Agile is not exclusively code

Working on an agile project does not restrict the domain to code, but IMO can be embraced in any team effort with a goal in mind. In my interpretation, agile is embracing change and continuous improvement of team processes. So what is this all about?

Group Setup and Goals

We wanted to achieve the following: "aim to bring junior consultants up to speed with core knowledge and practical skills regardless of programming language or stack." In practice, we set out to have six workshops preceded by a presentation and prep questions before actually getting hands-on with the content.

So what happened was

After the first workshop retrospectives, a couple of things became clear:

1. Attendees felt a lack of time
2. Some parts were perceived as unclear or difficult
3. The skill range was not taken into consideration

Immediately, action?1.?was taken and we made our group sessions go from unfocused AA-style meetings into Q&A about the coming topic. This unlocked a lot more time and two weeks of letting concepts be internalized with the mentees before the workshop.

For?2.?-?"show me" sections were added where the participant could drop-down the answers in the actual workshop if they wanted to. Sort of like how I studied math by checking the answers and working my way backwards ??.

Finally,?3.?meant adding advanced tasks, with less description and guidance in favour of freedom of direction and end-state. E.g. in the "devtools" workshop, the advanced task was running a docker image of their choice and interacting with it, along with some suggestions.

There is a purpose with it (get to know and work with docker) but a lot more freedom in the actual content. The previous tasks were a lot more defined and linear.

Engaging retrospectives

We used a password-protected public Miro board and for each retrospective we tried mixing things up by doing different models. "Sailboat retro", "the 4 Ls", at the end of the day, they're all about listing pros, cons, improvement suggestions and potentially praise or something similar. So we made it our own by having a retrospective?In the Lands Between,?discussing how we should stay out of the rotten?Caelid Swamps,?and how the heck we could have reached?The Mountaintops?without a constant?YOU DIED?feeling. Yes I'm talking about 2022s game of the year: Elden Ring which I happened to play?a lot?last year. Great fun, both the retro and the game ??.

But how were we doing?

Half way through the competence group, a form was sent out which was a more private forum for each attendant, both mentor and mentees could answer different questions depending on their role. The intent with the form was to get hard data (closed questions graded 1-5) together with open-ended questions. All of that then was recently compiled so that we could keep making improvements.

Fin

A massive thanks to those involved with the group, both mentors, mentees, and the sparring partners in the Competence Lead group I had along the way. Couldn't have done this without you!