thekua.com@work

At this year’s XP2009, I’m going to run the workshop, Climbing the Dreyfus ladder of Agile Practices where we’ll look at learning models (focusing on one in particular) and how to use them to help as a model for coaching and transferring skills around agile practices.

It’s going to be great fun, and contains some great material inspired by all the wonderful coaching work that Liz Keogh has been doing (we’re also hoping to get into Agile 2009).

Bring your friends, your work colleagues and anyone you think might get some benefit. I’ll be maintaining this page as we get closer to the conference.

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I’m a big believer in letting people try things out. Unfortunately, most training programs don’t let people do this enough. In fact, most of the time, training is seen as some way of “fixing problems” or a “all-in-one solution”. I can tell you a simple reason why training fails… people don’t have support to actually use the things they are trained on. They don’t get the essential feedback loop in their real environment and they quickly forget what they learned.

It’s all fantastic when you have an opportunity in class to try what you learned out. What really matters if whether or not you have long term lasting support in your environment to apply it to what you do. Unfortunately most training programs fail to address that, or the trainers don’t feel like it’s something they can influence.

Training lasts a day. True learning lasts a lifetime. If you send people on training, make sure they have a safe environment to apply it as well. Don’t view training as a silver bullet. Use it as a tactical solution as part of a larger strategic initiative.

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One thing I’ve noticed agile projects tend to do is to push relevant information out to people, and be extremely honest about how things are going. Here are my attempts at doing so:

• Posters Around the Workplace – Finding time to showcase progress to my stakeholders is like trying to hold a wriggling eel in water, so I thought of hanging some eye catching posters on the noticeboards. I decided they’d be good for two purposes – the first to help give stakeholders an idea of what I’ve been doing with training since we met about a month ago without the need of scheduling another meeting, and the second, to market towards potential people who’d have an interest in attending. In about an hour, I ended up with a poster (see the photo) that included what topics I have material for (and what I have planned), photos of outputs from the training including snippets of real feedback, and contact information for more information. I purposely left two spaces to update the colour poster with two pieces of information, just the right size for sticky notes. I’m currently filling one indicating the number of people who’ve participated so far, and the other, the number of classes I’ve run.
• Mini Card Wall – Keeping track of all the tasks associated with material development, scheduling training, meeting with people is becoming difficult so I’ve put up a mini card wall using the desktop PC I have next to my monitor. People around me can take a look at the things that I need to do, and as new requests pop up, I can quickly add it to the list of items still open using the pen and pad of sticky notes I have nearby. As you can see from the picture, all I really care about is whether or not something is open (needs my attention eventually), in progress (reminds me of what I’m working on) and done (I remove these at the end of the day).

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In my experience, achieving high quality is a key part to being adaptive and nimble. Continuous improvement and responding to the feedback allows you to achieve high quality. Here’s what I’ve applied to training so far:

• Set design and collaborating ideas – One approach I could have taken to developing the material included simply writing the content, trainer’s guide, handouts, etc and run it with a single class before trying to change anything. Instead, I came up with a few options, bouncing ideas off someone else who’d run training before and asked them, “I’m thinking of trying something like like …, I imagine it would work like … and we’d achieve … What do you think? What discussion would this generate? Would people find it engaging?” It stopped me detailing things too early and putting in too much effort that would need rework.
• User Centred Design – For some of the worksheets, I applied some principles from Don’t Make Me Think, testing them out with some users to make sure they needed as little instructions as possible. It’s important for students to have a good experience with everything to do with the course. You can see the evolution by looking at the picture above – it’s a worksheet for introducing the concept of velocity for the XP Lego Game.
• Finding the right metrics to use – I’ve already changed my feedback forms since running the pilot programs, looking at what information I actually consume and how people use it. I used to have a two-page feedback form, the first including instructions and a focus on multiple choice answers, with the second page using a more free form format. Since I hand them out in class, I give verbal instructions and removed the detail blurb I had at the top. I also condensed the form into a single page, and focused on three key questions I am more interested in – “What did you like best about the session? What constructive changes would you suggest to make the session more effective? What else do you want to know about?”

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I’ve been leveraging my experience with agile in teams and development and applying it to what I’ve been doing in training. Here’s what it looks like:

• Review material before class – Executing the material with an audience is the slowest part of my feedback loop. Instead, I’ve had a few people review different parts of the material during and after I’d developed the material, constantly seeking people who might give a different perspective about the content, delivery techniques, etc. Some of them involved a detailed walk through, others a brief, what do you think response?
• Gathering feedback from classes – I’ve had a chance to run some pilot classes, gathering effective feedback to consider changes. I also try to set some time aside after class, capturing notes around how effective I thought some of the classes ran, looking at ways of improving them.
• Eating my own dog food – The trainer’s guide is meant for someone else, and as difficult as I find it is, following a guide you wrote, I try using it to plan out the classes I run to see how well documented it is.

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