“Go-Wide” with Targeted Self-Learning Resources: the Key to Effective Agility Enablement
Many organizations that have adopted Agile delivery practices, or are in the process of doing so, wrestle with a foundational question:
“How can I help my teams move up the Agile curve as quickly as possible while keeping everyone aligned?”
The need to move quickly is clear. We are all challenged to “Do More with Less” and deliver high-impact products and services faster. As a result, many organizations take a “Ready, Fire, Aim” approach to introducing Agile to their teams, with mixed results.
The second part of the question is equally important: how to adopt Agile in a way that aligns practices to increase value, quality, and predictability rather than hindering them.
Learning and Internalizing Agile Practices
Targeted, curated self-learning solutions can play a large role in solving these challenges. Few organizations have enough experienced Agile coaches, and aligning practices across multiple coaches can be difficult. Continuous improvement often exceeds an organization’s capacity for high-touch enablement. Furthermore, teams need to learn different skills at varying levels of maturity.
AgilityInsights® has spent the past decade accelerating our customers’ Agile journeys and helping them optimize the value of their Agile practices. One key takeaway from this process is that for organizations to achieve higher levels of agility, they need to act, think, and interact in fundamentally different ways. It’s not enough to simply “Do Agile”; organizations need to “Be Agile.”
The Importance of Curated Self-Learning
We recommend investing in targeted, highly curated self-learning resources. These resources should be easily accessible to team members at any time, and in formats that suit their learning preferences. Effective Agile enablement strategies should include training and resources that are:
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Based on proven, applied best practices (avoid heavily theoretical approaches)
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Multi-modal (articles, videos, e-books, online simulations, etc.)
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Curated to fit your culture and needs, with a mix of industry resources and company-specific content
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Offering team-based, one-on-one, and self-learning resources
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Customized to your specific tool-sets where possible
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Aligned with coaching and continuous improvement strategies to ensure team members focus on the right areas when they’re ready
Bringing Recommendations to Life with the Growth Portal
At AgilityHealth, we’ve created the “Growth Portal” to bring these recommendations to life. The portal provides focused overviews of best practices, key “Watch-Outs,” customizable recommendations, easy-to-consume videos, and profiles for internal and external coaches. Teams that need high-touch support can benefit from these resources. All of this is fully customizable for each client and integrates with the AgilityHealth Measurement and Continuous Improvement platform.
Our goal is to offer clients an easy-to-use solution for progressing up the Agility curve in an aligned and cohesive way. Regardless of the approach you choose, the key is to make it user-friendly, tailored to your culture and needs, and connected to a measurement strategy so you can assess the effectiveness of your efforts.
Additional Resources
By Jason Molesworth, Enterprise Business Agility Strategist at AgilityInsights
Photo by Sridhar Gupta via Unsplash