Learn how to improve and continuously adapt your companies strategies, plans, and outcomes
Since 1992, ICON has cultivated a network of experienced Agile coaches to coach and mentor our clients in their Agile Transformations. Specializing in SAFe, DevSecOps, Lean Portfolio Management, and Business Agility, these coaches have a reputation for showing heart in their work and rolling up their sleeves to help our clients in collaborative partnership.
Why: Our Motto: See One, Do One. The key to a sustainable organization. By working and pairing with our experienced SAFe coaches, you will launch successfully into your transformation with ICON as your guide, while learning how to be sustainable on your own along the way.
Key Outcomes:
- Positively Shifts Employee Mindset and Culture
- Improves how your teams create and deliver value
- Empowers people to do better and faster work
- Boosts quality of overall work
It's key to have a coach who can align and lead the transformation. The transformation coach will work with leadership and internal sponsors to design solutions matched to your unique needs.
The program coach will work the ART (Agile Release Train) bringing together a team of teams to work together on the same cadence. Responsibilities include preparing, planning, and training each ART launch event, with continued coaching after the launch.
The Team Coach will train and coach teams in continual or new Agile practices. They are responsible for guiding teams through the implementation process and encouraging that everyone embraces agile methods.
The DevSecOps coach works with teams on technical related practices such as Behaviour Driven Development (BDD), Test-Driven Development (TDD), Pair Programming, and test automation. Working with the Agile Release Trains, the DevSecOps coach will help teams to adopt and enable continuous integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD).
ICON offers SAFe, DevSecOps, and Lean-Agile courses in both public and private settings.
Why: Our coaches help companies scale their Agile transformations with training that aligns with business strategy and corporate goals.
Key Outcomes:
- Boosts understanding of Agile and SAFe Principles and Practices
- Sets baseline of knowledge among teams and programs
- Provides the opportunity for advanced skills in individuals and teams
- Creates personal and career growth
Our coaches help companies scale their Agile transformations with essential experiential workshops that align with business strategy, technology investments, and corporate goals.
Workshops are sometimes the best starting point as you implement new practices within your organization. ICON works within your unique context to apply and plan such practices as you move forward with execution.
Key Outcomes:
- Brings theory to practice within your organization
- Engages the team to think critically about how these practices will be implemented internally
- Work hands-on with SAFe experts to solve early problems and challenges
Have you ever struggled with a problem that won't go away? The solution may seem obvious, such as a need for new technology, an expert capability, a different process, or better communication. Despite the “self-evident” solution, you may encounter unexpected resistance and the problem stubbornly persists. If so, you may be facing an adaptive challenge.
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) establish broad strategic alignment throughout the organization as teams understand how their work contributes to the organization's top objectives. OKRs Connect strategy, execution, and delivered outcomes while bringing a sense of purpose to your teams. It's crucial to focus on the top priorities of the organization while uncovering problems earlier in the development cycle.
Value streams are the primary construct in SAFe for understanding, organizing, and delivering value to the customer and the enterprise. Attempting to shortcut or breeze through this crucial step can derail your transformation before it begins. Getting value streams right enables the organization to accelerate the flow of value across functional silos, activities, and boundaries.
ART Quickstart (Release Train Launch)
Accelerate your SAFe transformation
The SAFe ART Quickstart reduces lead-time by quickly getting the ART launched and into executing and learning. The Quickstart consists of three parts: preparation, SAFe for Teams training, and PI Planning.
Using this approach, all teams on the ART are trained together, and the first Program Increment (PI) planning session is completed in just one week. While this may seem daunting, hundreds of rollouts have proven that this is the easiest and most pragmatic way to help 100-plus people transition to the new way of working.
Lean-Agile Center of Excellence Workshop (SAFe® LACE)
In this one-day workshop, you will accelerate your organization’s adoption of Lean-Agile practices, while increasing the likelihood and degree of achievable, sustainable business results. The LACE is a small, dedicated team of leaders and change agents who are responsible for driving real and lasting organizational change.
During this one-day workshop, you will be guided through planning, preparation, and execution of a three-part Inspect and Adapt event: PI System Demo, Quantitative Assessment, and Problem-Solving Workshop. The importance of the Inspect and Adapt (I&A) workshop cannot be understated. It enables every Agile Release Train (ART) to improve every Program Increment (PI).
Lean Portfolio Management Workshop
The Lean Portfolio Management competency aligns strategy and execution by applying Lean and systems thinking approaches to strategy and investment funding, Agile portfolio operations, and governance. LPM allows for the improvement of decentralized decision-making and growing leadership and innovation skills.
Agile Team Enablement Workshop
As a workshop, this course uses a combination of lecture, class discussion, and hands-on exercises, with emphasis on group activities, to reinforce the concepts and principles. The workshop is designed to benefit a new Agile project team attending as a group, providing a common foundation of knowledge and experience for everyone on the team. Participants will build a Product Backlog and initial Release Plan for the project they bring to the class, giving them a firm foundation for the early Sprints.
The workshop will start by familiarizing participants with Lean Software Development Concepts, Principles, Easily changeable building solutions, Easily changeable building solutions, and Practices by providing them with practical examples and hands-on exercises to help them understand and experience some of them. The workshop then will walk the participants through a series of steps to help them learn how a “Kanban System” can be implemented to start putting the Lean Principles that they have learned - into practice.
Program Increment (PI) Planning is a cadence-based event that serves as the heartbeat of the Agile Release Train (ART), aligning all the teams on the ART to a shared mission and Vision. For each ART, time will be devoted up-front to prepare and plan for the Program Increment (PI) planning event, including building the Program Backlog, Vision & Roadmap, identifying those who will fill program roles, finalizing the teams and team members, scheduling key dates, etc.
Why: Program Increment (PI) Planning is a cadence-based event that serves as the heartbeat of the Agile Release Train (ART), aligning all the teams on the ART to a shared mission and Vision.
Key Outcomes:
- Establishing communication across all team members and stakeholders
- Aligning development to business goals with the business context, Vision, and Team/Program PI Objectives
- Identifying dependencies and fostering cross-team and cross-ART collaboration
- Providing the opportunity for ‘just the right amount of architecture and Lean User Experience (UX) guidance
- Matching demand to capacity, eliminating excess work in process (WIP)
- Fast decision making
Launching a train is one of the most crucial activities in any SAFe Transformation. With ICON's experience, our coaches will help you successfully and effectively launch your trains.
Why: Conduct an ART for the first PI to ensure all teams are aligned with the same vision and develop critical Agile capabilities on the same cadence.
Key Outcomes:
- Aligns teams to a shared mission that plans, develops, and deploys together
- Organizes the teams around value
- Creates a culture of continuous improvement via inspect and adapt
- Develops a Program cadence to release on demand
A Lean-Agile Center of Excellence brings together a group of internal sponsors (LACE Team) to keep the established agile principles and practices alive and well within the organization. It is a structure that provides leadership, best practices, training, and coaching for driving Lean-Agile adoption across the enterprise.It helps the entire organization realize the benefits of scaling Lean-Agile principles and practices.
Why: ICON's goal is to empower real and lasting organizational change. With our coaches' support forming a LACE team, it will support and sustain the momentum of your transformation efforts, enabling the enterprise to be self-sufficient.
Key Outcomes:
- Continuous improvement within your organization
- A governing body for bringing the right training capabilities, consistent coaching practices, and standardization for processes and tooling
- A gathering of thought leadership to support and maximize the Agile Transformation investment
- An information radiator to share and scale Agile process and practice innovations throughout the enterprise
- Support for strategic enterprise goals and specific program or project goals
- A focus on people and their work in the Agile ecosystem, including resource management of Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and other key roles
An Internal Coaching Practice is a set of carefully selected internal coaches who coach other employees in the organization. Internal coaches reduce dependency on external coaches over time, which allows agile adoption to scale in a cost-effective manner. An Internal Coaching Practice enables, empowers, and improves your internal coaching capability.
Why: To help you build this practice, internal coaches are temporarily coached by an ICON team of experts to grow Lean-Agile capabilities within an organization.
We collaborate with you to create a Coach-the-Coach program and help you gain various certifications and accreditations for coaching future courses and internal instructors.
Key Outcomes:
- Identified Internal Agile Coach candidates
- Organized learning cohorts
- Established measures of coaching effectiveness
- Educated and guided candidate coaches through the Train the Trainer and Coach the Coach Program
Review our additional guidance, training, and resources for your transformation from ICON experts.
Review our Advanced Agility & Extended Offerings with one of our Experts
Review these tips for a smooth transformation
Register for public or private training
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