Agile Principles for Learning Design

We hear a lot about being Agile. We also talk, often amongst our industry colleagues, about the importance of agility. But do we really know what it means for Learning professionals to "be Agile" or "be agile"? First, I think it's important to look at what Agile Development and agile really are. I worked with the engineering team at Yahoo in 2011 when they were moving toward Agile Development. But to do that, they had to first be agile. So we must first understand the difference between lowercase-a agile and uppercase-A Agile (with thanks to Raymie Stata).

Lowercase-a agile

Businesses have a fundamental need to grow and in today's business climate they must grow rapidly to remain competitive. This often means growth in users, engagement, and revenue. The Internet is a fast-moving medium in which rapid growth is fueled by product and service innovation. This means that companies must not only rapidly grow, they must also grow through innovation (you probably hear a lot about Digital Transformation -- which is basically growth through innovation). Companies must drive competitive innovation through relevance: and to be relevant, they must furiously focus on delivering deep value to their customers. Additionally, they must drive sustainable cost-efficiency for the long-term. This is what lowercase-a agile means for business: driving rapid, sustainable growth through continuous innovation. How do you transfer this meaning to your Learning organization? Ask yourself these questions:

1. Do you have a simple, iterative and incremental design and development process that supports how your business conducts their product and/or service development?
2. Do you have access to the product teams and stakeholders that provide you information on development as it occurs?
3. Are you organized in a way that enables you to be embedded with the product teams you support?
4. Does your current process enable quick responses to stakeholder or customer needs or is it rigid and over-structured making it difficult to adapt to changing circumstances?
5. Is your design truly meeting the needs of your consumers or is your focus on the actual documentation of the product/service you're building the training for?
6. Are you able to accept changes late in development? Can you quickly adjust your design to meet changing product requirements?
7. Are you able to deliver smaller, more valuable learning experiences over longer, more structured courseware?

If you can answer yes to these questions, you can call yourself an agile team. You're potentially ready to apply the Agile Development methodology in your Learning design and development.

Uppercase-A Agile

Wikipedia defines Agile Development as “a group of software development methodologies based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration among self-organizing, cross-functional teams.” The focus is on software development, and it’s a challenge to link the definition back to cost-effectively sustaining a high rate of product innovation. It's also a challenge to link it to Learning design and development. The term Agile Development was coined during a workshop in 2001, at which leading practitioners of “lightweight” development processes came together to compare notes. These practitioners articulated twelve principles of Agile Development which express the true meaning of Agile Development and lead to cost-effectively sustaining a high rate of product innovation. In short, Agile Development is meant to:

1. Place individuals and interactions over process and tools
2. Focus on working software over comprehensive documentation
3. Place customer collaboration over contract negotiations
4. Be able to quickly respond to change over following a rigid plan

The 10 Agile Development Principles for Learning Design and Development

To pivot to the Agile Development methodology, consider these revised Agile Development Principles specifically adjusted for Learning design and development:

1. We will deliver learning solutions quickly. (And yes, you get to define what "quickly" means based on the needs of your business).
2. We will work collaboratively with our business partners and encourage continuous interaction with them during the product lifecycle.
3. We will give our team the resources they need and the autonomy to make decisions to move projects forward.
4. We will promote sustainable development by setting up an environment that predicts the learning needs of our audiences and the business.
5. We have a strong perspective on what types of learning interventions are necessary to drive business value.
6. The primary measure of our success is based on delivering our audience learning experiences they can use and succeed with.
7. We commit to focusing on technical excellence and good instructional design.
8. We embrace simplicity and will focus only on what needs to be done in the most efficient manner possible.
9. We believe the best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
10. We will, at regular intervals, reflect on how to become more effective and then tune and adjust accordingly.

What's Required to Apply the 10 Principles

You must first have an agile mindset, and then be willing to accept the Agile Development Principles before you can truly apply the Agile Development methodology to Learning. And you only want to go there if it meets the needs of your business and consumers. You will also need to alter your work values. You will need to:

• Be committed to the principles themselves. Drive this commitment across the team and ask each member of the team to commit.
• Be sharply focused on applying these principles, understanding when they're not working and then make the necessary changes.
• Be open to input from everyone on the team and encourage everyone to openly work together to overcome obstacles.
• Be respectful of everyone's contribution and take the time to ensure all team members operate with respect for each other.
• Be courageous in applying the principles to the work and also in welcoming co-workers into the Agile Development process.

For true Agile Development to take hold for your team, you must recognize that there's no traditional Boss anymore. There are only teammates. Agile Development is ALL about teamwork. You must all work with a shared vision, you must all be responsible for the output/outcome, you must all interact with stakeholders and customers to define the product, and during a review, you must all accept or reject the iteration. Are you willing to truly apply Agile Development to your Learning team? The first step is to understand how to be agile, and then to make the decision if you can or need to apply the Agile Development methodology.