Agile methodology is popular with its’ iterative development approach for producing software features. Both in house development teams and software vendors have been adopting the agile methodology to improve their ability to provide new features to their users and customers. The agile method also produces an increased number of software versions where the development team delivers new features in shorter development cycles. The increased delivery of software versions has placed a higher demand on businesses to be more adaptive and responsive with their employee software training. To keep pace with the increased number of process changes, companies can follow an iterative training approach that is similar to agile development by adopting some of the agile values.
Working Employees vs. Documenting Training Courses
Agile development follows the principle of valuing working software over creating comprehensive design documentation. Before this methodology, design documentation sometimes had a higher priority than the software. With agile development, the knowledge basis is in the software code, and changes get communicated as user stories describing the new software functionality. By focusing on the software changes instead of additional documentation, there is faster delivery of working software. To become more agile with employee training, companies can adopt a similar principle of working employees (using the new software) vs. creating training documentation. Procedures are the knowledge basis for employee training similar to software code being the knowledge basis for development. With agile training, trainers can use these procedures as the knowledge resource for their courses. The goal is to get employees working with the software faster by focusing more on communicating the procedural changes for the software version.
Speed Up the Training Design
Procedure management applications are more flexible and responsive in communicating new business changes to employees than creating training documentation using Word or PowerPoint. The following is a summary of two areas where training design can be complete faster:
1) Faster identification of tasks impacted by the software changes: the application maintains a relationship between software features, task instructions, and employees. This provides the functionality that speeds up the ability to identify both the tasks and employees affected by the software changes.
2) Improved communication of changes: the application provides a feature for a lightweight summary of the tasks affected by the changes. It highlights the impact of these changes, communicating them to the stakeholders and end-users during the planning process.
Procedure Management Guides Implementation Planning Efforts
Procedure management applications provide a workspace for team members to collaborate on how to use the new software features. As the team is working, they are updating the procedures with their decisions. This iterative process can be repeated until all of the desired changes are made and captured in the procedure management application.
The documentation process is streamlined and focused on communicating the impact of new software changes to employees, reducing the cycle time of implementation and training. At the time of the software roll-out, employees are notified about the latest procedures so that they can get up to speed with the new information. The procedures in the application are up-to-date and in a ready state for the next software release.