Join me in London, March 17, 18, 21, 2014 for these Workshops

I will be in London again this spring. Again, I will be offering public workshops. This year, I'll be offering these workshops:

Monday, March 17, 2014: Introduction to Agile Project Management

Are you an “agile project manager”? Or, a “Scrum Master with project management responsibilities”? Or, maybe you’re a “Product Owner who is supposed to drive the project to completion”? You might be called any number of things. What you're called doesn't matter. If your company tells you that you have the responsibility to “drive” the project to completion, and they want to use agile, you are an agile project manager. Your company is also confused, and we will address that.

If you’ve been managing projects for a while, you may be perplexed by an agile project or your role in it. If you’re accustomed to predicting the schedule, assigning the work, and tracking a Gantt chart, you may be puzzled by how to use empirical data to understand the project’s progress, having people self-assign work, and by your new role as coach and facilitator. Without a Gantt chart, you may be puzzled and not know how to answer your management’s question, “When will you be done?” You may not even realize that’s the wrong question and what the right question is.

Agile projects provide the project manager (and any other manager) more useful information than a serial-lifecycle project. Yet, it’s difficult for many project managers to make the transition to Agile, because they don’t know what they can or should do.

In this experiential tutorial, we’ll use a small project to practice working on an agile project and how to collect the data—both quantitative and qualitative—that tells you how the project and the team are progressing. You will learn how to assess the project’s true state and be able to tell your management when you will be done and what the right question really is.

Here’s the value: In one day, you will learn enough about agile to know what questions to ask your team:

• Can we work in timeboxes or flow?
• How do we start if we don’t have all the requirements?
• How do we start delivering features, not architecture or frameworks?
• What are our impediments to thinking about transitioning to agile?
• What do our customers really want first: release date, feature set, low defects, and how can we tell? (This is from Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management)
• How do we work with product management/product owners?
• How do we move from silos to cross-functional teams?
• And much more

I will decide on the location as I see people sign up. I learned my lesson from last year. This year, we will have sunlight and water service!

Want to participate in this workshop? This workshop, alone is £425. However, if you decide to participate in both workshops, you get a deal.  Sorry, The coaching workshop is sold out.

Tuesday, March 18, 2014: Master Class: Coaching for Leaders: Exploring All Coaching Stances: Sold Out.

If you have been a technical leader, a manager, an agile coach, or even worked on an agile team, you have coached people. And, have you noticed that sometimes your coaching has gone awry? Or that your coaching is not as effective as you would like it to be? You may not have thought about all of the possible coaching stances. Some of us prefer the teaching stance. Some of us prefer the modelling stance. Some, the hands-on expert stance. But, coaching can be much more than that. The most effective coaching is about offering options with support. But how do you do that, especially if you are coaching peers or your managers? In this master class, we will explore the coaching stances available to you. We will practice coaching. And, you will discover other possibilities you can take back to your work, whether you coach inside the organization or at a distance.

Our syllabus for the day:

1. Welcome and introductions
2. Simulation of a coaching activity and debrief
3. What is coaching?
   1. We will define coaching, mentoring, feedback, teaching, and when to use which, and when they slide into each other
   2. Discussion
4. Discuss the general coaching approach
   1. How do you help people see the problem?
   2. What do you do when the problem is bigger than your role?
   3. Which coaching tools can you bring to the problem?
   4. Generating options
      1. Discuss options vs. discuss steps. What different people can hear.
   5. Evaluating options
      1. Work through results vs. consequences. What different people can hear.
   6. Develop SMART goals
   7. Follow-up
   8. Practice, practice, practice!
5. Explore coaching stances
   1. What is your most common stance? Why?
   2. Activity
   3. Inflicting help and how to avoid it
   4. Activity
   5. Congruence and how that helps
   6. Activity
6. Implementing coaching
   1. More practice
7. Summary and wrap-up

Last year's folks really enjoyed this workshop. Here's a quote: “Johanna's fantastic workshop was a great encouragement to me and reinforced many of the good things we're doing at NVM.” –Lyndsay Prewer

Want to participate in this workshop? This workshop, alone is £425. However, if you decide to participate in both workshops, you get a deal. Sorry, this workshop is sold out.

Deal pricing for both workshops: £675 for both Introduction to Agile Project Management and the Coaching Master Class. This workshop is now sold out.

March 21, 2014 Manage Your Job Search Workshop: An Agile and Lean Approach to Finding a New Job

A job search is a scary, lonely, emotionally draining project. You have to track resumes here, phone calls there, interviews up the wazoo. How can you know if your job search is working?

You can use the visual system of the personal kanban and add the feedback of retrospecting at one-week timeboxes. If you then add learning from your past job history to know what kind of a job culture makes you want to run towards a job and what makes you want to run away, you can know where your target jobs are. You can improve your networking skills, all at a pace you can afford to sustain.

Our syllabus for the day:

1. Welcome and brief introductions.
2. Organize yourself for your job search
   1. Working in groups
   2. Introduction to personal kanban and timeboxes.
   3. How to use retrospectives
   4. How you might want to organize
3. Mine your career timeline (We'll timebox this)
   1. Working in groups
   2. Prepare for the interview
   3. Articulate your value
4. Build your networking skills
   1. Working in groups
   2. Online networking: what it can do for you, what it can't
   3. In-person networking: what it can do for you, what it can't
   4. Target networking: how you will find your next job
   5. The power of a loose connection
5. Traps and Tips
   1. Working in groups
   2. The top traps you encounter and how you handle them
   3. We'll debrief together
   4. The top tips you've found
   5. We'll debrief together

Manage Your Job Search is a special price, only £75. No discounts for this workshop.

Pricing

• Introduction to Agile Project Management is  £425. The workshop is full. Registration is closed.

Manage Your Job Search is £75. There is no price break on Manage Your Job Search. This is a rock bottom price.  The workshop is full. Registration is closed.

Have questions? Email me.

All workshops run from 9am to 5pm. We break for lunch. I will find a place that has sunlight and water this year. I promise!