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7 Agile Practices to Leverage on your L&D Team
- Sophia Stone
- Nov 20, 2022
- 1 min read
As L&D organizations are evolving and trying to deliver greater value to learners, they've started borrowing Agile design practices from the software industry. In this article, I'll share some considerations for adopting Agile practices based on my experience having worked on both traditional and Agile teams.
What is Agile?
Agile is an iterative approach to project management that originated in software development. While Agile can take different forms, its four key values are to prioritize:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working products over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
In contrast to the traditional waterfall model, the Agile approach relies on short iteration cycles with high degrees of collaboration and frequent ideation and testing. The end goal is to produce deliverables faster and generate the best products possible.
What does Agile look like in L&D?
A pure Agile approach has not be popularized in L&D due to the nature of instructional design projects, where the requirements are based on learning objectives and often one designer is leading multiple projects simultaneously. However, there have been various attempts to incorporate Agile into hybrid instructional design methodologies, like the Lot Like Agile Management Approach (LLAMA) and Successive Approximation Model (SAM).
7 Agile Practices for Instructional Design
Here are seven practices your L&D team can use to leverage the benefits of Agile:
Scrum teams
Organize designers and other learning professionals into collaborative, self-organizing teams with a scrum master who facilitates the Agile process.
Sprints
Define a short, time-boxed period when your team will complete a set amount of work. Each sprint should include planning, development, testing, and a retrospective (more on that below).
Standups
Schedule brief, daily standups with your team to report on progress and issues that need to be resolved.
Retrospectives
Schedule a retrospective meeting with your team at the end of each week, sprint, or project to reflect on your work and identify ways to improve going forward as a team.
Kanban boards
Use a Kanban board to visualize your team's work, with cards representing work tasks organized into columns.
Validation testing
Involve learners and stakeholders early and often for validation testing. Use their feedback to iterate continuously on the learning experience design.
Minimum viable product (MVP)
Release learning experiences in stages. Deliver a minimum viable product (MVP)—or small, incomplete portion of the learning experience—to learners and get feedback to improve the experience.
Not sure which approach is right for your project?
While Agile has certain advantages, it isn't right for every project. You may find that taking a hybrid approach, or integrating a few Agile practices, can help you better accomplish your goals based on the characteristics of your team and project.
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