Agile Development - Mitch Lacey & Associates, Inc.

Mitch Lacey & Associates offers a wide variety of private and public training courses as well as private team coaching and consulting. Services range from baselining your organization through our introduction workshops to taking your company to the next level with our advanced courses like Agile Requirements Management, targeted at seasoned teams. We also do on site evaluations and company analysis, creating targeted training solutions for your company.

Why would you want to use Mitch Lacey & Associates? Simple. We focus on emerging trends in software development and project management soyou don't have to. Our network is huge, with ties and insights ranging from Amazon to Microsoft to Yahoo. Regardless of your needs, we can help.

Certified ScrumMaster Course

The Certified ScrumMaster Course is a two-day course which introduces the concepts of Agile project leadership using the Scrum methodology. Successful participants will become Certified ScrumMasters, a first step in the journey towards this more adaptive form of project leadership.

Through this CSM training course, students will learn how to plan and run Sprint Planning Meetings, daily Scrum Meetings, Sprint Reviews, Sprint Retrospectives and more.

Successful participants will be listed as Certified ScrumMasters on the Scrum Alliance website and will receive a one year membership to the Scrum Alliance. The course format consists of multiple lecture topics, group exercises and group discussion. Ample time will be devoted to analysis of the “real-world” industry experiences of the ScrumMaster Course instructor based on case study examples and his experience managing Agile projects and coaching Scrum teams.

Certified Scrum Product Owner Course

The Certified Scrum Product Owner Course is a two-day course which introduces the concepts of agile product management using the Scrum methodology. Why does this matter? The 2003 Standish Chaos study showed that 43% of all IT projects had a cost overrun. Furhter, 52% of all projects failed to meet objectives, 66% failed and 82% were delivered late. It’s no wonder our customers are unhappy!

This course will provide you the tools, techniuqes and most importantly, the understanding needed to be an effecitve Scrum Product Owner. 

Students will learn tried & true methods for building, managing and prioritizing the Product Backlog and ways to build a product roadmap for release planning. Successful participants will be listed as Certified Scrum Product Owners on the Scrum Alliance website.

Agile Estimation and Planning

This course is in partnership with Mike Cohn and Mountain Goat Software. We are one of a handful of companies that has been authorized by Mountain Goat Software to provide training classes based on Mike Cohn's books and training materials.

Planning is important, even for agile projects. Unfortunately, we've all seen so many worthless plans that we'd like to throw planning out altogether. The good news is that it is possible to create a project plan that looks forward six to nine months that can be accurate and useful. Too many teams view planning as something to be avoided and too many organizations view plans as something to hold against their development teams.

Learn how to break that cycle by learning and practicing skills that will help create useful plans that lead to reliable decision‐making. The course will describe four techniques for deriving estimates, including how to use the popular Planning Poker technique.

Agile Requirements Management

Software projects start with functionality and requirements. The clarity and quality of the requirements drive the deliverables of the project and set the expectations of customers. Managing requirements can be a challenge because we have been taught to capture all requirements up front, and achieve customer sign off. This process does not allow for change, and all software projects have change.

Enter user stories. Authoring project requirements as user stories is one of the most common approaches across any agile method. In this course, you will learn what a user story is, how to build and author them and how to manage and communicate them to users.  The course format consists of multiple lecture topics, group exercises and group discussion. Ample time will be devoted to analysis of the “real-world” industry experiences of the instructor based on case study examples and experiences managing agile projects and coaching agile project teams.

Introduction to Agile and Scrum

The word "Agile" and "Scrum" seem to be huge buzzwords as of late. Unfortunately, application of these words to managing projects that are truly not agile or using Scrum cause tons of confusion. In this presentation, we will go through the basics of what agile is and the mindset needed to adopt it.

Topics for this talk include what is agile, when and why to use agile, benefits and pitfalls of agile and Scrum, the Scrum framework, role of managers on agile teams and how to structure teams to acheive hyper-productivity.