LACE Workshops

Business Agility Transition Workshop

The Business Agility workshop guides Business teams through the transition to Agile using proven practices developed over 22 years of success in software product and service delivery. Beginning with business process mapping and ending with planning for the first iterative period, this workshop equips participants with the knowledge, tools, and behaviors needed to effectively implement Agile and jumpstart their journey to new ways of working.

This 3 session workshop can be taken in a single day or broken up into 3 learning sessions over multiple days. The sessions are also offered A-La-Carte, based on your teams' progress in its transition.  Learn More...

Psychological Safety

Numerous studies show that the most high-performing and innovative organizations have high psychological safety, Defined as "the belief that you won't be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes", Psycholigical Safety begins with personal vulnerability, compassion, and empathy.

In this workshop, a LACE team member will facilitate exercises to create empathy, demonstrate techniques for blameless problem solving and creating the environment for innovation, challenge, leveraging role tension, and more.

Developers vs. Product Owners: Defining a Common Language of Requirements

This workshop guides participants through a series of activities to identify and overcome the challenges of creating high-quality, clear requirements that are easily estimable and lead to top-notch software. Through exercises that promote a shared understanding of the importance of role tension, productive conflict, and negotiation, attendees will leave with a stronger understanding of requirements authoring, effective ways to uncover hidden requirements, and the importance of communication between roles for achieving optimal performance and quality.

Request this workshop for your team or program to establish more effective and valuable requirements conversations and define a language for requirements that teams can deliver.

Program Backlog Management 

Getting the most value from Program Backlog Refinement requires guidance, practice, and a commitment to continuously improve the use of time. Who should be there? How should you review the work? What are the expected outcomes? How do we know which feature delivers the most value? When both events and value inform the order in which work is done, how can we balance those concerns? Learners will come away with techniques to maximize the expected outcomes and reduce the communications overhead needed to align around feature vision, intent, and desired outcomes. 

Come to this structured workshop to work through a series of activities to arrive at a backlog that delivers maximum customer value, accounts for future needs, respects hard deadlines, and has your team working on the right thing at the right time.

Value Stream Mapping

A value stream is all the people, systems, and processes required to fulfill a customer's need, from the time of the request until the completion of the request. While the teams within the value stream know their part of the value stream well, the systems, automation, and human processes in a full value stream are complex and almost never completely understood at a global level. Are you taking a holistic view of your processes for the first time? Working to decrease process overhead that impedes delivery?

Schedule a Value Stream Mapping workshop to define your top-to-bottom process, eliminate wasteful steps, and create an actionable plan to reduce delays and increase speed of delivery.

Feature Visioning and Authoring

Creating reliable and high-quality requirements is difficult at any level, but features hold particular challenges. Bridging the gap between the strategic and tactical, it is critical that features contain context, intent, expected outcomes, and other key pieces of information. The challenge with features is the accurate passage of intent and expected outcomes during the handoff between product management and the team product owners.

Come to this workshop to improve your understanding of what information a feature needs and how to present the feature vision to the product owners, enabling the delivery teams to support the customers in alignment with product strategy and staying focused on the users' needs.

Estimating Features and Stories

Gaining consensus on the risk, effort, and complexity of work can be challenging. Introducing techniques and tools to create a thorough shared understanding of the work and an estimate that validates the alignment of Product Management and Product Delivery, learners will come away with the tools to fully understand work and harness the power of collective estimation.

Schedule this workshop for your team or program to maximize clarity and alignment, and improve delivery predictability through powerful estimation conversations.

Managing Scope & Finding MVP

Creating an MVP that resonates with users and validating your hypothesis about its viability can be a delicate balance to strike. With tight deadlines, determining the essential functionality for the next release can be a tough decision. This workshop offers exercises on value scaling, redlining (cutting unnecessary functionality), and refining success criteria.

Request this workshop to work with the LACE team and define an MVP that meets customer needs, confirms the value of the features, and hits critical deadlines while including the most valuable tools for users.

Defining User Personas

While "As a user" is a good starting point for requirements, complex software systems often have multiple users with diverse objectives and levels of knowledge. Personas can help to go beyond a generic "User" and provide guidance when developing a product that caters to specific types of end-users or multiple types of end-users. This improves the value and integrity of the final product, and leads to a more focused, realistic and streamlined user experience. In this workshop, we will guide your team to define and build personas that connect you with your customers, generate empathy for them and create the desire to build a product that addresses their needs. 

Schedule this workshop to increase your team's understanding of the end-users of their product and make better decisions during delivery.

Customer Journey

The customer journey map is a tool to visualize the experience of interacting with your products and services from the customer's point of view.  In this workshop, we will work with your team or program to define and build personas that connect you with your customer, generate empathy for them, and create the desire to build a product that solves their problems.

Request this workshop to get to know your customer and understand their goals and how they achieve them, their fears, concerns, and successes. 

Powerful Product Demos

Delivering powerful product demonstrations that both excite and communicate value to customers is not easy to do, and even harder to do well. The Product Demo is your team's chance to create a positive impression outside of your software development organization. In a series of exercises and peer discussions, learners will explore do's and don'ts of presentation and public speaking. 

Quality product demonstrations are critical because an effective product demo creates conversation and evokes meaningful feedback from the customer; the higher the quality of the presentation, the higher the quality of the feedback received.

Demonstrate products like a pro by getting to the essence of the value delivered, linking it to a context that resonates with the customer, and presents the team's work at the right level of granularity at the right times. 

Schedule this workshop with your product owners or team to present your best face to your customers and convey the true value of your work to the organization.

Breaking Down Work for Value

The decomposition of features in user stories that deliver value to customers sets the stage for delivery success. In this workshop, we will establish working definitions of value, examine value on a micro scale, and learn when to combine multiple value points into one story or create a separate story for each. We will also discover ways to break work down into the most estimable stories possible, how leveraging personas and user journeys can clarify value, and discuss commonly missed opportunities to decompose work. 

Request this workshop for your product ownership team to create clear, understandable, and valuable requirements that reduce disruptive discovery, improve quality and delivery predictability, and deliver work that satisfies customer needs.