Turning into Mr T.
We all understand the importance of T-Shape(ness). Agile works best when we’re all dipping into each others territories and the lines between Product Owner, UX, QA, Front End Engineering and Design become opaque. In an effort to spread some X-Funk love here in Three Digital we decided to start running some sessions in our lunch hour to up-skill those that were interested in others area of expertise. We started off with Front End Engineering as it often seems to be a pain point here at Three so a few of us that have semi-decent Front End skills put on the first session as a test and learn.
How did we do it?
We’re fortunate at Three that we’re afforded a fair amount of autonomy but rather than seeking approval from the various departments within Three we decided to run the first session as an under-the-radar MVP until we’d proved the concept. The first thing to decide was:
What’s the goal of the course?
We decided the objective should be to teach anyone within Three (irrespective of job title, seniority or location) how to build their own fully functioning, live personal website purely for their own gratification.
Now we had the objective, we needed to decide on what the parameters were. We decided that the entire exercise would be self funded, would be run using existing equipment, would not need paid software, could be done with anyone with average computer skills but absolutely no coding experience.
OK cool, now we have our user group (call them proto-personas if you like), user stories and constraints.
The next logical thing to do seemed to be to pick a date for the first session to force us into a position where we got the ball rolling. Once we had a date in the diary we wrote the first 1 hour session (we didn’t need to do any more just yet as we wanted to treat session 1 as a test & learn). Then we started recruiting. We weren’t too worried about numbers for the first iteration, it was more important to get some learning under our belt and for those not comfortable in the lime-light, to build a bit of confidence.
Here’s a few pics:
Fast forward 3 months we’re now on our 3rd group of students for the beginner HTML & CSS course, we’ve started running an intermediate Front End course, have started running courses on confronting the fear of presenting and we’re about to start a Design course, an Insights and Metrics course and a UX course. We have over 80 people either completing a course or waiting to start one and have generally instilled a sense of fun and anticipation with our “corporate training”.
If there’s a moral of the story it’s that you don’t need big budgets, expensive trainers or buy in from the CEO to grow the knowledge and skill-set of your organisation. You just need to be a little pragmatic & determined, establish a tribe that believes what you believe and then fight to prove what you believe. I guess the same could be said of a lot of change :)
This was original posted on the Three-Digital blog which has sadly ceased to be, so I’m re-posting here:
