I’ve been asked to ‘upskill’ 2000 people. They all have different functions, they all work in different departments, and they all have different levels of understanding about agile ways of working. The first thing we are identifying are the different tracks that people may be interested in. Some of these tracks are role-based, whilst others are about the underlying concepts and philosophies. There is a great deal of overlap between the different tracks we are creating. People will be able to take modules from any track they choose, and once they have completed all of the modules on a given track they will receive a certificate.
As the good little agilists we are, we created a definition of done so that we know when we have done everything we need to do in order to create a module. As we were developing the DoD, we realised we have three DoDs in reality; one for creating a module, one for delivering a module, and one for following up with the module attendees. We intend to advertise all modules from the start when in reality we will only be able to develop one or two at a time. Everyone who signs up for any of them will be offered to attend the ones we initially develop while we develop the next most popular in parallel.
By producing an offering that doesn’t exist until people request it, means we can be quite agile in the creation of our product line. We know we’re capable of developing these modules and are waiting to see which ones would actually be consumed before choosing which ones to invest our energies into. We will also have an opportunity to gather feedback about the topics we offer, whether or not they resonate with our audience, and what other topics we haven’t considered that may be worthwhile investing in.
We have a tight deadline to ‘upskill’ (I truly hate this word…) so many people. If we were to wait to go to market until after we develop a complete programme, we would almost certainly have run out of time and money, and therefore have wasted the investment our client is making. Our scope is flexible, and that’s why we’re using agile principles to guide how we develop this programme. So far, we only have a few people interested in pursuing this kind of training with us, and if we can deliver good quality and valuable modules to them, then there is the hope that word will spread and more people will come to learn from us.
So now we know what we think we’ll be able to offer, we have to make some decisions about our first ones. We have little data on the few early bird sign-ups, but we do know that the only common factor is that they all work at (and not for) the same organisation. Our assumptions here can only be that starting with the broadest topics makes the most sense. We plan on creating a track to contemplate the underlining philosophies of the agile manifesto, and another to explore the scrum guide and learn how to implement scrum. It makes the most sense to us to start on these tracks because one will help guide people in making more agile decisions in their work, and the other will help them restructure their teams and their work in ways that support using the manifesto as a guiding light.
Our assumptions don’t end there, however. We hope that during the delivery of these early modules, people will express their interest in some of the topics that we lightly touch upon, and we can then develop modules that explore those topics in greater detail. I’m genuinely looking forward to finding out which track we will develop to the point of completion first. What will be the first certification we will hand out, and who will we hand it out to? I also wonder about the tracks we’ll drop due to lack of interest and the ones we haven’t even thought about yet.
It’s quite an exciting project to work on and an exciting point to be involved in. This is a highly influential time, and the impact of what we do here and now could be felt for anything from years to centuries. Restructuring an entire organisation through education, and allowing the current members of the system to design their own way there.