Call for Participation - XP 2010

I'm speaking at the 11th International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP2010
Dates: 1-4 June 2010, Trondheim, Norway
Early registration deadline: 24 March 2010

XP is a leading international conference on agile methods in software and information systems development. XP 2010 will bring together software and information systems professionals, both researchers and practitioners, to discuss the latest trends, applications, and theory, share experiences, and reveal new research results in agile software development.

XP2010 features a full four-day program of up to nine parallel tracks with Tutorials, Workshops, Experience Reports, Research Presentations, Invited Industry Talks, Lightning Talks, Open Space, Posters, and a Doctoral Symposium

This year's keynote speakers are:

Scott Page (University of Michigan Ann Arbor): Leveraging Diversity in Parallel: Perspective, Heuristics, and Oracles

David Anderson (David J Anderson & Associates, Seattle, Washington): Catalyzing Lean: Building a Limited WIP Society in Your Organization

Bjørn Alterhaug (NTNU) & John Pål Inderberg (NTNU): Improvisation: Between Panic and Boredom Perspectives on teamwork, dialogue and presence in music and other contexts

XP2010 will be held in Trondheim, which is Norway's third largest municipality.  Trondheim is a Norwegian center of education, technical and medical research with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and SINTEF located in the city. NTNU has about 25,000 students. The conference will be at the Rica Nidelven hotel. On the riverbed floor of the hotel you will find the conference section with airy meeting rooms, all with wireless internet access, natural daylight and a view of the Nidelven river.  A thousand years ago the Viking King Olav Tryggvason sailed up this river before founding his seat of government in Trondheim.  For the fourth year in a row the Rica Nidelven Hotel has been presented with the award for Norway's best breakfast. Over 400 hotels in Norway compete annually for this award, which is judged by a panel of top chefs from Norway and Twinings.

For an overview of topics and presentations, please see the conference program at http://xp2010.org/.

Innovation in the Enterprise -- is too much experience a good thing?

From Wikipedia: 
Nan-in, a Japanese master , received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.
Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring.
The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"
"Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"

I've been thinking about this for a few days -- does increasing experience in a company eventually stifle innovation? Why do younger, smaller companies seem to innovate more than large organisations with years of experience?

I've often felt that when a company is young, there are a lot of people with less experience who usually jump at most new ideas. There are those with a vision for the company that support these new ideas. Yes, there are pragmatists, conservatives and skeptics who may not be as gung-ho about new ideas, but in the initial days of the company, they're outnumbered by the enthusiastic lot and eventually they convert. It seems as if ideas flow in a viral fashion in these organisations.

Fast forward a decade and a half and a lot of the innovators are now grizzled professionals. The visionaries have learned from their mistakes and are more risk-aware. Yes, there are new innovators, but because of the shift of the original enthusiasts, the company now has a larger number of people with their own set ideas of success and with a strong criticism for every new idea. They've got experience to know why specific ideas will fail, they know that they'd rather not experiment and invite risk! As it turns out, new ideas get beaten down even as they're mentioned. People spend so much time trying to justify their ideas, that when it's time for implementation, they've lost all their steam. As a consequence, innovation suffers.

I have seen this phenomenon myself, but I don't know what organisations do to get out of such situations. Any thoughts?

(Photo credit: london_ally under the Creative Commons)

No Collaboration without Colocation? Maybe you're not 'Agile enough'!

As I await my flight to London, a strange thought possesses me. How much of Agile is valid today? A lot of Agile practices are almost a decade old. Since then, the enterprise collaboration landscape has changed significantly, team dynamics have changed quite a bit and dare I say the market is a lot more mature, having been through two relatively bad periods. This has always made me feel that to be Agile, you almost need to be 'not really Agile'. After all, the dictionary meaning of 'agile' seems to be:

agile |ˈajəl|
adjective
able to move quickly and easily : Ruth was as agile as a monkey | 
figurative his vague manner concealed an agile mind.

Well if that's the case, I feel like it's almost outdated to believe that a lack of colocation has to eventually mean a lack of collaboration and communication. Well there's no doubt that a colocated team in a team room will most likely generate great discussion, that said we've got technology today that can simulate team room like environments even without having people colocated. I say that a truly Agile team is so passionate about communication that they'll end up being resourceful enough to generate more communication in a distributed mode!

It's not that you can't communicate

The fact is that today, more so than ever, the world is really, really flat. The notions of distance are almost becoming irrelevant with the advent of what some people are calling webvolution. Yes, there's not much one can do about 12 hour time differences. That being said, there's been significant advances in technology to ensure that if there's a fair overlap in timezones, teams can collaborate almost seamlessly without having to bother about colocation. Dinesh and I recently submitted a proposal to Agile 2010 to demonstrate how we're seeing teams adapt their way of working to ensure that distribution doesn't mean disaster! Here's a table from the proposal that indicates the various tool types that you have at your disposal to create rich communication within teams, distributed or not! Using a combination of enterprise social software and tools on the public internet, teams can actually make distribution seem much easier than we've traditionally made it out to be. Of course, there are some common sense considerations to distribution -- take a look at Mark Rickmeier's recorded talk for more information.

Tools - How?	Potential Implication - What?	Agile Practice - Where can this be used?
Blogs	Personal knowledge management, Learning and reflection, provides opportunity to convert potential ties into actual ties	Team knowledge bases. Organisation wide knowledge sharing. Iteration reports. Daily Handoffs. Project timelines
Wikis	Project/Product Documentation, Co-Authoring learning	Retrospectives, Negotiating Requirements/Stories, “Handovers” across time zones
Workstreams - Microblogging	Ambient Awareness - Who knows what?	Standups, Distributed Dev Huddles, “Handovers” across time zones
Social Bookmarking	Knowledge Sharing	Particularly in the area of cross-project knowledge sharing and organisational knowledge bases
Social Networking	Serendipity	Finding experts in the organisation, leveraging weak ties, building relationships with potential problem solvers
Prediction Markets	Crowdsource complex decisions/outcomes - Estimation, likely release dates,	Estimation, Release Planning (this is one which we’re yet to see in practice)
Idea Management Platforms	Ongoing improvement to practices	Brainstorming, Design decisions
Web Conferencing Tools	Distributed pairing/reviews/	Distributed Pairing, showcases, training, workshops, really all sorts of meetings
Virtual Worlds	Virtual Offices, Realistic distributed simulations, synchronous learning, shared workspaces	All sorts of meetings, team room, Retrospectives, (There’s a state farm case study for this)
Video Conferencing	Meetings	IPM’s, Retrospectives
Collaborative Software Development Environments	Contextual Collaboration (one-stop collaboration platform)	All kinds of practices, but particularly improving on communication and visibility.

You just need to communicate differently

Now you may argue that while the tools have been there for a while your mileage has been different. I don't deny that possibility. I don't even deny the fact that your communication may not have been as rich as what you've seen when you communicated face to face. This though, is not a problem with the tool -- it's a paradigm shift that we need to adjust to. Just like we say today, "What did we do before Google?" we will say in 2020 "What did we do before the social web?". The change is destined to happen -- but before that we need to adjust ourselves to the context of the platform. I relate this to how we change our communication in various cultural contexts -- a conversation on the streets in England is significantly different to a conversation on the streets of India. Similarly, we adjust our style of travel based on the context; we change our style of eating based on the context too. So why not think of communication in a similar manner?

Conversations are great, but think of the value a facilitative tool like Google Wave brings you. The collaborative nature of tools such as Wave ensures that people like me who have a loud voice and can be extremely overbearing don't get an opportunity to derail the conversation. As a corollary, people who generally take time to get their thoughts organised or those that are generally shy, have the opportunity to now make their point in peace. Now to make best use of the medium, you need to appreciate these advantages and commit yourself to the context. In a similar manner, I believe webinars are far more facilitative than a face to face classroom session. In classrooms, people have to hold on to their thoughts for the fear of disturbing the sage on stage. In webinars OTOH, people can air their thoughts freely and without reserve at any given time. Now you may not be able to talk face to face, but can you communicate better - hell yeah! Take a look at some of the webinars from the virtual, free LearnTrends conference last year, if you don't believe me. As I always say, "The social web is more facilitative than facilitation!". You can keep making the comparisions and I suspect that if you're fair, you'll reach the same conclusions.

The future is so bright, I should wear shades!

The coming years promise a lot in terms of enterprise collaboration. I was recently reading Karl Kapp and Tony Driscoll's Learning in 3D, and the way the world is progressing towards the immersive internet, it could mean great things for society in general. Better collaboration platforms will mean lesser travel and hence a smaller carbon footprint. The diminishing need for colocation will mean that working moms, people in underprivileged countries can work in the best firms without having to leave their homes -- a great diversity boon for the industry! The fact that people will be able to work from their homes means that companies can spend less money on facilities and channel saved funds towards better pay and new business -- good news for all of us! The future is very, very bright indeed!

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As a knowledge worker, the possibilities of the webvolution really excite me. I believe big things can happen if we can change our perspectives slightly. What do you think? Let me know by adding your comments to this post. Hope you enjoyed today's article!

3 Ways to Spice up Linear Navigation in Elearning

Who doesn't want to create engaging elearning? But when managing projects, you're often balancing time, cost, money, scope and team. Sometimes, the mix of these factors means that you end up having to design simple and quick, linear courses - where every learner moves along only one predictable path in the course. That said, I'm a big believer in doing more with less and today I want to share with you three ways to make the most of when you have to create courses using linear navigation. So without further ado, let's get going.

Tip #1 - Try a Webcomic Approach.

If you've seen the Google Chrome comics by Scott McCloud, you'll realise how powerful a medium the webcomic is. The reason why webcomics are so effective is because they not only simplify complex topics, but they also make these topics seem less intimidating. More importantly people are used to flipping pages in a comic and so linear navigation doesn't seem odd to your audience. So if you have an engaging story, a comic approach automatically draws your learners to click the Next button. I can understand that Scott McCloud's work can make you feel it's really difficult to do, but if you look at the video above, you'll realise that its quite easy to create comic scenes quickly, provided you have the right image repositories. I recommend the design comics toolkit and elearningart's character packs, to get you kick started with this approach. If you want a sketch like feel to the elearning art character packs, then take a look at this tutorial.

Once you've created your scenes, there's the question of integrating the visuals into a story line. If you want to use Powerpoint, then the above video can be a good starting point and you can then use Articulate Presenter to stitch together the elearning. If you want an online magazine style effect like in the video, then you could use a tool such as Issuu or Yudu. Now, I recognise that you'd love some inspiration to get started, so here are two webcomics that I really like:

• Secret in the Cellar by the Smithsonian Museum
• Telstra's 3Rs of Social Engagement (while this includes talking characters, remember that you can get them at a very low cost using Codebaby Studio)

Tip #2 - Use Effective Interactivity

A couple of months back I'd written a post titled "The tools don't matter, use your creativity". If you look at the example from that post, you'll notice that it's a fairly linear course, as is the original course by Kineo. That said, the use of effective interactivity makes both courses easy to get through. One of the reasons I'm a big fan of Articulate Studio 09, is that it puts the power to create effective interactivity in the hands of less skilled people such as me. Here are three of interactions from the rapid elearning blog, that Tom (by his own admission) built with very little effort:

• Mini Cooper - A replica of an interaction from Allen Interactions using Articulate Engage
• 5 Common Quiz Mistakes - A demonstration of quizzes using Articulate Quizmaker
• Ethics Refresher - an excellent example of how you can develop scenarios using only a form-based authoring tool.

Now before you started thinking of me as an Articulate salesman, let me tell you very frankly that I'm nothing but a very passionate user of the tools. And by the way, don't believe me - rapid elearning is no myth; take a look at the examples!

Tip #3 - Use the right Language

If you're on a really tight budget for the year (and yes, I understand because I've been there), then Articulate isn't your only option. Remember that you have some free options for linear elearning, in the form of the following tools:

• ExeLearning -to create HTML based elearning
• Udutu - the free, yet full-fledged authoring tool
• Xerte
• and CourseLab

5 ways to make linear navigation more interesting

View more presentations from Cathy Moore.

That said, one of the most underestimated tools for corporate elearning is Slideshare. If all you have is a well made presentation, then Slideshare is your way to convert it into flash based elearning. If you look at examples like this and this, you'll notice that indeed it's not impossible to create engaging, interactivity free elearning (yes, I classify that as elearning) without fancy tools. I've taken too much time to come to the point here though, but both these presentations are excellent examples of how to use language appropriately to create interest in linear courses. One of my favourite resources with tips to use language to create interesting elearning courses is the one above. Cathy Moore does a great job to illustrate how clever use of language can make your linear elearning course extremely interesting to navigate. So really my third tip includes all five of Cathy Moore's tips. Take a look through the presentation to know more!

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For today's post, I'd like to give away the course files for the example in Tip#2. You can download them here. I'm sorry I can't give you the comic from Tip #1yet, but I promise to make it available once I have the opportunity. It's my passion to try doing more with less, so this blogpost is quite close to my heart. How did you like the examples in today's post? What methods are you trying at work to ensure that you can make the most of your budgets?  I'd love to hear from you, so please feel free to add your thoughts to the comments section. Hope you enjoyed today's article.

Elearning on a Shoestring - Produce content in 10 hours, and a budget of $ 0.0

First things first. I could really get into trouble with my wife if she reads this post. Let me explain. I was having a conversation with one of my friends about elearning and the associated costs and I almost laid a wager to say that you could produce quality elearning in a relatively short time on a pretty low budget. Now this is something all of us (at least in internal teams) have had to go through haven't we? Someone comes to us with an urgent request for creating elearning and gives us all of $100.00 to work with! I've felt like 'old mother hubbard's bare cupboard' in such instances.

So, let's come back to my wife. I decided to take on the challenge and give myself 10 hours on a Saturday and a budget of $0.0 to build an elearning module. Obviously it's a bit of stretch to call my work top-class, but given the time-constraint I placed on myself, I'm happy to have a first-cut which I guess I can easily show to an internal client if necessary. Now if my wife was to know that I was doing elearning work in all the (long) breaks that I took yesterday, from helping her around in the house, from watching movies and from following the India-South Africa cricket match; she is going to be livid. So, you and I have a secret to keep. If we're agreed on that, then let's start breaking down what I did and how you can do some similar things.

Course Specifications

Sharing Effective Feedback by Sumeet Madhukar Moghe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.
Based on a work at www.learninggeneralist.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.learninggeneralist.com.

I decided to build a course on Effective Feedback because this is something I continue to need at work and is in line not just with some conference submissions I've been making, but also with a webinar I'm doing in April (more on this later). I don't consider myself to be a subject matter expert, but I guess it's a topic I'm fairly passionate about, so I played the role of the SME as well. A few more details:

Course Duration: Approximately 25-30 minutes
Tools Used: Articulate Studio '09
Course Location: You can access the course here and you can download the zipped, offline version here.
Development Time: 10 hours

How I Aggregated Content

Feedback

View more presentations from sumeet.moghe.

Given my time constraint, I decided that I was going to have to trim down my research in a big way. So I decided to repurpose some of the content I'd used in the past, to deliver face-to-face presentations and workshops. One of them is what you see above and the other is here. I also used a lot of Patrick Kua's writings, since I found his blogposts to be a very astute assessment of the skills behind effective feedback. That gave me a fair amount of existing content to repurpose and helped me move forward very quickly.

How I Designed the Course

I decided that I was going to keep my course navigation mostly linear. I also decided I wasn't going to do anything hugely fancy with the course. I took the approach of sketching out a few mockups (like the one above) using Balsamiq, to give me an idea of where I wanted to go with the course. I also did a few quick sketches on paper to draw out the flow of topics in the course. I must say, I could do some more work on the design and language, but I'm postponing that to another iteration. The key for me was that I didn't want to detail out every screen. The fact that I was using a rapid tool meant that if I had the general flow and navigation thought through, I could move through the development in a fairly quick, iterative fashion.

How I obtained Media Assets

Media assets for your course are always likely to put a drain on your budget and I had none! I decided to go cheap and use free media assets. Here's what I did.

• I did almost all of my graphics editing using Powerpoint. The only other tool I used, was the free application - Poladroid. It's quite easy to create vintage style polaroids using the tool, and it gave me an opportunity to have some fun along the way!
• I used the Design Comics toolkit for all the characters in the course. They come in various poses and are open-source, so you can choose to edit the SVGs if you choose.
• The other images are royalty free pictures from my favourite free-photo resources -- stock xchng and I also used some of my favourite Microsoft illustrations.
  
• Lastly, I used a snippets of a video from the Carnegie Mellon University free podcasts. It's that of my favourite speech ever -- Randy Pausch's last lecture.
• Lastly, I got my Artculate player skin free of cost from Kineo, for filling out a survey to support some of their research.

Myths about Rapid Elearning

So, with all that in place, I was able to put together this elearning module on feedback, which you're free to download and use for non-commercial purposes. My aim with this experiment was to bust some of the myths associated with rapid elearning in particular. I'm not going to say much more than what's on the link, but I do want to reiterate that Rapid elearning doesn't have to be CRapid elearning. Rapid elearning doesn't mean that the speed will kill your quality.

• It means that if you spend a reasonable amount of time designing and planning the right approach, you now have the tools to reach an implementation quickly.
  
• It means that you can go through several iterations of the course with your clients.
• It means that the cost of change for your courses remains low.
• It means that your dependence on programmers and costly tools remains low and you can empower your teams and SMEs through a familiar tool and familiar interfaces.
• It means that you can respond to your organisation's learning needs faster and effectively, as long as you have the willingness to put some thought into your design and learning strategy.

If your approach towards design remains sound, then coming up with something really creative isn't tough! Sometimes a little inspiration can help.

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What did you think of today's blogpost? Hopefully, you'll never have to build a course with no budget and with 10 hours to finish it, but my hope is that you can respond to similar situations with increased confidence in the future. My course is still a work in progress (and I can share the source files if you'd like), but I'd love to hear some feedback about that as well and maybe get some free QA! As always, your comments will help me in a big way, so please comment liberally on this post and drop me a line if you'd like. Till next time, ciao!

For heaven's sake, avoid Slideuments! Here's how...

If you've worked for half as long as me I'm sure you would have already noticed the incredible importance Powerpoint seems to assume in our corporate lives. I'm also sure that you've received dozens of .PPT reports, agendas, project charters and documents in your working life. So much so, that it doesn't even seem wrong anymore! Let's take a step back -- what kind of a tool is Powerpoint again? A presentation tool. And why are we using a presentation tool to create awful documents? In today's post I want to address the practice of slideumentation, while keeping in mind people's motivation when creating such artifacts. A few clarifications:

• Have I ever created a slideument? YES many times
• Do I work with people who create slideuments? YES
• Are people who create slideuments stupid? ABSOLUTELY NOT. On the contrary they're the most intelligent people you'll meet
• Does ThoughtWorks have slideuments? YES, we're not perfect, are we?
• Does this blogpost represent a ThoughtWorks viewpoint? NO, these views are mine and mine alone!

I hope that the FAQ ensures I don't lose any friends for writing this blogpost. With that said, lets proceed.

Why Slideumentation is just wrong!

A couple of days back I chanced upon this video. It's a fairly hilarious take on how to avoid slideumentation. Garrey Reynolds of Presentation Zen fame has said enough about why slideumentation is just bad, but let me give you my reasons of what I consider slideumentation and what I dislike about them.

"Slideuments are documents we create in a presentation tool. Slideuments are often created for a dual purpose -- to share over electronic media and to present in front of an audience. Often, we create slideuments only because it's apparently easier to create documents using slideware. In such cases, we don't even present the slideument. We only send it across over email or put it up on slideshare or discuss it at a table with our bosses."

I'm not going to define slideuments further -- I'm sure you get the idea. But as you may have noticed from my definition, we end up creating slideuments for two reasons:

1. We have slides that we need to present and also share with people who may miss the actual presentation
2. We wan't to quickly create a 'visually interesting' document using an easy to use interface.

Don't worry, very very smart people create slideuments. Hillary Clinton's one of them. So let me first tell you why slideuments are a bad thing in my opinion:

• If your reason is #1 (above), then remember that if your slides can stand without you, your talk is kinda redundant. You might as well save people some time by sending them an email, writing a nice document (I'll come to this in a bit) or by putting up a blog post! Remember that your audience can read faster than you and if your slide says everything you needed to say, then you're not being much of a presenter, I'm afraid.
• If your reason is #2, then you have plenty more reasons not to slideument:
  
  • Slideuments full of bullet points are documents most people will never read. Ask yourself -- how many such documents have you picked up and read from the first slide to the last?
  • Slideumented reports hide complexity. To be very frank, bullet points are nothing but headings for more detailed information. Slideuments generally include only these headings. What about the details? It's complexity that's hidden somewhere at the back of your mind. By creating a slideumented report of your work over weeks and months, you've stopped all of that information from becoming explicit. What would have otherwise been a table of contents is now a many page report. Needless to say, this is a recipe for disaster.
    
  • Slideuments encourage bad presentations. You might create the slideument only for a reading purpose, but someone is likely to use your slides and create 'Death by Powerpoint'!
  • Slides generally operate at a much lower resolution than documents. Slideumentation creates extremely low quality documents that generally don't portray your professionalism.
    

So, that's my case against slideuments. If you search for slideuments on Google, I'm pretty sure you'll see a lot more criticism.

3 Parts to a Presentation

So, if we're agreed that slides are slides and that they shouldn't be able to stand without our narrative, then where does all the valuable information go? Garrey Reynolds says that you should consider three parts to your presentation:

1. The Visuals: These don't have to be slides. You can do presentations in many different ways. If you do use slides however, they should contain simple visuals that explain the topic you're talking about at the time.
2. Your Notes: Of course, you need to have some notes handy just in case you miss a point here and there. All slideware tools have a notes section built in, where you can enter your notes about the topic on hand.
3. The Handout: This is where you can add additional detail. So if there's a complex chart add it in here. If you want people to refer your talk after it's over, then provide them a handout. Your handout should be able to live without you. Your slides should not.

I cannot possibly tell you all there's to know about presentations, inside this blogpost. So I strongly recommend that if there's only one book you read about presentations, please read Presentation Zen and start to follow the Presentation Zen blog.

Use a Word-processor for Documents, please

Now for the more difficult part - creating interesting documents. Now you'd think that this is a simple task, but apparently not. People seem to use Powerpoint as page-layout software more than a presentation tool. The pity is that the tool was never designed for the purpose and has some obvious failings when it comes to dealing with large amounts of text.

So first things first -- you can create very interesting documents in just a few clicks using your good old word processor. Take a look at the documents in the image above. Those are templates from Microsoft Word! Now the next time you want to send a Powerpoint file as your 25 page report, think of how your favourite magazine would represent the same information. Then, select a template from your favourite word processor and start filling in the details. After a few rounds of working with templates you should be able to create your own stuff and lend your own brand to your documents. Here are a few tips on what kind of document you should create for some standard purposes.

Type of Document	Suggestion	Examples
Quarterly/ Monthly/ Annual Updates	Try a newsletter	Here are are a couple of examples from Microsoft Word: Example 1 Example 2
Reports	Try Toyota style A3 Reports. Limited to an A3 size sheet, these reports are an example of simplicity in action. The thinking behind A3 reports is: "If you can't express it in one page, then it's perhaps not worth expressing." Obviously this means two things: You need to put in serious thought to simplify your report. I mean simple - not simplistic. If your report is simple and visible on a single page, then it'll perhaps be much easier to read for the people who eventually see it.	Here's example template. Contact me for specific examples.
Agendas	If you're sending out an Agenda for a meeting, perhaps a simple one page document will suffice, but if you're keen on trying something fancy, then try the events template from your word processor.	Here's an example from Microsoft Word.
Project Plans/ Charters	Please, please, please don't pass around project plans in Powerpoint. Its tough to keep track of changes and at some point somebody will have an out of date document; There's always hidden complexity that you're bound to overlook Instead, try a project wiki. When you have to present reports, try the A3 format. When you have to make a presentation, make a presentation with simple visuals. When you need more detail, keep referring back to your project Wiki.	There are quite a few wikis available on the big broad internet: Mediawiki is the wiki that powers the internet TWiki is a popular wiki that satisfies a number of enterprise use-cases Wikispaces allows you to create a free wiki without the nightmare of hosting and maintainence. Confluence is my favourite wiki and is a full fledged enterprise knowledge sharing tool.
Announcements/ Events	Last but not the least, if you're making announcements or creating a slideument to describe an event, please try a brochure. They're professional, easy to create and extremely good looking.	Here's an example from Microsoft Word.

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As you might have guessed by now, I'm a sucker for good presentations and I just can't stand the misuse of good presentation tools! I hope my post today was helpful to you in some way. Please let me know what you think, by adding your thoughts to the comments section of this post. I understand this is a controversial topic, and I'm perhaps sticking my neck out for trouble, but I just can't help expressing myself on this topic.

Conference Updates

A few pieces of news that I hadn't posted yet. Firstly, I'm speaking at the XP2010 conference in Norway this year. The conference is from June 1-4, 2010 and I'm presenting the following workshops:

• Facilitating Dialogue in Situations of Conflict - with Rixt Wiersma
• The Distributed Agile Game -with Chirag Doshi

Second, I'm participating in RubyConf India. I don't know what my level of participation will be like, but you can be sure to find me there, doing something or the other.

And the last bit of news for now, is that I've submitted two proposals for Agile 2010 in Nashville, Tennesee. The two proposals are:

1. Facilitating Dialogue in Situations of Conflict - with Rixt Wiersma
2. Making feedback work in your teams

I need your feedback for those proposals, so I can do my best to find a speaker's slot at Nashville. So if everything works out fine, I'll see you at Agile 2010 as well - fingers crossed!

5 Simple Ideas to give an Edge to your Induction Experience

A few months ago, I wrote an article about empowering learners in your induction program. The thoughts I shared at the time were around the various components of an induction program. My points in that post were also around the value of considering a pull based approach for upskilling your new hires. A few days back Michelle Dineen asked a question on the Learning and Skills Group about accelerating learning for new employees and making their transition into their new roles, smoother. So, while I did reply to that post using my own experiences, in today's post I want to share some ideas consolidating some of the interesting work people around the globe are doing to make life easier and more effective for new hires.

The way I look at the process of Induction

If you look at the picture above, you'll see that I consider Induction to be a multistep process:

1. Orientation - which covers the standard stuff for people to understand the ecosystem of the company; people, policies, benefits, systems, etc.
2. Context Setting - which helps people understand the culture and identity of the company; history, values, USP, brand image, business model, etc.
3. Competence Building - which helps people pick up the technical skills they need for their jobs.
4. Project Onboarding - which helps people ease into their specific team, department, section or project.

As you'll notice, I've experienced learning to be a continuous process, so I believe that people will need an opportunity to keep building their competence as a result of ongoing challenges that they face on their projects. So here's a secret about me -- I don't believe in elearning, social media and the like because they're cool or because I think they can be cheap or maybe reduce the cost of training. All those are fair benefits, but I believe in these modes of learning because they provide continuing opportunities for people to support their own learning. The ideas I showcase today, are therefore a way for you to empower your learners in their performance situations.

Idea #1 - Try an Induction Portal

In July last year I was on a webinar by Lars Hyland of Brightwave showcasing the induction portal (or rather the pre-induction portal) for Sky - a major home entertainment provider in the UK. The portal allowed new hires in various roles to start their induction even before joining Sky and they could go through self-paced elearning courses on company values, organisational structure, core product knowledge, health and safety in an environment that was engaging and representative of Sky's brand. There are some obvious advantages of the approach:

• Your new hires have an opportunity to interact with your brand much earlier than the date of joining. With an intelligent application of design thinking, you could have inductees salivate at the prospect of their first day at work!
• You can ensure that new hires complete certain elements of training even before they join the company. As a consequence, you can reserve the time you earlier spent in induction, for more valuable activities which perhaps can happen only in a face to face environment.
• And most importantly, you reduce time to competence in many areas -- people can get up to speed with the requirements of their job much faster than in the case of classroom only education, given the unbridled access to these tools.

For the full article, click here. For an example of such a portal take a look at Vestas World.

Idea #2 - Provide your New Hires with continuously Reference-able Material

At DevLearn 2009, I met Bill Corwin. Let me first tell you that Bill is who you'd call an absolute demo-god! At the Demofest in the conference, Bill was showcasing his work on the company's Employee orientation programme. Armed with tools as humble as a simple video camera, Powerpoint and a bunch of advertisements and videos from marketing, Bill set out to create what seemed like a really interesting way of orienting employees to your organisation. Bill was in a situation where he found new starters drinking from a fire-hose in what used to be a 4-5 hour orientation programme. There was just too much to take in during that short time. So Bill decided to reuse the classroom training assets to create an online orientation programme that employees could take at their own pace, when they need it.

"And it’s easy for them to revisit things if they want. By design, the training doubles as a reference tool for all 4,500 of our North American employees. In fact, 61% of our trainees use the course after their initial training, to look up information as needed."

Bill's work is an example of simplicity in action. You'll notice that none of the materials would have taken too much programming skill to create. On the other hand the skill required was that of resourcefulness and content aggregation. If you take a look at the video above, you'll see that the program is designed with a very personable feel to it. People have videos of real people introducing the topic, the content is simply presented and it's no surprise that the number of learners who are confident they can find the HR info they need has jumped from 59% to 90%. I look at it as an excellent way of making your new hire orientation extremely effective.

Read the case study here.

Idea #3 - Give them Learning Paths to chart their own Learning Journey

While it's legitimate to ask people to learn on their own, it's tough for new hires who don't know what they don't know, to seek how to know what they don't know! Confused? Let me try again. It's fair to ask people to take charge of their own learning. That said, new hires are really keen to do well in their new job and get through their probation with a sense of success. Without a sense of what people expect from them in their jobs and what skills they'll need to meet those expectations, self-learning can become similar to a wild-goose chase. To tackle this, we're using an approach driven by Learning Paths. Very simply, a learning path is nothing but a chronological representation of an individual's learning journey from Novice to Expert in a specific job role. The idea is that you can hand a new hire their learning path at the start of their job in the company. From that point on, the electronic version of the path can be their entry point to seek out learning resources on the LMS, the organisational wiki or social learning platform. So yes, learning remains self-driven but has some tangible outcomes that the new hire can work towards. In coming weeks, I may just publish a case study that will illustrate real life examples of Learning Paths in action.

Idea #4 - Provide them a Career Coach

When you're new to a company and you need guidance on what your career should look like, it's never enough to look at a microsite or a set of documents or even the very engaging elearning module. You need someone to talk to; someone who can guide you through your career moves in the company. In your initial days at the company, this could be the person that makes you feel comfortable in the organisation. As you go on, this person connects you to others in the company, guides you through your learning journey and help you deal with the feedback you're recieving. As time progresses, this person can be your guide and advocate for career movements in the company and can again guide you to find the right people and resources to help your learning in your new role. In general, we call this role the career coach or the personal development coach at ThoughtWorks. We've had this support for quite some time now at the company and most people tend to swear by the support they get from their coaches.

Idea #5 - Strengthen your Project Onboarding Processes

Lastly, I come to the oft-neglected aspect of Project Onboarding. We need to remember that people can't know everything before they come onto a team or a project or even a department. There are many things that we learn only when we see them in a performance context. This is where project onboarding is crucial. According to my colleague Pat Kua, "The main goal of a new person is to learn about the larger context. They seek out things they should know about, start to understand the domain specific vocabulary, and begin to work with the team and the work culture. The more complex the project is, and the larger the number of people who join, the longer this phase can last."

Pat is someone I consider to be an expert on the topic of onboarding people. As with many other things, his skills are experiential and he knows about this having practiced it on many different teams. Take some time to look through the various onboarding strategies on his blog and his related article on InfoQ. I find all of them to be extremely lightweight, yet practical methods of getting a new person to be comfortable with the context, practices and the working of a project.

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Yet again, the ideas on my post are limited by my own experiential wisdom (or the lack of it). What ideas are working for you in your own induction context? I'll be hugely obliged if you shared them with me on the comments section of this blogpost. At ThoughtWorks, we're currently working on a new and improved model for induction and your experiences will help us greatly in our own approach. When we do get done, I'll do my best to get a case study out as long as I can get legal approval.
(A quick clarification -- the career coach role in ThoughtWorks has till date been known as the sponsor. We're in the process of changing the nomenclature, so that it reflects the true purpose of the role.)

How to effectively architect information for your elearning course

As Instructional Designers, its always a challenge to balance meaningful instruction with information. Cathy Moore's action mapping framework is a great way to create lively elearning that allows you to include just the right amount of information in your elearning course. That said, our SMEs and clients will often say to us things like, "But we need to include _______ in the course as well." or "All that's fine, but they need to KNOW ______ as well."

Its a consulting challenge to make the trade-off between meaningful instruction and information overload in such cases. That being said, there are a few simple strategies that you can use to ensure that your course has the right impact and you can include your client's request for additional information too! Here they are.

Provide information through scenarios

As you may have noticed in my last post, I have a strong preference towards scenario based elearning. Scenarios allow us as designers to present our audience with a real life challenge. Of course, real life challenges are tough to solve without background knowledge and sound instructional thinking can allow us to weave in this important information, without being too top heavy about it. When your audience accesses knowledge from a state of pain, they're more likely to appreciate its value and remember it at their day job. What this makes us do, is think hard about the information that is really of consequence for the performances we target.

Try organising optional information in tabs

Regardless of how hard we try however, there's some information that just is so sacrosanct that it HAS TO BE part of the course. But then, what if this 'valuable' information just doesn't add value to the performance we seek and expect our audience to demonstrate during the course? I've found a middle path, especially when using Articulate Studio '09. You see, Articulate Studio allows you to customise your player to include some of this information in tabs. When we tuck away some of this really 'nice to have' yet apparently 'important' information in tabs, we have one more way to satisfy our clients and at the same time ensure that the course stays lively, engaging and useful. Take a look at this really elementary demo that I put together for this very technique.

Provide your audience with Job Aids

I've always believed that people learn over time and that learning is a process not an event. So its impractical to include roll all of the support an individual needs, into a single course. In recent months I've been surprised to see so many wonderful courses that don't link to any follow up information such as a job aid or performance support. And to think that after all that effort in putting together a great course, it should be really easy for you to put together a one-page summary of how people can perform specific tasks! So my suggestion is to include a few things for people to use as a follow up for your course:

• a definite action that you'd like them to perform once they're done with the program;
• a set of people that can help them answer questions if they're stuck;
• a set of resources and job aids that can help your audience long after they've forgotten your hard-work on the course
  

Enable supervisors with Job Instruction

One of our problems as elearning instructional designers is that we often forget about other, lightweight methods of creating learning. I believe that people learn a lot from mentoring and apprenticeship. And who better to provide this support than the supervisors themselves? Fortunately we don't have to go down the heavyweight colocated training approach to achieve maximum benefits. In recent days I've become a big fan of the training within industry (TWI) approach of the Lean world. While the TWI set of practices dates back to second world war, the approaches make more sense today than ever. One of the practices from TWI is job instruction. The idea was to help supervisors get inexperienced workers 'up to speed' faster. So they taught supervisors to break down jobs into closely defined steps, show the procedures while explaining the key points and the reasons for the key points, then watch the student attempt under close coaching, and finally to gradually wean the student from the coaching. The course emphasized the credo, "If the student hasn't learned, the teacher hasn't taught".

Job Instruction sheets considerably simplify this activity for the supervisor and its great investment to provide them with such material to support their teams. You'll find some excellent examples of job instruction sheets at this location. Take a look, download the ones you like and start putting together these single sheet plans for supervisors to support your course. I believe the impact could be tremendous. 

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One of the things that I'm always curious about is how we can do more with less. What simple, yet high impact methods are you discovering to support learning for your clients or company? Yes, my intention is to steal your ideas and use them at work, but more importantly I'm keen to learn about what's happening across the world in terms of inexpensive innovation in the field of learning. So as always, place your thoughts in the comments section of this blogpost and also let me know what you thought of this article. I'm always keen to hear your thoughts.

How you can build Meaningful Interactivity into your eLearning

So last week I tweeted an example of immersive learning scenario built entirely in Powerpoint and published using Articulate Presenter. Given that I saw the tweet travel a fair bit, I thought it might be a good idea to share some of the related ideas on this blog.

Does Rapid eLearning mean Crapid eLearning?

No, it doesn't have to. Really, the quality of your elearning depends on your creativity and the amount of thought you put into its design. In a recent conference, Cammy Bean and Stephen Walsh put together a great talk on 10 ways you can yawn proof your elearning. If you look at any of the ideas they put into their guide, you'll notice, none of them says, "Employ an expensive flash programmer." or "Get a budget of $100k." Recent advancements in rapid elearning development have put a lot of power into the hands of the average SME who has a passion for learning.

The key to creating interactive elearning then isn't about rollovers and animations. In fact most people are really past the ooh's and aah's you might expect to get as a result of those fancy effects. So the way I define interactivity in elearning is:

"It's not about how someone interacts with the interface, but how the interface interacts with the person's mind."

Immersive scenarios are an inexpensive way to create meaningful interactivity

A few months back, my favorite blogger Cathy Moore put up a very interesting article about why you want to include scenarios in your elearning. Coupled with Cathy's excellent presentation on the topic (see below), it was great advocacy for the use of immersive scenarios in your elearning. The key as Cathy says, is to 'solve real problems in the real world.' so we need to think of ourselves as 'experience designers' and not 'information developers'.

How to save the world with elearning scenarios

View more presentations from Cathy Moore.

How I built my scenario

So, first things first - the credits. None of the content of this example was mine. This was a scenario Katherine and William Horton presented at a conference 3-4 years back. All I did was pretty it up a bit and place it in Articulate Presenter. My aim was to illustrate how easy it is to create something fairly engaging with just a few minutes of work in Powerpoint, provided you have your design well thought through.

My approach towards scenarios

When designing any kind of elearning, I like to use Cathy Moore's action mapping approach to first define the scenario-based activities. I then use Ruth Clark's framework to flesh out the details of the scenario. Ruth recommends that as designers we think through the following aspects of the situation on screen.

• Task Deliverable: What will the learner do to demonstrate competence?
  
• In our case we wanted the manager to make the right decision about somebody's sabbatical leave request.
  
• Trigger Event: How the task or problem normally initiates in the job setting.
• In our case, the scenario gets triggered when you recieve the approved request from the applicant's supervisor.
  
• Case Data: What background information is needed to solve the case?
• The employee's file and leave request form the case data for this scenario.
  
• Guidance: How will learners get assistance when solving the case?
• You can get guidance by talking to the employee's supervisor, an HR person or a legal eagle.
  
• Feedback: How will the learners receive intrinsic feedback as the scenario plays out? How will they receive traditional, instructional feedback a.k.a Teaching Moments?
• The scenario has some very traditional feedback for the choices they make, but some intrinsic feedback could be useful. Our scenario misses this at the moment, but one way to build this in would be to illustrate the consequence of their choices.
  
• Reflection: What opportunities will the learner have to review their actions/ decisions and consider alternatives?
• We're missing this part in the demo, but its really important to give the manager and opportunity to review their actions and reflect on how they actually went about the decision.

Visually representing the scenario

I built out all of the elements in my scenario entirely in Powerpoint -- at no point did I go into any external program. A few things that might help you achieve the same effect:

• Tom's tutorial on how to build out a scenario visually.
• Tom's folder template from which you can individually extract the stack of paper, the folder, the paper clip, etc. You can very easily create these assets yourself if you like. Just take a look at this tutorial.

As far as the remaining graphics are concerned, yes they may look custom, but they're not. They're just standard clipart from Microsoft Office. All you need to do is search by the styles I've mentioned below.
The rest is plain and simple hyperlinking. The current version of this demo has a few minor bugs, but I'll let you have the source files so you can dissect this and have a bit of a play around.

All you need is a bit of inspiration

For many years of my life I kept waking up saying, "I'm not a creative person." I know now that nothing can be far from the truth for both you and me. Sometimes all you need is a bit of inspiration. There are several examples of creativity that you can learn from. In fact, I'm starting to catalogue all such examples at this link. A few examples that I really liked in recent days were:

• A demonstration of how you can recreate an expensive Flash course in Powerpoint (@tomkuhlmann)
• E-mersion's course for the Red Cross
• Telstra's 3Rs of Social Media Engagement
• Experian's online orientation programme
  

You can find many more such examples on the web and in particular on the Articulate Community. Its defnitely worth being a part of this community even if you're silent lurker. All of the wonderful discussions that take place are well worth listening into, every once in a while. Remember, the tools don't matter -- exploit your creativity. Also, if you find something really creative that you care to let me know of, just drop me an email. And as always, please post your thoughts in the comments section. I'm really keen to hear from you.

Better Beginnings: How to Capture your Audience in 30 seconds - webinar by Carmen Taran

These are liveblogged notes from the ELearning Guild online forum on Building Effective Interactivity. If you're not a member yet, please enrol -- the benefits are tremendous. I loved Carmen's really interesting webinar about how you can capture your audience's attention during online webinars and in virtual classrooms.

Carmen Taran: Managing Partner at Rexi Media. In the business for almost two decades. Author of the book - Better Beginnings.

Do you remember your first kiss? Most probably yes! People remember first and lasts. How do we recreate the "You had me at hello" syndrome?

Most online training and presentations are boring. And the problem is not that bad things happen, but really nothing happens. Most people multi-task at the time they're in an online training. There's so much information around people now -- we find it difficult to capture people's attention for full hours.

Chase Manhattan has reduced their ATM waiting time by 18 seconds. That says a lot about people's value for time.

So how do we create better beginnings -- as juicy as the first kiss?

Create Anticipation

Hockey players run towards a puck. We love to look towards a future state. We enjoy anticipating what'll happen next. Newscasters do this very well -- "What will Apple unveil next? All of this and more at 10PM!"

Easy technique: Use a key phrase. "At last" a software that improves productivity. "Imagine" what it would be like to disconnect from the brain chatter. This program will open a "new" world for you.

Promise a reward -- for example a freebie you give away during the session.

There is order underneath chaos -- if you can promise to reduce complexity, you'll have people's attention. People want to demistify complicated things.

Don't be predictable. Include a touch of unpredictability. Keep them guessing what'll happen next. For example, you promise how something will work in the audience's specific situation. That way people will keep waiting to get that hugely contextualised session.

What kills anticipation at the beginning of a training program?

A narcisstic beginning -- presenters that begin with boasts about themselves or their company. Don't focus on your ego. Reserve the elements of building credibility for later. Use the unforgiving first minute to gain people's attention. Think about TV commercials, Reader's Digest, movie teasers. Teaching is the act of 'giving' - focus on what people want to know.

Incongruity

Taking your audience on one path and them leaving them on a concept that they wouldn't expect. Show how reality is incongruent to what they would naturally think. Surprise facts help do this.

For example what did the first coin operated vending machine dispense?
Holy Water

How many countries are there in the world?
176

What's the difference between nerd, geek and dork?
Do some research! :-)

What's the best time to work late?
Research says Tuesday nights between 6-9

What such incongruent stuff can you share in the beginning of your sessions? Think of the crazy statistic that people will never imagine!

Participation

One way Carmen demonstrated -- a contest to win the free book she promised. We live in the era of participation. People want to interact with everything. Tivo for example!

Try:

• Asking a question! Chat is your best friend. The more you do, the more you engage people. The moment you ask a question, the brain is programmed to answer. So that means people are thinking immediately. Eg: Atlantic used to hide questions in muffins. These were really intriguing questions and Atlantic's circulation increased hugely during this time.
• Try an interactive game: Flashcom guru has multiple such games that you can use within Adobe Connect Pro. Make sure that its linked to the content you're presenting.

Visual Thinking

The power of visuals is quite well known -- Presentation Zen.

Edge, Energy, Emotion: You have people's attention when your visuals actually use all three of these factors. Use images that are striking and create the right energies (post modern room vs clutter) When you create just the right visual, you create the right kind of emotion.

This way you:

• save time
• are more memorable
• keep people focussed

Keep in mind texture - you should feel like being a part of the picture. Keep in mind focus - what grabs your attention first? Use full size graphics.

"Good design is design that makes you want to lick the screen."

You cannot go wrong with red. Red captures attention and triggers a whole bunch of emotions! But again go with what your audience may like.

Sometimes color can be a distraction. Consider every so often turning things to black and white and see if the meaning changes.

Abstract concepts -- try visualising those with symbolism. For example barb wire for alienation. Try to brainstorm different ways to depict a certain topic.

Remember, "Any good design takes three eye movements or less."

Vocal Variety

There's a huge amount of power in your voice. Monotones are always boring. Sound natural, passionate and friendly.

As virtual presenters, we don't have the luxury of body language and beautiful facial expressions. We're addressing people who are multitasking. The voice is a transitory medium - we have only one chance to connect with people. We delete voice mails after listening to it for 10 seconds. No one has the time to listen to something very long.

Add more melody and pitch to your voice. Modulate your voice and don't be predictable. Doesn't matter if you go up or down -- its important you change your tone. Try highlighting adjectives and adverbs in your speech and change your tone by stressing those. That creates a great radio announcer effect.

The ear listens more when there's variety. Use your host, co-present your sessions if need be.

Practice by picking an everyday phrase and say it with various emotions.