*This post is part of the series ‘SAFe Practice Tips’, which aims to offer helpful advice to anyone using SAFe.

As a SAFe® Program Consultant Trainer (SPCT) I can’t remember how many PI Planning events I facilitated and attended last year. However, what I do know is that this is a seminal event in SAFe, which aims  to create alignment with the Teams, the Product Management, the Architects and Business Owners.

“Program Increment (PI) Planning is a cadence-based, face-to-face event that serves as the heartbeat of the Agile Release Train (ART), aligning all the teams on the ART to a shared mission and Vision.”

PI Planning is essential to SAFe - If you are not doing PI Planning, you are not doing SAFe.

Over the last 2 years, I have been experimenting with different techniques and practices which I thought I would share with you. The first one is regarding Business Context and Team Space

You may have already read our recent blogs announcing that Professional Scrum Master and Implementing SAFe 4.0 with SPC certification courses are now available within our training portfolio.

Our training portfolio is set to be enhanced further - Radtac have joined the International Consortium for Agile (ICAgile) as a Member Training Organisation (MTO). 

ICAgile is a leading global Agile accreditation and certification body that helps organisations design learning experiences that cultivate an Agile mindset and enable sustainable organisational agility. They collaborate with worldwide Agile and industry experts to design world-class learning tracks that guide organisations in the development of their curriculum. ICAgile’s approach is not tied to any specific Agile methodology, thus giving people the flexibility to blend flavors in a way that make sense for their reality.

The ICAgile learning roadmap provides clear paths for professionals and organisations who want to start or continue their Agile journey. The learning roadmap is made up of:

ICAgile Certified Professional (ICP) Certifications:

Knowledge-based certifications which focus on fulfillment of ICAgile learning objectives and an in-class demonstration of acquired knowledge.

As a SAFe® Program Consultant Trainer, I have launched many Agile Release Trains (ARTs) over the last two years in a variety of industries and countries. Every time, I look to try something new (an experiment) to see whether there is a better way of doing things.

So, through a series of blogs I am going to share some of those experiments that I have found really useful. Perhaps try them out for yourself and let me know how you get on.

Many of you may have already started your journey on the Path to CSP® (Certified Scrum Practitioner) with the Scrum Alliance. However, for those of you thinking about progressing your career, knowledge and expertise in 2018, you can learn more about the new model designed by Scrum Alliance to take individuals from foundational to advance practice as part of a two-year staged journey.

Scrum Alliance Certifications: What's Your Journey?

The Path to CSP® has been designed to give individuals the choice in an educational track that will improve their core Scrum knowledge, build skill sets, and provide the necessary tools to evolve as an Agile practitioner, from Scrum foundations to advanced practice.

The program has been designed by Scrum Alliance to be a two-year journey where individuals will pick between SA’s already popular courses - Certified ScrumMaster, Certified Scrum Product Owner and Certified Scrum Developer - as the starting or foundational point of an individual's journey.

Last year we told you about the addition of Professional Scrum Master courses to our training portfolio, following the news Andy Hiles had become a licensed Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) with Scrum.org. 

This is a guest post by Samantha Webb. Samantha is an experienced Scrum Master and Agile coach working in the computer games and eSports industry. She spends a lot of time both inside and outside work mentoring professionals new to the Scrum Master role as well as coaching teams in Agile. 

Whether or not you are familiar with the world of MMOs or RPGs (that’s massively multiplayer online games and role-playing games), there are a lot of lessons that can be learned from the virtual world and applied in the real one. This is certainly true of my experience working in Agile environments as well, and this article aims to look at some of the practices introduced in online games that can help Scrum Masters improve their own practices.

One of the most common questions I hear from new Scrum Masters – and also often those with more experience under their belt – is how they can better themselves. Inspection and adaptation are two of the three pillars of Scrum, so it is no surprise that the best practitioners I know apply these pillars to their own practice. Lately I’ve found myself offering up similar advice to many Scrum Masters in different circumstances, so I thought the time had come to put quill to parchment and record my advice for other Scrum Master adventurers.

Our training portfolio will be expanding further this New Year with the exciting news that Radtac have been accredited by the DevOps Institute (DOI) in partnership with PeopleCert as a Registered Education Partner! 

 
The DevOps Institute is the continuous learning community around  emerging DevOps practices. Working with recognised thought leaders, the DevOps Institute is setting the quality standard for DevOps competency-based education and qualifications.

The DevOps Institute’s vision is to facilitate a community where members have access to the most innovative, inspirational and transformational DevOps content, courses and certifications around emerging DevOps practices and principles. We strive to provide content that inspires discussion, collaboration, transformation, and to foster healthy dialogue among global members of various technical backgrounds and experiences.

Every year in December, Christmas enthusiasts across the UK put on their silliest, funniest, and prettiest Christmas jumpers to celebrate Christmas Jumper Day. And, apart from brightening up your regular Friday at the office, the Christmas Jumper Day has a much more noble purpose. This year, our team members have put on their best jumpers in an effort to support the initiative.

Part of our Chatham Team and little Frankie rocking their Christmas Jumpers.

Christmas Jumper Day is an annual fundraising initiative organised by Save the Children. The campaign encourages people to "make the world better with a sweater" by wearing a Christmas jumper and making a donation to the charity.

Last year, prior to Toni and I joining Radtac, our colleague and Head of Training Alex Gray wrote a blog about “How to Prioritise Using Mince Pies”, which you can view here before reading on. So, inspired by the previous year, we went on to maintain this new-found tradition while also learning more about prioritisation ourselves.

Now don’t get me wrong, the M&S Star Mince pies were good but they were not quite what we had hoped for from Marks & Spencer. Which is why they ended up getting what would turn out to be an only slightly below average score, especially let down by the pastry and price. However, this gave us a benchmark for the rest of the pies to live up to, or hopefully exceed.

Are you struggling to plan your Christmas in an efficient way? We have provided a solution for you to overcome this with a Kanban board. A Kanban board is a workflow visualisation tool that enables you to optimise and manage the flow of your work. If you are a beginner in using a Kanban board or have never used one yourself check out our previous blog on ‘How to use a Kanban board’.  There are many benefits to using a Kanban Board such as:

- Providing visibility across the team

- Reduces overburdening

- Helps with communicating better

- Encourages better quality of work