What Is a Facilitator? Scrum Alliance Agile Facilitation Certification

What Is a Facilitator? Scrum Alliance Agile Facilitation Certification

Once every person’s ideas are obtained, they should be arranged and ranked before deciding on a specific idea and discarding others. When this is done in every agile facilitation meeting, people will gain motivation to move beyond their core competencies. They will start exploring other potential ideas and will give their best ideas.

agile facilitation

If you’ve ever felt frustrated by the inability of stakeholders to make decisions relating to prioritisation, Buy a Feature is a great technique for getting people talking about it. An Agile team facilitator needs to have extensive knowledge of employee and workplace behavior; having a background in occupational or organizational psychology can be especially helpful. They often work closely with individuals to determine their strengths and weaknesses and alleviate individual pain points with an end goal of helping the team function better together. While the Agile team facilitator role might sound quite like a Scrum master role, it is different in a few key ways. First, the Agile facilitator is referred to as ‘framework agnostic’ because it is not tied to a Scrum framework. Additionally, Agile team facilitators work with multiple teams, whereas Scrum masters work only with their specific team.

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This is the fourth part in the series of tools that I have found useful in my role as Agile Coach – Effective Facilitation. These interpersonal skills can be incredibly hard to master but will ultimately help shape you into a better facilitator, teammate, and employee. ICAgile Team Facilitation Certification (ICP-ATF) – the course is accredited by the International Consortium for Agile (ICAgile). Participants are eligible for the ICP-ATF Certification upon completion of this course.

agile facilitation

The good thing about this voting technique is that each participant gets the power to vote, so specialization cannot be overlooked. Anyone who strives to lead teams towards greater efficiency and achieve tangible results will benefit from the essential leadership skills of team facilitation. That is why it is important to set goals, outline boundaries (set rules), ensure accountability, and communicate with others. It’s crucial for agile facilitator to believe in team professionalism for the team to grow and mature. A fantastic way to address risk management is pre-mortem, which relates to death-planning and it involves considering things like your bucket list, as well as things you can do to remain safe and healthy.

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Relevant roles include, but are not limited to Project Managers, Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, Product Owners and Product Managers. The Agile Team Facilitator (ATF) role is broader than conducting meetings. The ATF must also guide the team through the paradigm shifts required in Agile team environments and lead them towards collaboration and self-organization. To do so requires a mindset shift for the team leader – the facilitator mindset.

agile facilitation

This technique will work if you wish to decide quickly during an Agile Facilitation meeting. You may find this technique helpful when you wish the meeting to conclude quickly due to high work pressure. You want to be able to deliver value frequently, learn from feedback, and then deliver changes that delight customers. The benefit of having an Agile facilitator is to help address issues that affect productivity and improve how the team works together.

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Agile leadership should possess the skills to plan and conduct efficient team meetings to make sure that the team is working together with full dedication. The good facilitation abilities of the Agile team facilitator decide the right collaboration between the team to bring value and higher levels of performance to the organization. The Agile team facilitator role is beyond the activities like conducting meetings as they have to guide the whole Agile team about the paradigm shifts needed in Agile team environments. Therefore, it is recommended to take an ICP-ATF course to obtain enough skills to plan and conduct collaborative meetings to produce effective results within the company.

By the end of the course, you will have your facilitation plan to improve your next team discussion or Scrum event. The facilitator should get consent from every person present in the meeting and should give importance to the suggestion of each one of them. In addition to the interpersonal skills we just mentioned, a good agile team facilitator needs to understand motivation theory in order to create an environment for productive discussion and problem solving. Leading teams to higher levels of maturity requires the ability to plan and conduct effective team meetings to ensure the team is working collaboratively. In an Agile environment, the team depends on the facilitation skills of the Agile Team Facilitator to lead the team to higher levels of performance.

What is Agile Facilitation and What are its Roles and Responsibilities?

But, as an Agile facilitator, you are responsible for ensuring that your organization has an environment where the diverse ideas of employees will be considered. So, motivate open discussions, where the leaders will share ideas on how and where innovation is required. When this approach is followed, it will be possible to bring down the layer of control and approval. It will also enhance the time focused on decision-making and boost the team’s innovation.

  • The Agile Team Facilitator is on the development path to becoming an Agile Coach.
  • Building more autonomy, mastery, and purpose will make your workforce be more productive and effective.
  • Guide-level certifications are designed to authorize well qualified coaches and trainers as educators, mentors, and thought leaders in agile principles and the Scrum framework.
  • If you’re interested in improving and growing your facilitation skills, we’re excited to announce our new course, Agile Coaching Skills – Certified Facilitator (ACS-CF).
  • Agile team facilitation is a key skill for anyone who works with agile teams, whether as a scrum master, a product owner, a coach, or a leader.

Each line of circles and arrows represents one person’s line of thought as it develops during the discussion. A facilitator should be skilled in asking questions that are open-ended and encourage discussion. The Theory of Constraints (TOC), developed by Eliyahu M. Goldratt in his seminal book “The Goal,” is a revolutionary management philosophy.

The Agile Facilitation and Facilitation Mindset

The responsibility of the Agile Team Facilitator is to ensure that conditions exist to meet the objectives to be realized. The responsibility of a facilitator does not stop with standard Agile practices, and it can be a tricky task to play a meager role in a meeting but to continue to guide the team in the right direction. When facilitating a session, the facilitator is the holder of the process and the team holds the content.

agile facilitation

Another fun way to innovate is a game-based technique known as spider-webbing, which is essentially a type of context diagramming with your own set of rules woven into proceedings. It’s a fun way to gain insight into the flows between departments, systems and having team leaders mentoring people within a team and it’s something that only involves using pictures i.e. no words. It’s also something that will break the ice and get the creative juices flowing. This Agile certification is perfect for Agile team leaders or aspiring leads with a desire to learn and practice Agile facilitation and Agile team coaching.

What Is an Agile Team Facilitator?

Dot voting is one of the Agile Facilitation Voting Techniques that is widely used. The ATF needs to recognize team patterns and know when a team may need more, or less, intervention. We will look at how our styles need to change based on the team current state of knowledge and self-sufficiency. Get real-world tips and time-tested research-backed techniques from highly qualified mentors. Expert level program for those who wish to help others understand the principles and values that form the foundation of Scrum.

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