Having made the case for the change to Agile, communicating when the change would take place and how it might affect both the organization and the individuals, the next step was to ensure that all of the team members had the tools that they would need to implement this new approach. This was accomplished by ensuring that everyone in the organization was trained in the agile methodology.
A vendor was commissioned and the leadership team spent weeks describing the culture of our company, the nature of our customers and the temperament of our staff to the coach who would be delivering the training. The last thing the leadership team wanted was an “off-the-shelf” class on agile. We felt that if agile was going to be successful at DTCC, the training needed to be tailored to our specific needs.
Since this was (as far as we knew) the first time agile would be applied to the development of learning solutions, DTCC Learning leadership wanted the training to contain examples that were specific to what we did, not some general and vague academic exercise. The vendors assured us that they understood the nature of the work that we did and that by the end of the three-day session the team would be well prepared to begin using agile on their current projects. The leadership team was especially confident since one of our colleagues had implemented agile at two other companies and had previously worked with the vendor.
Special care was taken to ensure that the team members in the various geographic locations would have a good experience. Rooms with multiple HD cameras and high-powered microphones were secured. A test walk through on the Friday prior to the training was undertaken. Everything was in place for a successful session … then everything went wrong.
We found out that the rooms that we tested and thought that we had reserved were actually scheduled to be used by the COO for a town hall meeting. This left the team scrambling to secure alternative rooms and equipment. Even worse, just two days before the training was scheduled to take place the vendor informed us that the coach who had spent so much time understanding our organization, culture and workflow had a family emergency and would not be able to deliver the training. A backup trainer was provided instead. The real world exercises and examples were now a thing of the past.
These misfortunes resulted in the team spending three days in suboptimal facilities receiving an academic off-the-shelf lecture on Agile. As Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “Plans are useless, planning however is invaluable.” The preparation that took place to prepare for the training session allowed us to avert what might have otherwise been a catastrophe. In my next post, I’ll cover what took place that allowed us to avoid failure and what we learned in the training session.
