A quick announcement: Diana Larsen and I are repeating our popular Art of Agile training courses at the end of February. There are two courses: The Art of Agile Planning, which takes place on February 28th and March 1st, and The Art of Agile Delivery, which takes place March 2nd, 3rd, and 4th. These are really awesome courses, if I may say so myself. We've been teaching them for years, refining them each time, and they're very polished.

A lot of people are offering Agile training these days. What makes ours stand out? Three things:

• Real-World Expertise. If you're reading this website, you know that I've been part of Agile teams for a long time (since 1999, in fact) and that I do a lot of hands-on work transitioning Agile teams, typically by embedding with them for months at a time. You may not have known, though, that Diana brings equal depth from the organizational systems perspective. She's author of Agile Retrospectives, past chair of the Agile Alliance (twice!), and has been working with Agile teams since 2002. Few courses have even one trainer with this sort of experience, let alone two.

• Hands-On Approach. Our courses are very experiential and hands-on. (If you're the kind of student that prefers to passively listen, don't come.) We design all our own exercises, and we make them as real-world as can possibly be done. No paper airplanes here! In The Art of Agile Delivery, for example, you'll build actual working software from scratch in a networked team environment, using continuous integration, pair programming, test-driven development, and more. (You can read more about our teaching philosophy here.)

• Principled Excellence. We teach Agile at its best--not what's easy, or what bureaucratic organizations will tolerate, but how Agile is really meant to work. We've made a principled decision to offer no certification. This has cost us attendees and sponsorship, unquestionably--but it means the course is successful because of the content, not because of a piece of paper you get at the end.

The net result is a really awesome course. You don't have to take my word for it: one of the attendees of our last two courses put up a comprehensive five-day review. Here's an excerpt from his conclusion:

What an ending. I've just finished the most interactive training class I've ever taken. I spent much of the last two days on a real Agile team producing a real product in 90-minute iterations. In a word, it was intense. It's ingenious to dangle the responsibility for shipping working code in front of programmers during a training class. It really made the content exceedingly relevant.

After four iterations we shipped a working Java console game that was demonstrated to the class. And I ended up on a development team that, in some ways, is more functional than my development team at work. Seriously, I could take this team back and start solving some real problems very, very soon. At the end some time was reserved for us to express our appreciation for one another. It was a real bonding experience for me. Nerds bonding. What a beautiful, awkward thing.

I hope you'll join us! Both courses will be held in Portland, Oregon during the week of February 28th. You can take them separately or together. Here's the registration information:

Feb 28 & Mar 1, 2011	Planning	Register here
Mar 2 - 4, 2011	Delivery	Register here

PS: If you're on the other side of the Atlantic, we're offering a special 5-day combined class in London on June 20th-24th. It has all the content of Planning and Delivery courses together in one comprehensive course. It should be pretty special. Register here.