scrum Reset is often needed in the workshop

If the class attendees demonstrate additional ability, bonus content may get covered. However, as per pre-class communications, the class pace can get set to a slower pace by even one attendee who has not prepared for class. While John Coleman's style is to assume zero knowledge, some attendees may have negative knowledge, and incorrect preconceived ideas, according to Scrum.org.

Negative knowledge creates drag for a training class; hence John Coleman sometimes performs pre-training-screening-calls. While there are no formal prerequisites for Scrum.org classes, the trainer may request in pre-training phone calls that some attendees go to Professional Scrum Foundations/Scrum Master (by any Scrum.org trainer) to ensure a smooth learning experience, even if the booked class ticket needs to be postponed to another date, refunding if necessary less banking fees. Either way, at the beginning of each workshop, some Scrum reset takes place to align attendees and reduce the potential for learning drag later.

Payment, fees & cancellation

• Payment in advance is required, with no exceptions. All documentation requirements for invoice payment by the training date must be declared immediately. 
• No responsibility is taken for costs resulting from cancellation/postponement.
• A minimum quorum is needed for this class to proceed.
• It's unusual for courses to get canceled. Some classes require a minimum number of attendees. No responsibility is taken for costs resulting from cancellation/postponement.
• You may cancel up to the specified online ticketing deadline, and if so, depending on the payment engine/approach, the refund could have deductions for bank transfer fees.
• You may postpone your ticket with a minimum of three business days' notice; thereafter, your lack of attendance at the booked date will be treated as a cancellation with zero refund (due to planning & venue costs for class numbers). Best efforts will be made to fit you into a later workshop.
• Electronic manuals and Scrum.org assessment fees are included. Physical manuals are not provided.

GDPR etc.

Subject to GDPR or other regulations:

• Attendees may be asked to optionally consent to receive communications, e.g., follow-up email newsletters.
• A booking is not a guarantee of attendance. The trainer may need to contact attendees to assess their readiness for the training class. It is possible the trainer will recommend additional training/reading before you can be accepted into the booked class.
• To get an assessment, the trainer must submit your name and email address to Scrum.org; Scrum.org may, in turn, send you regular newsletters. 
• Attendees will be invited to a slack channel for the class to enable communications before, during, and after the class.
• Photographs and/or video permission will be requested in class for follow-up marketing purposes.
• Reviews & Testimonials will be requested in class; you can add the same review and star rating to each of VocalReferences, TrustPilot, and Google, to be performed optionally in class. Attendees may also be asked to provide feedback to Scrum.org. For these requests, additional bonus learning content will be delivered regardless of the response.
• A limited number of free-of-charge post-training Zoom/alternative calls are offered. To book, attendees can arrange to meet me via  https://calendly.com/johncolemanagile 
• Attendees may be asked to join compatible communities, e.g., the LeSS community.
• See the privacy statement at orderlydisruption.com.