Class Overview

The art and science of transitioning yourself into an outstanding agile leader…

This workshop provides an ICP-LEA Agile Leadership skills certification with iCAgile.

Leading agile teams might be one of the hardest things you’ve ever done. That is if you want to do it effectively and congruently. The agile methods have moved beyond hype and novelty to embed themselves in nearly every software company worldwide. The good news is that these methods are here to stay and can potentially be a game-changer.

The bad news is that it takes a leadership transformation to make agility work effectively. You see, you can’t just “go Agile” and not change your leadership style, habits, approaches, and posture. It also requires a culture shift. All of these point to you as a critical guide to lead your teams through these changes. But there has been a lack of focus on leaders and the requisite leadership skills in agile contexts.

The good news is that this course is intended to address that challenge precisely. And do it practically--sharing stories, practices, and real-world experience into the dynamics of effective agile leadership. If you want to become a skilled, agile leader, this class is a beautiful way to kick off that journey.

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What makes our class different?

Many instructors of agile leadership classes have far too limited real-world leadership experience. While they've studied leadership academically and try to empathize with the challenges, in a word, they really can't. They lack the seasoning and experience to understand agile leadership development truly.

What sets Bob Galen and our ICP-LEA class apart is the depth and breadth of our real-world experience:

• Bob has been leading software teams for over 25 years and agile teams for nearly that long.
• Bob has held roles in software development, software testing, architecture, operations, and project management.
• Bob has had senior-level leadership roles at the Director, VP, and C-level in various organizations.
• Bob has worked from small start-up companies to large, enterprise-level companies. So, he viscerally understands the challenges of scale.
• Bob has worked with distributed teams for over 15 years - both nearshore and offshore models from various cultures.
• Bob has been coaching both at the team, management, and leadership level for over 15 years.
• Bob has an excellent understanding of, respect for, and empathy for the craft of leadership—agile included.

And all of this experience is woven into the materials of our class stories, examples, breakouts, and the focus.

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Class Overview

The class contains four primary modules—

1. Why & What of Leading with Agility—where we explore the why behind agile, the value proposition,, and the sweet spots for high-impact and high-value.
2. Developing Personal Agility—leadership agility is an inside-out job where you internalize agile principles and ethics. Here we explore how to be agile on the inside.
3. Developing Relationship Agility—a huge part of becoming an agile leader is effective communication at all levels of the organization. You’ll gain a fresh perspective and get the chance to practice a bit.
4. Leading to Agility—here, we explore some of the organizational and change dynamics required of a change agent in agile contexts.

Here’s a link to the iCAgile page to explore more information and the direct learning objectives.

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Schedule

This virtual class is 4-days in length. We'll meet Monday through Thursday from 1pm - 4:30pm EST. We'll take a break every hour to keep things fresh.

Please note: there will be ~3-hours of prework before the class and a bit of homework after each daily session. You'll be sent connection information and prework upon registration.

Materials

You will receive access to a Dropbox with ALL the materials we will be using/referencing in the class.

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Attendee Profile

The ICP-LEA is designed to transform your leadership—

• Style
• Tactics
• Approaches
• Behaviors
• Models

In the same way that your organization must shift and change during a successful agile/digital transformation.

Does attending the class automatically do that for you? Of course not. But you’ll leave with the KEYs to begin, navigate, and advance that journey.

The sweet spot for the class is a company’s entire cross-functional leadership team engaged in an agile transformation. Often, the broader the organizational representation, the better. Senior leaders (C-level, VP, Director, and Sr, Managers) will benefit enormously from this path.

Cancellation Policy

Registrations are non-refundable, but substitutions will be easily allowed with advance notice.

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Your Class Facilitators

    Bob Galen has held senior leadership roles within software development organizations since the early 1990s. Always a student of leadership, he’s been at the forefront as management and leadership techniques have moved towards “the team.” An early adopter of agile methods, Bob has had in-the-trenches experience building three successful agile technical organizations that have served as models of “agile done right.”

Currently, he is president of RGCG, a boutique agile coaching firm.

Bob has broad and deep experience leveraging Extreme Programming, Scrum, and Kanban, as a practitioner since the late 1990s. In 2013, Bob became one of ~90 CEC level coaches with the Scrum Alliance. He coaches cross-organizationally around the world in helping clients achieve improved performance.

Often called a “Coach of Agile Coaches,” Bob has included his deep, pragmatic leadership and agile experiences in this class. You’ll leave with the skills, knowledge, ideas, and tactics to accelerate your agile leadership journey.

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To say that Rhiannon Galen-Personick has spent much of her career focusing on our youth would be a bit of an understatement. For the last 15 years, she has focused on working with mature youth (foster, troubled, challenged) in various companies and settings. She has held multiple roles, from direct care as a case manager and counselor to a macro role as a program coordinator and supervisor/director.

In the past few years, she has refocused on leadership and organizational training and development exclusively in child welfare organizations. The move was driven by the need to take her practical field experience and multiply it across organizations. In effect, she is a change agent who is intolerant of the status quo while being patient but relentlessly fostering individual, team, and organizational change.

She has a beautiful balance in her training – focusing on negotiation, effective communication, conflict management, group coaching, training, and leadership skills in an organizational setting. She pivoted entirely into Scrum Master and coaching in 2021, working at Relias as a Scrum Master.

In 2016, Rhiannon joined RGalen Consulting as a trainer and coach. Her broad and deep soft skills and ability to facilitate classes and workshops have proven to be an asset in the agile space: and her infectious enthusiasm for organizational and cultural development and transformation.