Education Is More than Training

Does your Agile education begin and end with a touch of training? A number of colleagues have told me that their Agile training was completed in one hour, one day, or two days, and then they were expected to apply and master the topics. Agile isn’t simply a process or skill that can be memorized and applied. Will such limited training time suffice for a transformation to Agile? Probably not, as insufficient training time limits the success of effectively implementing Agile.

Education is an investment in your people. A shift in culture requires an incremental learning approach that spans across time. What works in one company doesn’t work in another. Education should be an intrinsic part of your Agile transformation that includes skills, roles, process, culture, and behavior education with room to experience and experiment.

When you want to adapt your enterprise culture, you need education that includes more than just skill building. Culture change is a transformation that involves the most change and requires the most time for an organization to adapt. To support that change, there are educational elements that are suited for achieving the Agile skills, roles, processes, and culture as illustrated in Figure 9-2. These elements include training, mentoring, coaching, experiencing, experimenting, reflecting, and giving back. These education elements should be included in your culture change.

Figure 9-2. Educational elements for different levels of change

Training is applied when an enterprise wants to build employee skills, educate employees in their roles, or roll out a process. It is often event-driven and a one-way transfer of knowledge. What was learned can be undone when you move back into your existing culture, and it can be forgotten if not applied quickly. Coaching can reaffirm the training. Also, training can occur in an instructor-led manner where it is scheduled or in a web-based manner where the material is pre-recorded and can be used on demand.

Reading allows individuals to focus on topics of their own interest and at their own pace, but it does require self-motivation. Readers can use a physical book or e-book. The reading often includes articles, journals, podcasts, and blogs. Reading offers the advantage of going back to the source of the article, chapter, or section. Reading can also be done in with the aid of book clubs where teams or groups read and then discuss a topic.

Coaching helps a team put the knowledge of process and roles into action and lays the groundwork for transforming the culture. Coaching provides a two-way communication process so that questions can be asked along the way. 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 has been on this journey before and can help you until you are enacting the process or practice correctly with the right behaviors for the culture you want.

Mentoring focuses on relationships and building confidence and self-perception. The person being mentored (mentee) invests time by proposing topics to be discussed in the relationship. In this two-way communication, deep learning can occur because the mentee is asking questions and seeking answers without being prompted. Mentoring allows individuals within an enterprise to better understand their place in the culture.

Experiencing focuses on living in the new process, applying the skills, and experiencing the new roles. This provides individuals with first-hand knowledge of what they’ve learned, allowing them to better understand the behavior changes needed. It allows for deeper questions, further exploration, and experimentation.

Experimenting focuses on trying something new for a short period of time in order to test a proposed change. The change often begins with a hypothesis on what might work better and then is crafted into a short test to see if the new idea had the effect or improvement set out by the hypothesis. Experimenting is a way to try concepts and practices before fully committing to a change.

Reflecting focuses on taking the time to consider what you learned—whether it is a skill, process, role, or culture—and determine what you can do better and what else you need on your learning journey. In effect, it is similar to an Agile retrospective that can occur at the employee, team, or enterprise level. It is a feedback loop to consider where you’ve been and what you need to achieve an Agile culture and a customer-value-driven enterprise.

Giving back occurs when the employees have gained enough knowledge, skills, and experience to start giving back to their community. It is a commitment to start helping others. This provides a feeling of ownership in a transformation of the culture. Giving back can be to the company, local community, or greater community.

It takes a repertoire of educational elements to achieve an Agile culture. These elements help a team develop skills, learn its roles, navigate a process, and grasp behavioral changes toward achieving an Agile mindset. Ensure you apply a repertoire to your learning.

Agile Education Universe

There is a wealth of topics that can be covered in achieving an Agile mindset and customer value as illustrated in Figure 9-1. In an Agile galaxy context, you can learn about the early part of the delivery life cycle where ideas get articulated and prioritized, processes are applied, and motivation and trust become a priority. What you can learn is limitless.

Since learning is a journey, you may apply different education elements, depending on the topic. For some Agile topics, looking at a topic from several different angles enables learners to fully digest and understand it. Also there are certain core topics that can be building blocks in achieving an Agile culture. This is why I strongly recommend avoiding process and role topics up front and instead focus on topics that can ready the mind for an Agile culture.

Importance of Work-Based Learning

Work-based learning is an approach to education where for every topic that you learn, you must apply the knowledge. This supports the discovery mindset and provides a deeper level of learning for students. The first-hand experience gained by students provides a deeper learning environment.

Within the Value, Flow, Quality (VFQ) education, Alex Adamopoulos includes the work-based approach to education, which helps organizations learn Agile and business topics and then gain immediate business benefits from applying them. Students learn a topic, exercise the topic in class, and then apply the topic with their team members in their actual working environment.

A similar approach is the learn-apply-share model, which includes learning a topic in the classroom, applying it in exercises, using it in a real work setting, and finally sharing and explaining the topic to others. When you have to explain a topic to others, you more fully understand the topic, which deepens your learning opportunity.

When you expand the notion of continuous learning, not only do you learn Agile topics, you also “learn your way to customer value.” A learning enterprise goes beyond learning processes and tools. The type of enterprise that uses this approach recognizes that you learn from each other and you learn from your customers. Just as it takes a discovery mindset with multiple customer feedback loops to zero in on customer value, it takes multiple types of Agile topics to operate in an Agile manner to achieve customer value.

Agile Education Vision

Agile is a cultural shift that is often larger than most people realize. As you look to change your culture and gain the business benefits, you have learned in this chapter that there are hundreds of Agile and customer value related topics. You have also learned there are many ways to become educated. So, how do you organize Agile education in a manageable way?

Enter the Agile Education Vision. This vision is an adaptive education roadmap where you can iteratively plan and apply the repertoire of topics and educational elements to support your transformation toward an Agile culture. The vision can be applied to an employee, a team, and/or an enterprise.

You may consider an Agile education vision as a prioritized product backlog of education topics based on needs. In each iteration, some form of education is provided that builds Agile knowledge, skills, and capabilities toward achieving an Agile mindset. At the beginning of each iteration, topics may be added and reprioritized for what is most important at that time.

• When applied at an individual employee level, ask what education may help a person develop the skills, process, and experience to better grasp Agile and understand how to achieve customer value. An employee may have personal learning goals such as gaining more knowledge on story point sizing and gaining new experiences by meeting actual customers.

• When applied at a team level, ask what education may help employees improve Agile teamwork and the flow of their work? A team may have goals focused on collaboration or learning to decompose work from user story to task. In the spirit of self-organizing teams, the Agile education vision is meant to be self-organized by the teams and their education needs.

• When applied at the enterprise level, ask what education can help the organization shift toward an Agile mindset and be more customer-value-driven by aligning roles more closely to the customer. This may start with basic Agile education that all employees should have such as Agile values and principles. An enterprise may then focus on applying self-organizing teams and applying the discovery mindset to meet customer needs.

As an added tip, any time an education item is time-consuming (one-day training, reading a book, and so), consider including it as a story with a story point value. As the owner works on this item, the story card can get moved across the board to indicate progress of the education. This highlights that education is considered valuable and illustrates the progress made in completing the education work item.

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. Consider applying a self-organized education vision that best serves your goal toward being Agile. You want to create a self-organizing education culture where employees are eager to learn, act, and give back to their community.

Is It Time to Learn?

Do you work in a continuous learning enterprise? Injecting a continuous learning mindset can help people understand that there is a lot to learn and that the knowledge gained can only help your enterprise succeed. It takes a repertoire of educational elements to achieve an Agile culture. An accumulation of education elements at different points in time will provide the comprehensive focus to help you, your team, and your enterprise.

Consider establishing an iterative and adaptable Agile education vision for yourself, your team, and your enterprise that best serves your goal for an Agile transformation and the delivery of customer value. Ultimately, you want to create a self-organizing learning culture where employees are willing and eager to learn new topics and make themselves and their enterprise more successful.