With markets and customer needs constantly changing, organizations 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 organizations 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, organizational capabilities, and business results. EBM focuses on customer value and intentional experimentation to systematically improve an organization’s performance and achieve their strategic goals.

The course also includes a free attempt at the globally recognized Professional Agile Leadership – Evidence-Based Management (PAL-EBM) certification exam.

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

• 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

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.

All participants completing this course will receive a password to attempt the Professional Agile Leadership – Evidence Based Management (PAL-EBM) assessment. The industry-recognized PAL-EBM certification requires a minimum passing score of 85%. PAL-EBM class participants who attempt the PAL-EBM assessment within 14 days of receiving their free password and do not score at least 85% will be granted a 2nd attempt at no additional cost.

The 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.