Amplio Team

Workshop description

In-house classes can be run from 1 to 8 weeks. Participants can join the Amplio Learning journeys, where they can get their questions answered for up to one year at no charge.

Public classes rotate through the core material on 2-3 month basis. Participants can control their rate of learning, however.  All students get access to new Miro boards and sessions for up to one year from enrollment.  

If you run fixed scope, time, and cost projects, see why you should take this workshop instead of a Scrum or Kanban workshop.

Many companies are trading certification for effectiveness. Quick 2-3 day workshops that get people certified sound good until you realize they got no experience in what they’ve learned. Furthermore, since certification tests information, the focus becomes one on learning the framework, not how to solve their own problems.

Amplio (“Improve” in Latin) takes a different approach. While we offer in-house training spanning just a few days, if needed, for a quick start, presenting the workshop over a few weeks has the advantage of being more effective with less paid coaching.

Amplio Team is an alternative to Scrum and Kanban. It is based on the principles that drive both but is a tunable framework so that it can incorporate the advantages of both without having the disadvantages each has. It is based on the book Amplio Development: The Path to Effective Lean-Agile Teams

The main differences between Amplio Team and Scrum

1. It can be tuned to the team adopting it. It eschews Scrum’s immutable approach, which limits where it applies well but is not usually mentioned by  Scrum proponents.
2. It is taught with an incremental, flipped-classroom, workplace learning approach that includes a variety of virtual collaboration boards (see below) that participants get to use in their own workplace (they need their own license to run them).
3. It comes with a companion guide – Being a Professional Coach – which improves the coaching ability of participants.

Amplio Team works well in places Scrum won’t

Scrum’s lack of first principles has it be immutable. The bottom line is that Scrum makes several assumptions that may not be true for your team. These include:

• A cross-functional team exists, or can be readily created. While cross-functional teams are often the best solution, they often aren’t a pragmatic solution.
• The team can plan ahead to create the sprint plan. Not all teams know what’s coming their way.
• The team can work autonomously. Teams are rarely truly autonomous.
• The people have the Scrum values of Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, and Courage. These are great, of course. But, as Jerry Sternin suggests “It is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking, than it is to think yourself into a new way of acting.” Amplio doesn’t presume these are present when starting, but helps yo uget them.
• People will understand the intentions of the Scrum Guide. Take a look on LinkedIn and you’ll see its guidance is unclear.
• People can increase their skils as needed to work in an Agile manner. Not all people are self-learning. This is one reason people are enrolled in Amplio Learning Journies.
• That if you start with Scrum you’ll learn how to go beyond it if you need to. Unfortunately, Scrum doesn’t provide any insights on how to do this.

What the Amplio Team Workshop looks like

The incremental flipped-classroom approach means participants learn something, get to try it out, see how that worked, get feedback from the instructor, try it again, and keep doing this throughout the learning journey. The pace of the workshop can be its prescribed 6 weeks (one for each lesson) or accelerated by the participants if desired. Registration gets participants into the program for 3 months enabling them to continue asking questions even after they’re gone through all the lessons.

Each week has one lesson broken down as follows:

• The Thursday before the lesson, a 20–30-minute recording is made available to students. Exercises for the lesson are also provided.
• Monday morning of the week of the lesson, a 60-minute session is provided for Q&A and live training.
• Wednesday morning, a 30-minute Q&A session is made available.

Several Miro boards are used throughout the learning journey, both to teach the material in the workshop and for the participants to use in their workplace.

For companies that run fixed scope, time, and cost projects.

There is an assumption in the Agile community that projects with fixed scope, time, and cost will result in lower quality.  They don’t need too. Dropping quality is a choice and can often be avoided with Lean methods. In fact, a tenet of Lean is that as you focus on quality, the cost and time required go down.

Toyota didn’t just build better cars, they built them in less time and at a lower cost. The method used can be applied to fixed scope, time, and cost projects as well.

I am not suggesting that we go with these types of projects. But for many companies, this is a way of life.

Let’s consider three promises of using Lean in product development.

The first is to continuously improve our methods to avoid the creation of waste. We do this by eliminating delays between our working steps. This not only shortens the time for delivery, but more important, it provides us quick feedback to enable us to detect mistakes quickly and minimize waste. You could say this ends up buying time and cost for us in case we understated the first and overstated the second. The result also improves quality. We’re not shortcutting the work in the steps, the continuity achieved by eliminating the delays between the steps increases focus. By eliminating the waste that would otherwise ensue, we have more time to do it right while still abiding by the terms of the contract.

The second benefit is that we can often deliver some value sooner. It may be the entire project needs to be done but delivering value in steps earlier may be a significant value to the customer. At a minimum they can see where things are headed – more feedback.

The third benefit is that you can offer the customer an opportunity to change their mind. As they see the product being built, they may get insights about a better target. While you can’t change the contract unilaterally, the client may want to change direction or add functionality to it. Renegotiation of the contract for the benefit of both is possible.

Consider these benefits in fixed scope, time, and cost contracts. We may make a mistake in our estimates. But cutting quality is a misguided choice to lower cost. Becoming more efficient, lowers our overall risk. Companies that engage in these types of projects may lose money on some. The issue is to be profitable overall.

In-house classes can be run over 1-8 weeks. Participants can join the Amplio Learning journeys, where they can get their questions answered for up to one year at no charge.

Public classes rotate through the core material on 2-3 month basis. Participants can control their rate of learning, however.  All students get access to new Miro boards and sessions for up to one year from enrollment.  

If you run fixed scope, time, and cost projects, see why you should take this workshop instead of a Scrum or Kanban workshop.

Many companies are trading certification for effectiveness. Quick 2-3 day workshops that get people certified sound good until you realize they got no experience in what they’ve learned. Furthermore, since certification tests information, the focus becomes one on learning the framework, not how to solve their own problems.

Amplio (“Improve” in Latin) takes a different approach. While we offer in-house training spanning just a few days, if needed, for a quick start, presenting the workshop over a few weeks has the advantage of being more effective with less paid coaching.

Amplio Team is an alternative to Scrum and Kanban. It is based on the principles that drive both but is a tunable framework so that it can incorporate the advantages of both without having the disadvantages each has. It is based on the book Amplio Development: The Path to Effective Lean-Agile Teams

The main differences between Amplio Team and Scrum

1. It can be tuned to the team adopting it. It eschews Scrum’s immutable approach, which limits where it applies well but is not usually mentioned by  Scrum proponents.
2. It is taught with an incremental, flipped-classroom, workplace learning approach that includes a variety of virtual collaboration boards (see below) that participants get to use in their own workplace (they need their own license to run them).
3. It comes with a companion guide – Being a Professional Coach – which improves the coaching ability of participants.

Amplio Team works well in places Scrum won’t

Scrum’s lack of first principles has it be immutable. The bottom line is that Scrum makes several assumptions that may not be true for your team. These include:

• A cross-functional team exists, or can be readily created. While cross-functional teams are often the best solution, they often aren’t a pragmatic solution.
• The team can plan ahead to create the sprint plan. Not all teams know what’s coming their way.
• The team can work autonomously. Teams are rarely truly autonomous.
• The people have the Scrum values of Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, and Courage. These are great, of course. But, as Jerry Sternin suggests “It is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking, than it is to think yourself into a new way of acting.” Amplio doesn’t presume these are present when starting, but helps yo uget them.
• People will understand the intentions of the Scrum Guide. Take a look on LinkedIn and you’ll see its guidance is unclear.
• People can increase their skils as needed to work in an Agile manner. Not all people are self-learning. This is one reason people are enrolled in Amplio Learning Journies.
• That if you start with Scrum you’ll learn how to go beyond it if you need to. Unfortunately, Scrum doesn’t provide any insights on how to do this.

What the Amplio Team Workshop looks like

The incremental flipped-classroom approach means participants learn something, get to try it out, see how that worked, get feedback from the instructor, try it again, and keep doing this throughout the learning journey. The pace of the workshop can be its prescribed 6 weeks (one for each lesson) or accelerated by the participants if desired. Registration gets participants into the program for 3 months enabling them to continue asking questions even after they’re gone through all the lessons.

Each week has one lesson broken down as follows:

• The Thursday before the lesson, a 20–30-minute recording is made available to students. Exercises for the lesson are also provided.
• Monday morning of the week of the lesson, a 60-minute session is provided for Q&A and live training.
• Wednesday morning, a 30-minute Q&A session is made available.

Several Miro boards are used throughout the learning journey, both to teach the material in the workshop and for the participants to use in their workplace.

For companies that run fixed scope, time, and cost projects.

There is an assumption in the Agile community that projects with fixed scope, time, and cost will result in lower quality.  They don’t need too. Dropping quality is a choice and can often be avoided with Lean methods. In fact, a tenet of Lean is that as you focus on quality, the cost and time required go down.

Toyota didn’t just build better cars, they built them in less time and at a lower cost. The method used can be applied to fixed scope, time, and cost projects as well.

I am not suggesting that we go with these types of projects. But for many companies, this is a way of life.

Let’s consider three promises of using Lean in product development.

The first is to continuously improve our methods to avoid the creation of waste. We do this by eliminating delays between our working steps. This not only shortens the time for delivery, but more important, it provides us quick feedback to enable us to detect mistakes quickly and minimize waste. You could say this ends up buying time and cost for us in case we understated the first and overstated the second. The result also improves quality. We’re not shortcutting the work in the steps, the continuity achieved by eliminating the delays between the steps increases focus. By eliminating the waste that would otherwise ensue, we have more time to do it right while still abiding by the terms of the contract.

The second benefit is that we can often deliver some value sooner. It may be the entire project needs to be done but delivering value in steps earlier may be a significant value to the customer. At a minimum they can see where things are headed – more feedback.

The third benefit is that you can offer the customer an opportunity to change their mind. As they see the product being built, they may get insights about a better target. While you can’t change the contract unilaterally, the client may want to change direction or add functionality to it. Renegotiation of the contract for the benefit of both is possible.

Consider these benefits in fixed scope, time, and cost contracts. We may make a mistake in our estimates. But cutting quality is a misguided choice to lower cost. Becoming more efficient, lowers our overall risk. Companies that engage in these types of projects may lose money on some. The issue is to be profitable overall.