Scaled Learning
Net Objectives can help you grow hundreds, even thousands, of your talent.
Overview
As Agile has spread, the need for Agile training has increased exponentially. It has reached the point that many people are trained and/or coached with little experience. Using outdated training techniques just adds to the problem.
For large companies, the biggest training and coaching expense is at the team level - both for coaches and for teams. The team agility approach required at the team will be somewhat similar regard of the approach for the organization. A blend of Scrum and Kanban us usually appropriate. Scrum works well for development teams while Kanban is great for shared services, ops and maintenance. It's actually best to provide training that allows the teams to pick their own approach because they best understand what they need.
Although Lean, Agile and Kanban have advanced significantly over the last decade, the approach for effective adoption has not. People are often brought up to speed through a combination of training and coaching that leaves out many critical aspects of team-agility – in particular, the ability to write small, well-scoped, clear requirements using Acceptance Test-Driven Development (note automating the tests is not a requirement for initial training, but being able to write the stories well is). Few courses have people write small stories from their own backlogs if they have them or to create the backlogs if they don’t. Learning best takes place on a person’s actual work.
Scaled Learning is both more effective and has lower cost
Scaled learning is the method by which hundreds, even thousands, of people can learn in a consistent way across an organization. Scaled learning takes advantage of the "flipped classroom" method where videos and written lessons are provided. Then, under guidance of a live instructor, students learn in peer-to-peer manner.
This provides:
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the ability to learn in a one's own environment
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learning over time
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opportunity to try things on their own
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learning with peers so that what's learned is readily applied in the work environment
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a support system after workshops
Net Objectives started building our scaled learning modules in 2014 with the idea that high quality, high volume, low-cost training was needed. Our expectation was that it would be of lower quality as the widespread belief is that nothing beats in person on-site training. But, in fact, the way most on-site training is done (PowerPoint slides and attention to things other than the participants' actual work) results in most of it 'bouncing' off.
Flipped classroom methods can be applied to classroom training for up to 100 people or to online training for up to thousands. Whether it is in classroom or online depends on the content being covered.
Net Objectives University
Affordable, scaled learning options from the industry thought leaders in Lean-Agile process and technical approaches for the sustainable realization of business value.