How do you train users to use products/systems developed under Agile methodologies?

[Sam Burrough]

More and more of our IT projects are moving to Agile, which I'm a big fan of, but it seems like there is very little written on the subject of how you effectively train people to use the end products, which of course are always changing.

Before you jump to share links to agile elearning methodologies, I'm not sure that is the answer. Again I'm a big fan of them and I think they work well when the project is the eLearning. But I'm struggling to see how you integrate that with an agile product development team.

It seems like you either need to have a trainer (for want of a better word) embedded in the team, but also different methods of instruction that don't rely on screenshots etc because the chances are the screens will have changed between the time you took them and the time the users see them. It also seems like the users themselves will need to develop an appreciation of what Agile means and become more comfortable with ambiguity.

So if you have any tales to tell I would be delighted to hear them!

Thanks 

[Sam Burrough]

So I managed to answer my own question with a little help from some lovely people at Ripple-Rock Consulting...

‘Non IT requirements’ should be collected as part of the user story mapping process with the IT and form part of the Backlog and Release Plan as with any other story. The Product Owner and the Scrum Master will then create an Agile Release Plan that will define when Items need to get delivered and any dependencies such as screens (for screenshots) being available.  This makes it clear to the teams the impact of further change.

 

Agile is incremental and Iterative and so further changing requirement driven by the business, will mean that any work done to date maybe subject to change.

 

Include any stakeholders or users as part of the team review process and look to back end the training when more levels of stability have been reached.

 

If the team are really sporadic with their changes, I would suggest there is a dysfunction there somewhere."

So there you go! If you are going to work with Agile teams to design training for their outputs, you may need to adjust the way you work, get involved right at the start during scoping and play an active role throughout each cycle.

Hope that's of some use to someone, it certainly helped our team.