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How effective is scrum training via digital delivery?

Published on 31 January 2023

Written by Martin Hinshelwood

5 minute read

They offer very different experiences, each with their own set of unique pros and cons, but to answer the question simply, no, a live-online class is not as effective as in-person delivery.

In-person delivery offers:

Higher bandwidth.
More engagement.
More interaction between different people on the course.

That said, the live-online course is incredibly effective and offer their own unique benefits.

If you asked, which of the formats is better and which would you rather participate in, my answer would be digital delivery. Here’s why.

How effective is scrum training via digital delivery? Is it as good as the in-person courses?

Different Techniques

When I train, I use many different training techniques to help the material land and transform the delegate who is attending the course into a competent, capable agile practitioner.

I use ‘training from the back of the room’ techniques, I use ‘training from liberating structures’, and my own techniques developed over years of teaching, coaching, and mentoring others. Using those techniques, you can get 90% of the way you would if you were delivering in-person classes.

Added benefits of the digital space.

After almost three years of delivering live, online classes around the world, we are getting really good at optimizing technology and leveraging the digital environment to enhance the learning experience, especially with Scrum and Agile courses.

Multicultural experiences

I like training people who come together from all over the world.

The people who attend the course receive perspectives from all over the world and they also learn that the challenges they face are not so unique after all. The team over in Mumbai, India are facing the exact same challenges as the team in Adelaide, Australia.

There’s different cultural influences, different accents, and different applications that weave together to create a unique experience. Something which wouldn’t typically be present if someone attended an in-person delivery in Glasgow, Scotland.

As the group share their experiences, their interpretations, and their challenges, I notice that the learning experience is enhanced in ways I couldn’t imagine. As I answer each of the questions or help frame the learning in the context of the problem they pitched, each member of the course is learning on a completely different level than they would in an in-person environment.

Accessibility

I like digital delivery better because it is more accessible to people and invites greater participation.

I will have 10 people in the class from Africa, 5 people from all around Europe, a few people from the US, a few from Canada, and a few from India and Asia. People who wouldn’t ordinarily have been able to afford to travel, the accommodation costs, and other costs associated with being away from home for 4 days.

Someone in the US can start their morning with a 4-hour training session and follow the afternoon with their own work for the organization they serve. They can immediately apply what they have learned in the morning session into their afternoon work experience and see the benefits of what they have learned.

They also form different questions through the application experience which they can then pose in the next morning’s training session and receive immediate help and feedback to fuel the success of what they are attempting.

It’s literally a case of switching on your computer, activating your video and microphone, and logging into the digital platforms such as MIRO that we use to illustrate core elements of the learning. That’s it. Nothing more is required to get the training that you want and need.

Tapping into how teams currently work.

Since Covid, teams have been working remotely and connecting digitally around the world.

Yes, in the days pre-Covid, Agile was a strong champion for people working together, in a single place, rather than having distributed and remote teams around the world, but everything has changed and the technology has been developed to empower teams to work remotely.

Delivering a digital course taps into how people are currently working and slots in perfectly with how they interact and engage with others, in a learning and working capacity, via technology.

In addition to the learning experience, delegates are also being exposed to new technologies and digital platforms that can enhance how they currently work. Our course uses various platforms to collaborate with others, allow people to contribute their thoughts and ideas, and map out what their concepts are for others to explore and interrogate.

I find that people are blown away by the tools and are keen to integrate them into their current array of tools. The course teaches them how to use those digital platforms effectively, and how to collaborate with others using those digital platforms, and so people walk away from the experience with a new set of skills and a greater ability to cocreate and collaborate with others.

It’s very cool.

So, in theory, an in-person is marginally more effective than a live, online delivery but there are a great deal of benefits associated with digital delivery that you don’t get with in-person training.

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A really interesting question.

So, the question is, is digital delivery of training of live training classes as effective as in-person?

And there’s really, there’s the SE are just answering the question, right? Which is no, it’s not.

Right? I mean, that is ultimately in-person is higher bandwidth and it’s more engaging, right?

But the other part of the question is, which would you rather participate in and is it better? And I would say yes, it is better and I would rather participate in a digital delivery than I would in an in-person delivery.

And there’s a couple of reasons why.

So, I believe that using techniques, pulling in as many techniques as you can. I use techniques from Training from the Back of the Room, from Liberating Structures, and my own creations based on, you know, mushing those things together.

Using those techniques, you can get 90% of the way to an in-person delivery, right?

But in the digital space, you get some added benefits that I think we’re only just getting an idea of how big those benefits are.

For me personally, one is that I like teaching training courses where I have people in the training from all over the world.

I taught a training class today. I was teaching an APS today and I had one person from the US, a couple of people from Europe, some people from India, and somebody from Asia Pacific, right?

All in the one class, right? So you’ve got different accents, different understandings, different interpretations, different ways of looking at the world, all coming together and influencing and cross-sharing with each other.

Right? So there’s more of that.

I like digital delivery better because it is more accessible to people.

I’ll teach our training class and I’ll have 10 people book from Africa, right? I’ll have 10 people in the classroom from Africa, a couple of people from Europe, a couple of people from the US.

And that’s a training class. Those folks in Africa might not have been able to participate if we were doing it in person because it becomes so much more expensive.

Right? When you do it in-person class, you’ve got to have a room availability, you’ve got to get all the people into the one place, you’ve got to fly the trainer in and teach the class.

You can only, it only really makes sense if you do two full-day classes, which I don’t teach anymore because I don’t think they’re as valuable.

So you have to do two full-day classes because it’s not economically viable to do four half-days and you’ve got a trainer on site for four days, right?

And it gives that flexibility to the people in your team because you’re able to then do four half-days.

So they can take a little bit longer to absorb the information. They can absorb some information, try it in the afternoon.

We could do longer times, but that seems to work pretty well as well.

You don’t have to fly people around, you don’t have to pay all of those expensive things.

I just think it’s fundamentally better.

The other thing, the next thing that I think is hugely valuable is how are your teams currently working?

And that’s my kind of, that’s my mic drop one, right? Is if your teams are currently working in person and go to the office every day and sit five days a week together in the office and build products, then absolutely you’re going to get bigger benefits from flying a trainer in, having an in-person class, doing it over two days, and everybody’s working in the same way that they currently work.

But that’s not how most people in my sweet spot of industry, right, which is IT and software teams.

They’re virtual. They’re sitting at home. Even if they’re hybrid, right?

And everybody has to come in two days a week. Does everybody on your team pick the same two days to come in? No, they don’t, right?

So all the meetings, all of the conversations are all done on Teams or Zoom or whatever platform you’ve got.

They’re all online. So your teams have to figure out how to engage online, how to collaborate online, and how to discuss and get the most out of online because even your customers are not coming on site anymore to talk to your teams.

They’re wanting a virtual call, right?

So if I teach a training class over four half-days online, the students learn not just the content of the material but the meta information around how does Martin run a class online.

What are the tools and techniques that Martin is using to run the class so that we might be able to use them as well?

You know, I’ve heard of this Liberating Structures thing, but how do I do an impromptu networking with breakout rooms in Microsoft Teams?

Well, you’re going to experience that in my class and then you can go use that with your customers.

So I think they’re learning more than they would do in an in-person class because they’re learning about how to engage, how they work.

That’s my favourite part.

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