Let’s take a stroll down memory lane of your Agile journey. You may recall a moment when it became clear that Agile adoption required more than just “Agile 101” training.
In fact, successful Agile adoptions followed a familiar three step process:
1. Awareness and training
2. Follow up, leadership support, coaching and mentoring
3. Measurement, assessment, and adapting to local context
BDD Jumpstart training takes a lesson from Agile adoption. Jumpstart focuses on adoption and real-world problems. Still, each environment has unique challenges, many of which are not evident until applying BDD to the work.
These problems can range from technical, tooling, process, organizational, cultural, and people. Our coaches have worked through these challenges before and can help your teams with all of them!
There are two well-known options for coaching.
Option one, you hire an experienced consultant to observe, coach, and mentor your teams. This is effective, but can get very expensive.
External consultants need some time to learn your organization. You have to pay them for this time, but it's necessary for them to be effective.
You also have to pay the consultant to observe, coach, and mentor each of your teams. This works well when running a pilot program or ramping up a couple more teams.
It gets very expensive in an enterprise or even departmental adoption. When you have a lot of teams, the cost becomes a focus. Often, this results in less coaching and support and sub-optimal adoption.
Option two is to develop the coaching expertise within your organization. This can take years and the lessons are hard won. They call it the school of hard knocks for a reason.
Learning on your own comes at a high cost, even though the cost is usually hidden. Lessons learned leave scars in your applications. We call this technical debt. It is expensive to remove and even more expensive to live with.
Our Enterprise Adoption program offers a third option.
We train and mentor your key employees to provide coaching. We also have regular calls with your employee coaches to answer any questions. We guide your people every step of the way as they guide your BDD adoption.
We've found the contextual awareness of employees allows them to start fast. The impact of internal coaches also lasts longer. This is because your teams already trust your credible internal technical leaders.
As a bonus, you get coaching and support at a fraction of the cost of hired consultants. Longer term, you develop coaching skills on staff that can help with future adoptions.
Owning the change yourself instead of outsourcing it to consultants reduces resistance. Combine that with your internal champions’ organizational knowledge, the Enterprise Adoption program is faster, less expensive, and more effective.
Conclusion
While adopting agile, your organization learned it's patterns for successful change. We harness that learning and train your people how to change the organization again with BDD.
This allows you to own the change to BDD, avoid the detours of your agile adoption, and skill up for future change.
Schedule time to talk with us. We will personalize an Enterprise Adoption Program to get your teams moving faster.
