—Nelson Mandela

Does your company education begin and end with training? Will this suffice for a change to Agile? Agile is a mindset that signifies a change to the culture. Because of this, we cannot think that reading a book or taking a training class will suffice and provide enough knowledge to cause a shift in thinking to be Agile. There is more to ramping up with Agile then just training. It takes a repertoire of educational elements. Training is just one of those educational elements.

The goal of this chapter is to make you aware that it takes a variety of educational elements within an agile context to help your organization come up to speed with Agile. No one element is sufficient; it is instead the accumulation of education elements at different points in time that will provide the comprehensive focus to help you, your team, and your organization. As you read the information, the objective is for you to construct an education plan that best serves your goal of an Agile transformation. Ultimately you want to create a self-organizing educational culture with many elements and the most mature level is when employees are willing to give back to their community.

Path to Making Education Matter

Training is a basic educational element and is best applied when an organization wants to build employee skills. When you want to adapt your organizational culture, however, you need an education plan that includes much more than just skill building. As discussed in Chapter 2, culture change is a transformation that involves the most change and requires the most time for an organization to adjust. To support that change, there are certain educational levels that are suited for skills, procedure, and achieving an Agile culture. These are training, coaching, mentoring, and giving back (Figure 16-1).

Here is a closer look at the educational levels:

• Training helps you build skills in a process. Its benefits can be undone the moment the trainee moves back into their existing culture. This is where coaching helps.
• Coaching helps a team adopt a process or procedure and lays the groundwork for transforming the culture. The coach is able to guide a team in adopting a process. If you do not have a coach, it is very easy to apply a process incorrectly or give up and revert to the old process. A coach can help you course-correct until you are enacting the process or practice correctly.
• Mentoring focuses on relationships and building self-confidence and self-perception. The person being mentored (mentee) advances the topics to be treated in the relationship. Deep learning can occur because the mentee is asking questions and seeking answers without being prompted. Mentoring allows people within the organization to start owning the culture.
• Giving back occurs when the employee has gained enough skills, experience, and confidence to start giving back. When employees have reached this level and are committed to giving back, they start helping others. A broader group of people who are committed to the transformation to Agile self-organizes to enhance the culture that they feel they own.

Educational Elements

There are many education elements that can help you get to an Agile culture. Within the levels of education described in the previous section are various additive education elements that contribute to the next level of education. As you move up the education levels, the education moves from formal to informal elements of education. Here is one perspective on educational elements within a level:

• Awareness may be considered the first step in the education process. This element calls attention to the new Agile initiative, may include the objectives and motivations, and may provide an overview of the initiative or of the topic such as a 30-minute Agile overview. Awareness elements may also be in the form of a brochure, flyer, or short presentation. This element prepares the mind to become open and attentive to subsequent educational elements.
• Skills training provides soft or hard skills to the attendee. This may come in the form of an instructor-led seminar or a virtual webinar. An example of this type of training is a course on agile planning tools or how to write user stories.
• Role training provides education on a person’s role in relation to the process, practices, and methods being taught. An example is a Scrum Master’s role for Sprint Planning.
• Community sharing includes items within a shared environment. This may take form of agile practices within a website, and recorded seminars and webinars that are hosted and always available for viewing.
• Process and role coaching involves in-session education by a coach to a team or an individual. This may include respective Scrum Master and Product Owner Q&A sessions where those playing these roles may ask specific questions regarding the application of the agile process in context to their role. This element helps reinforce a new skill or process to ensure they are being applied as expected.
• Culture coaching involves in-session education by a coach to promote Agile principles and values. This may include establishing an apprentice coaching circle to build in-house coaching expertise for Agile Champions ready to give back to the organization. This element helps reinforce the new behavior to ensure it is being applied as expected.
• Mentoring involves educating individuals where a mentee or participant leads the conversation to gain ownership and build self-confidence.
• Community contributing includes items within a shared environment. This may take the form of blogs and just-in-time seminars and webinars that are given by local Agile Champions giving back to their community.

Examples of Common Agile Education

When product teams or organizations move toward Agile, the more common educational elements include role training, coaching teams in long-term Agile usage, establishing an agile community, building an agile website, initiating a blog to capture experience and offer guidance, and launching a seminar or webinar series.

Gamification

Gamification adapts game concepts to nongaming situations to engage employees and motivate them to improve their performance and behavior. It rewards employees for completing performance levels with points, badges, privileges, and sometimes monetary incentives. Gamification can be deployed to engage employees in agile educational elements.

The key to gamification is that it must be driven by a clear business objective. With the context of Agile, the goal with gamification is to encourage employees to become Agile Champions and achieve an Agile culture. Although it may start with training, you eventually would like employees acting as Agile Champions to give back to their community.

Here is an example of using gamification to motivate and engage employees to become Agile Champions who give back to the community. Let's posit five levels of Agile Champion and the points needed to achieve each level:

• Steel: 5 points
• Bronze: 25 points
• Silver: 50 points
• Gold: 100 points
• Platinum: 250 points

An agile education plan has been established with the goal of getting employees to give back to the community. The plan lays out the following education elements, together with the points earned by completing each one:

• Take the “Agile Overview” for awareness: 5 points
• Attend Scrum Master, Product Owner, team, or manager training per your role: 20 points
• Take a variety of short online courses such as “How to Write User Stories” to build skills: 5 points each
• Attend a 45-minute seminar/webinar on various Agile topics such as “Lessons Learned from Sprint Retrospective” to understand process: 5 points each
• Write a blog article on giving back: 25 points
• Present a webinar on giving back: 50 points

Notice that by taking the “Agile Overview,” the participant immediately becomes Steel level. This gets them into the game and motivates them to keep playing. Also notice that the bigger point items promote giving back to the internal agile community. This preferential valuation aligns with the goal of giving back. If you use gamification, ensure the achievement is real, helps the employee with their work, and is aligned with the objectives.

Are You Getting Educated?

It takes a repertoire of educational elements to achieve an Agile culture. Training is just one educational element that are needed. How will your teams be educated? An accumulation of education elements at different points in time will provide the comprehensive focus to help you, your team, and your organization. Construct an education plan that best serves your goal for an Agile transformation. Ultimately you want to create a self-organizing educational culture where employees are willing and eager to give back to their community.