Training - Now Available in "Lite"

How do you provide useful training to technical managers in a timely, lightweight way? I don't have the perfect answer, but here are some ideas I've seen work well.

Book Club
We've been experimenting with this idea for the last several months at Atlassian. The engineering team leads & managers meet once a week on the downstairs sofas to discuss a few chapters of an Agile methodology book (we have upstairs sofas too, which are closer for most of us, but the ambience upstairs is lacking a certain je ne sais quoi) . We all read the selected chapters during the week, so at the meeting we can have a productive discussion, relating our particular experiences and issues to the material covered in the chapters. More often than not we go off on a tangent, but that doesn't matter - we learn a lot from either the book chapters or each other.

We appear to have so much fun at these book club meetings that now the product managers have started their own book club, in yet another incarnation of product management - engineering rivalry (give up PMs, you know you can't win).

The thing to remember with a Book Club is to build a backlog of compelling books (or articles), and have enough copies of them to go round. Sometimes we run out of material and pick something in a hurry... turns out this is not the shortcut to gaining popularity with your peers. Also, try finding books in a beta state that you can download hot off the virtual press. This is a great way to grab really current material, and gives you the chance to give feedback to the authors before the content is finalised. The Pragmatic Bookshelf is a good source for beta books.

Blog-a-thon
A variation on the book club, but can be played as an individual sport. Often requires fewer tree deaths too. Pick a topic you're interested in, search your blog subscriptions (or a handy site like Alltop, or, heck, the whole Internet) for relevant posts, spend an afternoon reading through those posts, and share the links to the best articles with your team. The key ingredients here are: 1 beanbag, 1 dark cosy corner, 1 set of headphones, and 2-3 hours of uninterrupted time. You might want to schedule regular presentations of your findings to your team mates - this creates a deadline for getting your reading done, ensures that you share your learning, and will likely inspire others to stage their own fabulous blog-a-thons. You'll end up with an awesome selection of quality blogs to add to your collection.

Practical Exercises
Sometimes the training you're interested in requires something more hands-on than simply reading about stuff. You may be teaching yourself a new programming language, or working though a strategic planning book, or learning how to read a balance sheet, or following up on a negotiation course. These kinds of training activities need regular practice, or you'll quickly lose your mental muscle. Rope in some colleagues and book in a few hours each week to work through the material together. A bit of friendly peer pressure will help keep you on track. This is particularly useful if you've invested in an expensive and time-consuming training course for yourself or your team - you'll get the most out of it by following up with regular, ongoing practical work when you're back in the office. Our clever QA Team has been doing this after attending a week-long offsite programming course. It's a great learning & team-building win for them, and very reassuring for me (and the Finance team).

Whatever method you choose, the ideal outcome is lasting individual and organisational improvement. Distilling some common themes from the examples above, aim for:

• small chunks of targeted learning
• on relevant and engaging topics
  
• at planned, regular times
  
• sharing the results with your peers.

By mixing up a few different approaches and keeping the content fresh, I bet you'll quietly establish a culture of continuous learning and sharing in your organisation faster than I can read War and Peace, Book I*.

*Not much of a challenge, since I've been stuck on Chapter IV for the last 8 years. Sorry Leo.