What would be a great course for an aspiring Agile leader to do?
There are several courses available for aspiring agile leaders, and they come from different certification bodies and in alignment with different agile frameworks.
In SAFe or Scaled Agile Framework we have:
- Leading SAFe
- SAFe Leadership
From Scrum Alliance we have:
- Certified Agile Leadership I
- Certified Agile Leadership II
From Scrum.Org we have:
- Professional Agile Leadership – Essentials (PAL-E)
- Professional Agile Leadership – Evidence Based Management (PAL-EBM)
These courses are all useful and valuable because they provide leadership teams with insights into what agile is, what values and principles it is built upon, and often provides exercises and demonstrations to prove the difference between micromanagement and agile leadership.
There is already a lot of talk about the difference between management and leadership, and agile leadership takes that a step further to focus on how to increase business agility and thrive in product development and complex environments.
Learning on the job.
Comparison is sometimes the thief of joy, but it is also a great place to start when attempting to understand how things currently work and how you would like things to work in the future.
Start by assessing your current system of work and identify what is working, what isn’t working, and where you could improve that system.
As you acquire more agile knowledge and learn how agile executives and agile leaders have designed their own systems and processes, based on agile and lean concepts, you can start to identify where and how your system is different compared to the tested, proven systems in Agile environments.
A leader may have inherited a system, but they are responsible for making the changes necessary for the individuals and teams within that system to thrive. They are responsible for leading into the 21st Century style of working and departing from the industrial era style of management that exists in many traditional organizations today.
Navigating Complexity.
In a simple or complicated environment, we know the best practices that lead to the outcomes we want and desire. In that space, we don’t need agile because we aren’t dealing with uncertainty or with complexity.
As soon as complexity knocks on the door, traditional management and project management tends to fall over. We don’t know the answers because we have never solved the problem nor have we ever built the solution. We don’t know what we don’t know and there are too many unknown variables for us to consider at the start of our journey.
This is where Agile thrives. This is where Agile comes into its own.
The system of work, supported by a culture and mindset of discovery and innovation, allows us to navigate complexity and uncertainty by learning through doing.
Empirical Process Control.
Make the work, vision, objectives, hypotheses, and so forth transparent. Frequently inspect what is being built. Use the data and evidence we gather whilst doing the work to inform how we should adapt or pivot in future.
A great agile leadership course will introduce you to the processes, systems, and tools that enable leadership teams to navigate uncertainty and solve complex problems effectively.
All of the courses I listed above will do a great job at helping you learn those essential concepts and how to navigate complexity effectively.
Leading SAFe
The Leading SAFe course provides leaders with a good, solid insight into what Scaled Agile Framework is, how it works, and why it works so effectively in complex environments.
It demonstrates how teams of agile teams, known as Agile Release Trains, coordinate their efforts in alignment with customer and organizational objectives and goals. It also shows how they achieve this despite having integrated and interconnected teams working on different parts of the product.
It is a great course if you are thinking of adopting SAFe and want to learn how to lead in a SAFe environment effectively.
About Value Glide
Value Glide are a SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) consultancy, coaching practice, and training specialist who work with organizations to align business objectives with customer needs and wants.
As deeply experienced agile coaches and practitioners, our team are invested in continuous learning through each client engagement and use the data and evidence we gather from each implementation to inform our training, coaching, and consulting services.
In a nutshell, empirical process control or empiricism.
If you are thinking of adopting agile within your organization and have identified SAFe as a great agile framework to adopt, implement and improve your business agility, visit our SAFe Quickstart ART Launch program page or view our SAFe Consulting Services page.
If you have identified a need for an agile coach and SAFe coach to help your organization adopt and implement SAFe, visit our SAFe Coaching Services page.
If you want to know more about SAFe and how to lead SAFe, visit our SAFE Training page for a host of options, from Leading SAFe to a SAFe Release Train Engineer course.
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