The Six Step Process applies after the project has been given the 'green
light' to proceed and usually, as part of the project's (people) resource planning.
Imagine you are briefing an external consultant. He or she needs
to discover what the project is about, what its business drivers and deliverables
are. There may be technical
issues that need to be overcome, legacy applications to be included and operational constraints involved. For applied learning projects, it's important to describe the backgrounds and skill levels of the development team and their project managers.
This step is about discovery and scope, so it's perfectly reasonable to be expansive
initially, discussing 'nice-to-haves' items as well as the 'must-haves', before getting specific
and defining which can be realistically accomplished and in what time scales.
Typically, all parties will have something to contribute. Whether it's a training
consultant, project manager or developer that's being briefed, they should have
plenty of experience from which to draw ideas. External experts should be able to
transfer techniques developed on previous assignments and relate them to a new project,
so expect some good ideas at this stage. Listening-in to a Step 1 meeting, we might hear dialogue like this:
Tip
A great way of documenting Step 1 is to create a mind map® of what's covered.
Mind
maps® work the same way we humans do, so provide an easier and more natural way to
capture information. By using colour or symbols, such a map can help differentiate
differentiate the various phases of the project too.
Client: “We’re a financial software house; we provide risk assessment systems, mainly to merchant banks. We have 12 developers who we want to move from ASP, Java and C++ onto the .NET platform using C#”
Consultant: “This is a similar situation to another company for whom we recently worked. Because the developer’s backgrounds are rather different, we decided to hold a rapid conversion to C# event for the Java and C++ people, which included advanced programming topics that they would be familiar with, but demonstrating the .NET way. These people became very productive, very quickly.”
Client: “What about the ASP folk? We want them to build the Web pages in ASP.NET”
Consultant: “They'll learn ASP.NET, but because they are working solely in the presentation tier, it’s appropriate for them to learn using the specific architecture for this project rather than expecting them to learn everything and potentially getting it wrong later.”
Client: “Perfect. I’ll put you in touch with our .NET architect and you can agree the architectural details for the training.”
Cautionary note: Although the Six Steps are always used, every project is different
and the process is always
customised to suit the project, therefore, each step becomes different for
each project.
