Agile Training - Why Bother?

This is an article about a blog post I don't like. Here is one by Paul Dyson on Agile project management that I really do like. Why aren't many other people thinking so closely about what the project manager actually does?

Why Bother?

Why bother with Agile Training? Isn't it just a waste of time? When you search for "Agile Training Blog" using Google - one of the first posts that comes up is a three year old post on a dead blog (hey you Google boys - are you sure this is right?) claiming that Agile training is a waste of time. The gist of the post is that when you attend an Agile training course you're going to get one of two things for your money: either you'll get taken through all the Agile concepts or you'll be regaled with war stories of the trainer's Agile experiences.

Education Bad

The point of the author of the "Why Bother with Agile Training?" blog post is that either of these approaches is a waste of time. If the course is just a lecture that takes you through the standard Agile ideas and concepts, you could have just as easily read about these in a book. If the course is just a collection of war stories, the chances are that they aren't going to apply to your situation.

Wrong and Wrongerer

I don't agree with either criticism. It's always useful to have someone who understands the material to take you through it. There are a couple of aspects of Agile - stories, velocity - that in my experience people don't immediatiately "get". And the idea that you can't learn from other people's stories because they aren't in the same situation as you is just strange. How else could you learn most things? If someone tells you not to put your hand in the fire, because it burns, what do you do? Say to yourself? "Oh that was a completely different fire, not comparable to this fire at all. Ow! Ow! Ow! Don't just stand there! Call an ambulance!"

Can you Feel it?

But the most important reason why I disagree with this post is because I think there's a third kind of experience that you can get from training. An experience of what it feels like to do things in a new way. And that's why I work really hard to develop and improve the exercises that I include in my courses. Through the exercises, I want to give people an idea of what it actually feels like to take a brief for a project, break it into stories and then develop it iteratively, using time-boxed iterations. By the end of these exercises, there's a much better chance that they "get" what I mean by a story and have a feeling for how to calculate velocity and use it in future iterations.


Fire - like they say in the "War stories" - it burns. (Picture courtesy of . SantiMB .)

For further information, contact Mark@agilelab.co.uk (07736 807 604)