CAPED Practitioner Workshop

Our CAPED Practitioner workshop is designed to get a project team or even a whole organization aligned around the new way of working and to give them enough practical skills and tools to get started right away. It’s for engineers, testers, project managers, product managers, ScrumMasters, managers, and anyone else involved in your product development.

This 2.5-day in-person workshop is highly-interactive and hands-on.

The first morning lays the foundations with a deep dive into complexity and the Humanizing Work Complexity-Aware Planning, Estimation, and Delivery (CAPED) approach.

Then, we shift to a fun and engaging simulation to take participants through the key practices in CAPED: reference class forecasting, complexity mapping, feature mining, user story mapping, and risk-adjusted forecasting. Instead of just hearing about the techniques, participants actually practice them, building understanding and skills that stick.

We send participants away from day 2 with homework: “Come back with all the reasons why this won’t work in this context. Why are we going to struggle to work in this way?”

For the final morning, we collect, prioritize, and address those concerns in a structured, interactive way. This gives participants confidence and practical knowledge to make the change succeed.

Participants leave the workshop able to do the following:

Distinguish between complex and complicated work and explain the appropriate approach for each
Understand how to use CAPED to experience the benefits of both Agile and traditional project management
Use a 3-level planning system to balance big-picture and detailed planning in a complexity-aware way
Quickly figure out where to start on a new initiative so complexity gets resolved early
Split projects into features and user stories for incremental value, learning, and risk-mitigation
Use reference class estimating for quick, accurate estimating at 3 levels of detail
Make forecasts that account for risk and complexity so you can find the sweet spot between over- and under-planning the future
Apply the best of Scrum for incremental delivery
Understand how to structure teams and their work to scale beyond the work of one team in a way that avoids churn and rework
Coordinate between teams working on the same initiative
Get the right cross-functional group aligned early in a project
Identify and address the specific challenges this approach will face in your organizational context

Because of the large scale of a full-org workshop and the need to create a memorable shared experience that will lay a healthy foundation for the change, this workshop is only conducted in-person in a suitable space.

We often follow the CAPED Practitioner Workshop with ongoing coaching for leaders to help them adopt CAPED successfully on a high-value initiative.