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Professional Agile Leadership – Evidence-Based Management™

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Professional Agile Leadership - Evidence-Based Management
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Professional Agile Leadership – Evidence-Based Management™

With markets and customer needs constantly changing, organisations need information and evidence that helps them adapt quickly to new challenges and opportunities so that they can deliver greater value and achieve true business agility. Yet often organisations that use Agile product development techniques use traditional management approaches, expecting leaders to set firm long-term goals and manage progress toward them with dashboards of static metrics.

That is why Scrum.org created the Evidence-Based Management (EBM) framework which is an Agile approach to help leaders guide their teams toward continuously improving customer outcomes, organisational capabilities, and business results. EBM focuses on customer value and intentional experimentation to systematically improve an organisation’s performance and achieve their strategic goals.

Who should attend?   

PAL-EBM is for professionals in leadership roles (including executives, managers, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, coaches, and consultants) who:

  • Are responsible for the success of their product delivery programs or Agile transformations and are seeking a means to measure and demonstrate that success
  • Are looking for a framework that identifies improvement areas that increase their business agility, including their time to pivot to meet new challenges and deliver customer value
  • Want to help their organization embrace empiricism and experimentation to find solutions for complex problems (where more is unknown than known or the situation changes rapidly)
  • Want to articulate goals and measures in a way that fosters self-management and empower their teams to understand the connection between their work and the value their organization is providing and customer is receiving
  • Want to be more effective in how they measure success by using Agile measures rather than traditional measurement models (including the use of velocity)

Attendees should have read the Evidence-Based Management Guide, have an understanding of Agile practices and a desire to move away from traditional, plan-driven ways of working and measurement models, however they do not need specific experience with Scrum. Our Professional Agile Leadership- Essentials course helps leaders understand how to best support their Agile teams and is ideal preparation for PAL-EBM, but is not a prerequisite. Our Professional Scrum Product Owner and Professional Scrum Product Owner – Advanced courses teach Product Owners how to deliver value and can be a great complement to the PAL-EBM course.

What is the class?   

In the Professional Agile Leadership™ – Evidence-Based Management (PAL-EBM) one day* course, participants learn what EBM is and how to apply it through hands-on, activity-based learning. Through a series of exercises participants learn techniques that support a more agile mindset:

  • Use empiricism to set and achieve strategic goals, managing the unknown and complexity through experimentation and by adapting goals along the way
  • Create a cultural environment using clear goals, appropriate measures and trust to enable self-management and autonomy
  • Shift the conversation away from measuring progress purely through team performance metrics, toward a focus on customer-centricity and improving customer outcomes
  • Drive operational improvements by using four Key Value Areas (Unrealized Value, Current Value, Time to Market, and the Ability to Innovate) as lenses for evidence-based decision-making

The areas of focus are: 

  • Understand the essential aspects of goals and measures and how they influence behaviors and an organization’s culture and values
  • Help organizations embrace empiricism as a leadership approach. Using experimentation to incrementally steer toward the organization’s goals 
  • An appreciation for how goals and trust act together to enable autonomy, transparency, and value delivery
  • Correlate market leadership and sustainability to curiosity, adaptation, and empiricism
  • Understand how to use EBM and its KVAs to focus measurements on improving market value and operational capabilities
What are the benefits of attending a PAL-EBM with Optilearn? 

There are lots of trainers offering the same course. When you book directly with Optilearn (sometimes, we offer our classes via Partner Training Organisations) you will receive the following benefits:  

If you fail your (free) PAL-EBM assessment attempt on the first go, we’ll give you free mentoring, coaching and teaching to help you fill in the gaps before your (free) second attempt.  

Specifically designated time in every class for assessment preparation. Practicing some mock questions and receiving feedback will increase your chances of success. 

Professional Agile Leadership - Evidence-Based Management
Course overview

This class is for those involved in setting strategic goals for your organisation and products. It will cover the four KVAs of EBM.

1 day or 2 half days

Virtual or In-person

Download course PDF
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Professional Agile Leadership – Evidence-Based Management™ courses

Optilearn's Professional Agile Leadership – Evidence-Based Management™ course schedule.

Unfortunately there are currently no courses listed.

Please get in touch with us to discuss a private class for your organisation. Alternatively you can view our course schedule below.

Course schedule

Frequent questions

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    Frequent questions

  • Full access to the class, an emailed copy of the resources used (for your personal use only), expert training by an accredited trainer and where applicable, free assessment attempts and more. For all classes that are accredited by Scrum.org, you will typically receive a 40% discount to the next level assessment, a thank you package sent to your home address, lifetime certification and also an alumni discount with Optilearn so that all future course bookings receive 10% off.

  • Yes, full attendance is required to be processed as an attendee.

    We accept that life gets in the way sometimes, and emergencies do happen, but we expect all learners to have the days cleared in their calendar. It is at the trainer’s discretion as to whether you have missed too much to be accredited (typically, missing more than an hour is not accepted). In this case, you will not receive a refund or the assessment codes. Don’t worry though, in these cases we will accept you onto a future class at no further cost, but we are not liable for any costs you incur due to this.

  • Absolutely not. When making payment we will request your home address, but you do not have to give it to us (a business address is perfectly acceptable). We simply use this to send a thank you package to the address provided if you have booked a qualifying class.

    You will never receive any marketing to your home address. If you have any concerns over how your data is used, please contact us and we will be happy to assist.

  • For some of our classes we will ask you for your country, or the participant’s country of residence (not the nationality). This is because we try to maintain parity in our pricing based on where the participant will be joining the class from. You may see these options referred to in some material as primary, secondary or tertiary and these are determined by our accrediting body.

    Based on the information found here: https://www.scrum.org/become-professional-scrum-trainer/supporting-world we will select the correct pricing for you after you enter your country. We reserve the right to ask for proof of your residence in order to process a booking.

  • The first thing to do is to contact us. Although we always recommend public classes as a better option due to the diversity of thought and experience available to the learners, we accept that sometimes organisations would like a private experience just for their employees.

    They are available for any class, virtual or in-person – we can even offer delivery in a variety of languages. Typically, it becomes cheaper to arrange a private offering when you exceed seven learners in a single class, but please contact us to explain your requirements so that we can provide a detailed quotation.

  • Depending on the class chosen, it will equate to a minimum of eight hours per day (including lunch). For example, our two-day Professional Scrum Master classes are often scheduled to run between 0830-1630 on two consecutive days. When split across more than two days, class hours will differ but they are made clear at the time of booking.

  • For most classes, we reserve the right to cancel if less than four learners are due to attend. In terms of the maximum, we are able to handle up to twenty for a virtual offering or thirty in-person. Having said this, our average numbers are between six and ten. 

  • As soon as you make payment you will receive a confirmation email (if you don’t receive it, it’s likely your spam filter or an incorrect email address being listed). If you didn’t receive anything, please contact us as soon as possible. Beyond that initial email, all learners will receive instructions seven days in advance of the class start date (again, if you don’t receive anything, please contact us). These details will include joining instructions (for virtual classes) or meeting instructions (for in-person classes) alongside any preparation work required.

  • Sometimes. Depending on the class you are booked onto, we may ask you to read some blogs, watch some videos, or most commonly, read the Scrum Guide (for Professional Scrum classes only). All of this information will be included in your welcome email sent seven days before the class is due to start. If you are someone who likes to get ahead and study, please contact your specific trainer requesting pre-study information and they will be happy to provide you with guidance.

  • There are a lot of variables to take into account for this question, and so we’d recommend taking a look at our Terms and Conditions.

    In short though, if you cancel more than ten days before the start date you will be offered a full refund or the opportunity to move dates at no cost. Cancellations with less than ten days’ notice will provide a 50% refund, but we will still try to accommodate a date move at no cost. In all cases, we reserve the right to deduct any costs (typically payment processing fees or any packages shipped to your address) from your refund.

  • If the class is cancelled or rescheduled due to our trainer’s availability or circumstances broadly within our control, we will provide a full refund or date change at no cost, with no deductions made. Most commonly, cancellation is done due to low numbers of registrations and we do so to ensure the quality you have paid for (which includes interactions with other learners) is delivered.

    We appreciate this can be disappointing and we always aim to keep cancellations to a minimum.

  • They are too numerous and hard to detail. Often, we find that people favour the in-person connections of an in-person class due to the ‘water cooler’ discussions, activities that require physical space and also the opportunity to minimise the distractions of home-working. However, our virtual classes utilise Mural and Zoom as our collaboration tools, and increasingly we are our finding that our learners are choosing the option for remote learning.

    We cover the same material, in much the same ways, but the experiences are simply, different. If you’d like to discuss which option may suit you better, please contact us and we’ll be happy to advise.

  • You can pay via card, bank transfer, PayPal or international bank transfer. All currency payments are made in GBP by default, although we can arrange payment in USD by prior agreement. We can also request payment via invoice although please note that payment must be received at least 48h before the class start date. We are willing to onboard with your organisation’s financial department, but in our experience this requires a significant lead time.

    If none of these payment methods are suitable, please contact us and we will try and work with you to provide an alternative.

  • For virtual classes, if you or your business are resident in the UK then you will incur a 20% VAT charge on your purchase total. If you are external to the UK (inc. the EU) then there will be no VAT due. Full VAT receipts are available upon request. For in-person classes in the UK, VAT is charged to all learners as the delivery is within the zone where VAT is applicable.

  • Yes! Our business is supported by great referrals from our previous learners. To make a referral, please tell the participant to include your name/referral information in the ‘Additional Information’ field of their booking. Once they have made a purchase, we will pay a referral fee of up to 10% of their invoice value.

    Unfortunately, you must refer them before they make the purchase otherwise it will not be considered.

  • For all classes accredited by Scrum.org you are eligible for a specific amount of PDU credits which can be used as proof of your continued professional development. These credits vary based on the class you take, and are given based on class attendance rather than passing the assessment. You can find more information about PDUs and how to claim them here: https://www.scrum.org/support/can-i-claim-pdus-attending-scrumorg-course

  • For each class listing you will see the trainer scheduled to deliver that class. If your question is specific to that class, then please contact them directly. If your question is about an Optilearn process or something more generally, then please contact us as enquiries@optilearn.co.uk and a member of our team will get back to you.

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