In our earlier posts, Pete and I defined a strategy designed to provide a “deep and wide” training and coaching model for a substantive enterprise agility rollout.
- Wide in that all practitioners and stakeholders receive some amount of agility training (see training post)
- Deep in that all development teams and role-based practitioners on those teams receive both in depth, role-based training (see training post) as well as consulting and mentoring support (see consulting post)
The “leverage” in this model comes from two elements:
- The long term, internal agile coaches are identified and under training and mentoring support from Day 1. This reduces the need for outside Scrummasters/consultants and the like to mentor the teams after their initial training
- The mentors, along with the coaches can deliver the first few agile team training courses to multiple teams. Since there are two instructors minimum in these first courses, (the outside mentor and the internal coach, who should have received substantive training prior to that time) they can generally effectively provide initial agile training to as many as 3-4 teams at one time. In addition, if those teams are building cooperative subsystems (components that need to work together to deliver a higher level functionality to the user), then the teams can also benefit from the shared learning environment, and plan for the integration scrums or release tracking mechanisms they will use to track release level progress over time.
Scaling Software Agility 