Assessing the learning needs of a team are among the first problems I focus on when starting a project. I say “learning needs” because I want to find missing skills and plan how to acquire them. Once I understand their needs, I start them on the path to learning new skills using a structured plan. They often don’t realize they are learning new skills.
I challenge people to learn in several ways. The Socratic method works best for daily interactions, but another method teaches the concept of “deliberate leaning.” I urge people to explore what they don’t know and then develop a week-by-week plan to acquire the skills they lack. If they are unwilling or unable, I develop the plan for them as part of their normal project duties.
Let’s take the skill of prioritization as an example. Knowing what to do first is much more complex than working a list. If you do not understand how a business runs, or what is important to management, or what is important to the project, how can you choose between two tasks? How can you prioritize a list of 20 tasks? What rationale would you use to make your decisions?
Breaking the learning goal down into weekly pieces will gradually teach the skill of prioritization. But first, you must understand what it takes to make a prioritization decision. What if there are 20 skills involved? It is possible. Think it through. Once you understand, make a plan.
- Week 1 – Develop a high level business process flow
- Week 2 – Rank business processes in order of importance
- Week 3 – Develop detail business process maps
- Week 4 - Rank processes
- Week 5 – Match open dev tickets to high level processes and then to lower level processes
- Week 6 – Start reviewing programming queue to make sure tickets show proper sequence and priority
- Week 7 – Repeat the process until mastered
In this scenario, a talented team member learned to tame an out-of-control process by learning a new skill. The knowledge acquired went from a general overview of the business to specific understanding of key processes over 6 weeks. Learning was deliberate and executed per a plan. In this case they were unwilling to learn at the start, but by week 6 became rabid fans as the project started to show positive results. The trick is to get people to think about acquiring skills so that learning becomes second nature.
I’m deliberate in my approach to learning. A former boss once described me as a mile wide and a mile deep when it came to my understanding of manufacturing and systems. He knew that I developed those skills per a plan, and that I re-examined my needs each month. I ask myself, “What don’t I know?’ Then I figure out how to learn it. For example, these are my goals for this month.
- Learn 10 conversational Mandarin phrases. (Needed for a working trip to China)
- Lean how a progressive die machine works. (Needed to solve a costing problem in June.)
- Read two books related to my job. (Needed to support a the development of our internal Wiki.)
- Understand all variables in QAD’s MRP process. (Needed for a working trip to China.)
- Master a newly developed application. (Needed for a project in June.)
- Master and document the forecasting algorithm for an app experiencing problems. (Added at last review to help solve an unexpected problem.)
I will do every item on the list because they are skills I need to support a project. In my case, everything is a project. I’ve used this method every month for 15 years. This is what I to teach my team. I ask that they figure out what they don’t know and then develop a plan to learn it. I tell them to do it over an over again and watch as they master their environment. What this does for a project is amazing. People become highly skilled contributors who are capable of achieving more and more complex tasks. They grow as employees and feel a heighten sense of value. As a project manager, this is what you want… a team that is continually improving.
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