How do you effectively scale skill-based, quality training across your organization?

Over the years, I’ve experimented with different ideas/models to scaling skill-based training across an organization. In the last 4 years, I’ve pretty much settled down on the following model. Its very useful when mentoring teams on skills like Test-Drive-Development (TDD), Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), Product Discovery, Writing User Stories, Evolutionary Design, Design Patterns, Problem Solving, etc.  I’ve successfully implemented this model at some very prominent fortune 500 enterprises.

* This model assumes that the potential trainer has first-hand working experience on the subject to be trained on. Also we assume they have the basic skill required for effectively delivering any training. We are mostly focusing on building on those 2 basic skills to help them deepen their subject matter expertise and enable them to effectively impart their knowledge.

I curious to know what other models have worked for people and if anyone else has tried this model?

How different is Counseling from Coaching?

Definition: the provision of assistance and guidance in resolving personal, social, or psychological problems and difficulties, esp. by a professional.

While the approach might look very similar, there are 2 key differences:

• Generally people go for Counseling when something is bothering them. So counseling typically focused on trying to find the root-cause of something that occurred in the past. While coaching is mostly focused on achieving a goal/skill in future.
• Counseling can also be used when the person is not really in a mental state to accept coaching.

What about Consulting?

Definition: A senior person in a professional or technical field, engaged in the business of giving advice to others working in the same field.

In my experience, consulting is at a whole different level. Typically as a consultant, I use coaching skills to gain deeper understanding of the situation/context and thus discover the real problem/s, which would help us co-create an agenda/plan to resolve the problem/s. This agenda/plan might consist of more coaching, training and/or mentoring. Its also important to note that sometimes, since the consultant is a subject matter expert, a consultant might be called in to just give their advice or do actually do the work for the client. In the second case, the consultant might not using coaching, training or mentoring at all.

Recently I’ve been getting a lot of request for Agile Training and Consulting. Unfortunately the expectations from the training are not clear for me. Most people approach me saying, “we want a TDD training” or “we want a Project Management training“. Once I start talking to them & their team (or even worse sometime during the training), I realize the topic we’re discussing is not their biggest issue. I get a feeling that most organizations have not done their homework to figure out what they really need and how they should go about it. They might have heard somewhere that ‘blah’ will help them and they want to jump on it.

Few months ago I started doing readiness assessments before my trainings. (I’ve also started doing assessments after my training so see if the training was effective.) But I have realized the assessment is not enough. So I’ve started asking the following questions even before the assessments:

• What kind of issues your organization is facing currently and do you think Agile will help you? If yes, why so?
• What is the current strength of your development team? How experienced is the team with software development? Does your team understand all aspects of software development?
• What is the current process you follow? In other words, from the inception of an idea to the delivery of the same, what are the various steps and people involved?
• What is a day in life of a team member (one per role please)?
• How do your stakeholders (including customers) perceive your team/organization? Currently how do you gather feedback from them?
• How would you rate the technical know-how of your team? Are they able to quickly resolve technical challenges and respond to changing priority of the business?
• Is your team/organization open to trying out things that might seem non-intuitive/illogical? For Ex: Letting the requirements evolve during the project, not freezing them? Letting tests drive your design?
• And so on …

Luckily a lot of organizations don’t get back to me with answers for these questions. This is really good for me, because this acts as a filtering criteria. I feel I would have wasted my time training/coaching this team. There are others who are in much more need and are more receptive to what I’ve to contribute.