LACE Workshops

Business Agility Transition Workshop

The Business Agility workshop support's a business team's transition to using the successful practices that have evolved over 22 years of Agile in software product and service delivery.

Starting with a business process mapping exercise and ending with the planning of work for the teams first iterative planning period, this workshop is designed to both impart an understanding of the tools, processes and behaviors that have made agile product delivery successful, and kickstart your team's journey into 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 is a facilitated series of activity to surface the challenges of creating high-quality, usable requirements that are easily estimable, deliverable, and result in high-quality software. Leveraging exercises to create a shared understanding the value of role tension, productive conflict, and negotiation, Learners will come away with an increased understanding of requirements authoring, powerful questions to surface hidden requirements, and how the conversation between the two roles is critical for 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 expected 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, and 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 fulfil 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, automated, 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.

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

Managing Scope & Finding MVP

Defining and MVP that users can embrace and proving your hypothesis that the software is viable is a difficult balance to find. When you're pressed for a deadline, identifying the necessary functionality to make the next release requires hard choices. This workshop includes exercises on value scaling, redlining, and refining success criteria. 

Request this workshop to work with the LACE on your features to define and MVP that customers can use, that confirms the feature value, and that hits the non-negotiable deadlines with the required and most valuable tools for users

Defining User Personas

"As a user" is a great way to start requirements, but complex software systems have many users with different objectives and knowledge. Go beyond a generic "User", with personas to provide guidance when developing a product that fits the needs of a specific type of end-user or multiple types of end-users, improves the value and integrity of the final product. and produces a more focused, realistic, and streamlined product.

Request this workshop to increase the team’s awareness of the type or types of 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 brand from the customer's point of view. This map is critical because it forces you to look at how your customers actually experience your system versus how you think they do.

Schedule 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

Breaking Down Work for Value