188体育

Training and coaching will give you the basics of some agile delivery techniques, but the real learning comes from putting it into practice.

It鈥檚 also important that your team and organisation鈥檚 culture is set up to support learning and experimenting.

Civil Service Learning

If you鈥檙e a civil servant, you can also find agile and digital training courses through .

Agile training for delivery managers and scrum masters

There are many different approaches to agile delivery management, so it鈥檚 good to learn a number of tools and techniques. You should also strengthen your understanding with independent learning and doing.

You should consider your own learning needs before booking a course, but it鈥檚 helpful to learn about:

• specific frameworks and methods: start with lightweight frameworks and methodologies such as Scrum, Kanban and extreme programming
• more specific practices such as agile user stories, agile estimating, agile planning and managing teams
• softer skills, such as workshop facilitation, coaching and motivating teams

Agile training for other team roles and stakeholders

If you need to find out more about agile and how it relates to your role, book a course that gives you an introduction to agile and covers its benefits. Make sure that it鈥檚 a course that covers more than one method or framework.

Agile coaching

Part of a delivery manager or scrum master鈥檚 role is to be an agile coach, training the team, organisation and stakeholders in the benefits of agile working.

Book agile coach training

If you鈥檙e a civil servant, find and book an agile course through .

Hire an agile coach

Sometimes it can be helpful to bring in an agile coach, especially in an organisation new to agile, where an agile coach can:

• train teams and organisations in agile working
• help organisational change
• help stakeholder engagement

You can .

Learn from other teams

You can learn a lot by watching other people practising agile techniques in your organisation or in other government organisations.

Ask an agile team if you can sit in on their planning, review and retrospective meetings.

There are communities of practice for all agile disciplines where you can find teams and people.

Bring knowledge into your team

It鈥檚 important to bring knowledge into your team, especially from external contractors, for example by:

• shadowing
• pairing
• mentoring

When you hire contractors and suppliers, you should make sure they鈥檙e prepared to do this.

Shadowing

Try to spend some time working with people who use agile. This will give you a better understanding of how they solve problems and use agile methods.

You could invite speakers to share their experiences with you and your team and discuss your ideas with them.

Pairing

Pairing comes from the term 鈥榩air programming鈥� in , but is just as relevant for all types of work and job role.

During this practice 2 people will sit together to work on the same thing at the same time. One person is writing the code or doing the task, and the other is observing and giving input. The benefits of working in this way are:

• better quality of work
• better communication among team members
• you learn hands-on how something is built and why decisions were made

Pairing can rapidly increase individual and team learning.

Mentoring

This works by pairing a new or less experienced team member (mentee) with someone with more or different experience (mentor). There is an ongoing relationship where the mentor:

• regularly meets with the mentee
• is freely available for advice and coaching
• allows the mentee to shadow and attend networking opportunities

Find support and share ideas

A fundamental principle of agile is finding things out for yourself and sharing knowledge.

Part of this is by asking questions and visiting other teams. But you can also gain more knowledge through learning by:

• joining cross-government digital communities
• attending events and networking
• reading widely (including blogs)
• coaching others and sharing your knowledge

Networking and events

Networking is a useful way of learning. You can close to you or you can start your own.

Blogs

There are many blogs and blog posts about agile and lean techniques, for example:

• by Emily Webber
• by Abisola Fatokun
• by Matt Jukes
• by Myles Jarvis collects together many more recommended blogs, articles and learning resources.

Digital teams in government also publish blogs that can give you real examples of a particular agile team or challenge, for example:

How to start out

The phrase 鈥榝ail fast鈥� is often used in an agile context, especially when building software.

While failure can be seen as a negative thing, the point is that you鈥檙e detecting problems as early as possible.

Take a project that you鈥檙e working on and start to apply agile techniques to it, then improve on them as you go.