Join Jason Tanner on September 29-30 for an Innovation Games® Practitioner course.

Date: September 29-30 2010
Location: Atlanta, GA
Venue: VersionOne
Timing: 8:30 am - 5:30 pm
Max class capacity: 24

Join Enthiosys President Jason Tanner for our two-day Innovation Games® course on September 29-30 in the Atlanta, Georgia metro-area.

Innovation Games® are serious games that can be used to deliver cost-effective market research for Agile teams and super-charge the product planning process. Based on the book of the same name by Luke Hohmann, Innovation Games® power innovation by enabling you to better understand your customers.

This interactive, two-day course is specifically designed with Agile development principles in mind, and is aimed at helping you understand how to apply Innovation Games within the context of the Agile development process.  

What You’ll Learn

While there is a lot to love about Agile development, many practices can get pretty tiresome. Retrospectives stop working when teams become bored with answering the same three questions (“what worked, what didn’t work, what should we change?”). Prioritizing a product backlog in a single meeting before, or during, release planning using a spreadsheet isn’t very engaging. Developing and presenting a product roadmap using PowerPoint gets pretty old, especially when you can’t find a way to show the growth in functionality of your product.

In this two-day session, we will show how Innovation Games® can be used to improve many of the practices that are common in Agile teams. Beginning with an overview of Innovation Games, you will learn how to:

• Identify customer requirements for an ideal product through Product Box
• Improve retrospectives with Speed Boat
• Prioritize your backlog through the online game Buy a Feature Online
• Plan a successful project through the game Remember the Future
• Develop better release plans with Prune the Product Tree
• Understand product usage with Me and My Shadow and Start Your Day
• And much more!

Agile should be fun! And when you integrate the games described in this class into your Agile practice, it will be.

Target Audience

• All members of Agile teams with a focus on product planning, product development and product management.
• Anyone who wishes to create more innovative product and service offerings.

Format/Duration

Two days of instructor-led, interactive training

Benefits

Upon completing this course, participants will have played several Innovation Games® that they can use to work together as a team and directly with customers to better understand their needs. They will also have reference materials to additional techniques beyond the ones used in the presentation.

Theory of Instruction

The course is guided by a “learning by doing” model of education based on the Enthiosys “Know-Do-Have” model of course design:

• What participants will know after taking the class.
• What participants will do during the class to reinforce key concepts.
• What participants will have after the seminar to promote further practice and study.

Prerequisites

Although not strictly required, it is helpful if participants read the book Innovation Games®: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play before the course.

Materials

• Copy of the book Innovation Games®: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play
• Presentation in soft and hard copy
• A variety of handouts used to stimulate thinking and apply the materials
• Case studies

Instructor

Jason Tanner, President of Enthiosys, has more than 18 years experience with software companies, a telecommunications company and the Marine Corps. His expertise spans agile software product management, product marketing, business planning, partner management, project management and leadership.

His prior position with a startup software company included experience migrating from waterfall to agile development methods. Jason collaborated closely with engineering to integrate product management into the Agile workflow.

Jason is an active member of the Agile User Group in Research Triangle Park, the Triangle Product Management Association in Raleigh, NC and the North Carolina Council for Entrepreneurial Development. He frequently speaks for the Product Management View webinar series, at user group meetings and for the Atlanta Agile Project Leadership Network.

He holds a BS degree in mechanical and aeronautical engineering from Cornell University and a MBA with a concentration in entrepreneurship from Duke University.