Agile Conditioning

Visionpace recently conducted another ScrumMaster Certification course and a few of our associates participated as well students from other organizations. (If you’re not familiar with the course check http://www.visionpace.com/developereducation.html.) The Visionpace folks have been engaged in agile development (XP and Scrum) for anywhere from one to three years as developers. This training allowed them to consider the agile development from the Scrum Master perspective. As such, it generated a lot of good conversation over some recent lunches.

One such topic that I think is universal to all learning, is that one can’t go to a training session and then expect to be fully proficient at the end of the training. Nor can one go to training and not use the skills presented in the training, and expect to retain them. In order to become proficient in a new skill set (be it a new language, new technology, new art form, or new project management approach) one has to continuously use, hone and train with the skill set.

This was the topic of conversation recently. It seems that a lot of people expect that if they send a person to a class and\or have them read a book that they will then be an expert in the topic overnight. (Does this sound familiar? “Jetson, we’ve been hearing a lot about agile development lately and figure if it can work at Chrysler it can work at ACME Sprockets. Attend this three day seminar next week and be ready to tell the Board what we need to do when you get back.”) It’s not unlike your boss telling you to go home over the weekend and read a white paper about swimming and spend a day or two at the pool swimming laps because you’re going to be the captain of the new company swim team. In order to be proficient at anything, you have to train. You have to condition yourself for the skill and continually build on it.

At Visionpace we strongly believe in the phrase ‘Inspect and adapt’ as part of this continual conditioning. Collectively and individually we look at our project and the associated process to see what we’re doing well and what we need to address. We have regular reviews and sessions to help each other get better at being more productive team members.  This is good because it allows us to review and reinforce our actions and processes. Over time we find the results continually improve and as one would expect proficiency increases. A simple concept, that often time is overlooked in organizations.