Mass rollout of Agile training is boring and expensive — what should we do instead?
By: Bontle Senne
Tags: Training, Agile Training, Agile Methodology, Agile, Scaled Agile

Mass rollout of Agile training is boring and expensive — what should we do instead? Bontle Senne Jun 17·8 min read

Insufficient skills to implement Agility is often indicated as a major impediment to successful Agile transformation. The topics you will need to train people on are well-described and documented: the values, the principles, the frameworks you have chosen (if you have one), processes, practices, team norms, roles and responsibilities, and new ways to lead, learn, inspect and adapt. A common approach to training involves getting everyone in the organisation into some form of introductory classroom training and then launching supplementary online modules on specific topics. This is what I think of as a “sheep-dip” approach. Yes, you will have trained hundreds of people in a relatively short period of time. Yes, everyone in the organisation will know something about Agile and it won’t be a total surprise when change comes to their teams. But what is the actual value for the individual?

A scaled Agile training roadmap (Credit: Scaled Agile Inc)

If they go through an intro training, get really excited about this new way of working, and then nothing on their team actually changes for several months, what was the point? Everyone can talk a little about Agile but no one has experienced anything. Much of the content is quickly forgotten after months of not being able to practically use any of the skills, ideas, or practices introduced. The doubts start to fill in where there was once excitement: if Agile is really so amazing, shouldn’t the team have actually started changing? Shouldn’t things feel different? What proof is there that this isn’t just another management change program. The promises of the initial training are quickly broken when the number of people trained is a more important metric than actual flow, quality, or value created by changing the way people work.

What’s the alternative? There isn’t one right model for learning or training. Here are three options to consider.

Competency based models of training

Competency-based models of training break each role or profession into the component capabilities, traits, motives, and skilled behavior that constitute high performance in that role.

Competencies are often defined in generic terms applicable to any employee in a particular role.

There are several challenges with applying the competencies of the past to professionals of your future Agile organisation. Agile and Lean organizational and team structures are built around the ability to deliver an end-to-end value stream for the business without handoff to other teams. This means that the teams are cross-functional by necessity and often require team members with multiple skills across the value stream. For example, to deliver a launch and run an innovation unit, the team will require developers, data scientists, designers, risk and control professionals, process coaches, strategists, process improvement specialists, and finance professionals to work on the same team with the same line management. This is already how some of the world’s largest tech companies function as digital natives built with Agile principles as the foundation. Professionals from support functions like HR or finance would also need to be active participants in these teams and their responsibilities may range from planning, ideation, personal and professional coaching, getting feedback from (internal or external) customers, servant leadership, facilitator, trainer, and cross-team coordinator. These skills would also need to be underpinned by domain knowledge of the business and functional expertise of innovation. The traits exhibited would also need to be consistent with Agile principles of purpose, master, autonomy, and creation of quantifiable business value from every activity.

This is a very different threshold for competence than employees have had to meet in the past. The competencies required to meet the needs of that kind of cross-functional team are varied and specific to teams and situations. It may not be possible to meaningfully map them all and they will likely change as the team and the individual mature.

As the technology matures so too will the digital skillset required of employees. For those in support functions, it may not be possible to even understand the full set of competencies required for a person specializing in support of complex and rapidly changing fields like Artificial Intelligence teams working on self-driving cars.

The inclusion of motives and traits as components of capability may also create challenges for future organizations given that the presence or absence of these qualities can only be inferred or deduced through observed behavior. Those conducting the observation may not fully understand the motivations for Generation Z or Gen Alpha employees whose value base and incentives may differ substantially from their Baby Boomer, Generation X, or Millennial predecessors and may as a result erroneously interpret and evaluate traits and motivations for these younger generations.

Case-based decision-making models of training

Case-based decision-making models of training rely on past experiences and pattern recognition to help trainees apply lessons from previous scenarios in new contexts. This model for learning requires that trainees are taught to evaluate the similarity between a new problem and analogous classes of problems, or cases, in the past. The trainee needs to be able to recognize or remember solutions of the analogous cases and decide how to appropriately apply parts of the solutions to the new problem.

Case-based decision-making requires trainees to accept subjectivity and estimations in the process of developing solutions and rejects the rules-based models that tend to be associated with traditional learning. Where problems are likely to reoccur and are deterministic in nature with clear causal links between actions and reactions, this form of learning is helpful for all Agile professionals in training. Where the problems are strategic and do not have sufficient reference or analogous cases in the past, it is difficult for trainees to use this form of decision-making effectively. In the future, global organizations are likely to face many problems they have yet to encounter and where the causal links are made up of a chain of interrelated people, processes, and systems. This might limit the ability of this model of training to meaningfully help employees adapt to changing stakeholder needs.

The effectiveness of case-based approaches in behavioral or mindset training is increased when the cases are developed based on real constraints and resistance that employees will face in their daily roles. Having grappled with these behavioral challenges in a simulated case-scenario, employees may feel more confident when faced with the same or a similar scenario in their real jobs. Even in situations where they failed to solve the case or the case is completely different from new scenarios that they encounter, they can still apply the lessons they learned in what will not work to save time and resources, and purpose alternative lines of reasoning or investigation.

Systems thinking models of training

A system is a set of interdependent endogenous and exogenous processes, people, interactions, and tools that function as a whole by virtue of their interdependence. External inputs feed into the system. Internal transformative mechanisms impact the inputs and turn them into outputs for users. Feedback mechanisms ensure that the transformative mechanisms change the nature of outputs as inputs and needs of users change.

Training models built on systems thinking accept training as a sub-system of the organization. People, tools, resources, and information feed into the training sub-system. The transformative mechanisms in training then generate outputs such as skills, competencies, mindsets, and knowledge to training participants in support of the users’ goals. The users in this sub-system are most often other sub-systems (or departments) in the organization.

To remain responsive to changing user goals and constraints, the system must remain an open system that is able to alter the form, content, and conduct of outputs continuously as inputs and users change. Training may also have an impact on other sub-systems or inputs into those systems as training outputs change the skills attitudes of people that operate in other sub-systems. Many traditional training operates on a closed system that does not adapt often to changing inputs or outputs from the organizational system it operated in. This will likely not be an option in the future.

Being able to implement, learn, and adapt faster than its competitors may be the only distinct competitive advantage for an organization in the future. This implies that training that is stable over long periods regardless of changing inputs or users and does not have adequate feedback mechanisms for faster adoption of approach will be ineffective for future, global organizations. Systems thinking models of training then emerge as amongst the most appropriate training models for global organizations.

Measuring success of training

While the specific learning outcomes of each training program may differ by content and methodology, the metrics that organizations should use to assess training success should not. It is not possible to use a single metric to evaluate the training given that the learning outcomes impact multiple learning objectives. Four metrics can be used consistently across trainings: employee feedback, quality outcomes, flow outcomes, and return on investment (ROI).

Employee feedback is the participant’s reaction to the training, often measured by surveys asking for their level of agreement or disagreement with several questions or statements related to the training. Examples of statements often presented to employees to respond to in these kinds of feedback surveys include “I feel better equipped to do my job after completing this training”, “this training met my expectations”, “this training was a worthwhile investment of my time”, or “I would recommend this training to my colleagues”.

Quality and flow outcomes are metrics that measure the impact on performance. Quality and flow are defined differently for different employees. For a software engineer, indicators of increase quality and flow after a training might be a decrease in software defects and an increase in throughput of new features for users or customers respectively. For a safety officer at a manufacturing facility, indicators of increase quality and flow after a training might be reduction in incorrectly handled safety incidents and a decrease in the time taken to resolve a safety incident respectively.

ROI is the marginal or net benefit generated by a training. Calculating the costs associated with a training may be more straightforward that calculating the benefit as the costs are mostly direct and quantifiable such trainer’s fees, venue rental, or material printing. There is also the opportunity cost to the organization of the employer in attending the training but that can be quantified through a calculation of the revenue they would have generated during the same time period that the employee was engaged in the training.

When the impact of cost saving or revenues generated of increased quality and flow can be quantified, that gives a view of the monetary value of the direct benefits for the training. Indirect benefits such as employee satisfaction or feelings of belonging as less easily quantified and may be best added as commentary to the ROI calculation but not used to calculate the figure. One rationale for this choice is because there are numerous proxies for the measures but little agreement on even a range of monetary figures to allocate to these intangible benefits. Another is that these factors may be conveyed more reliability in the impact and feedback surveys completed by participants of the training.

The TL;DR version

Don’t measure success by the number of employees trained. Don’t rush to train everyone at once. Do shorter training sessions, more frequently. Apply a just-in-time training approach where people are trained on practices or experiments to address specific problems as they become relevant. Struggling to get transparency on what the team is working on? Try some training on product roadmaps, backlog development, or sprint planning. Need to get requirements from business in a way that supports genuine product ownership? Get the team in user story writing and backlog refinement training. Need project managers to under their new roles as leaders in Agile constructs? Looks like a servant leadership training would be helpful as a start.

This approach is not faster and won’t reach as many people at once but it is cheaper, more effective, more impactful to individuals, and better able to respond to changes in priorities and team/company needs.

This isn’t ground-breaking: What you train people on is as important as how you choose to train them and one size fits no one.