My experience delivering remote Leading SAFe course
I did my first leading SAFe 5.0 course online from 23rd till 26th Jun 2020. Initially it took several months to believe that a remote SAFe training is possible and then comes being successful.
SAFe realized the need to change. How can I not be part of that change.
Overall the course went very well and I would like to share my experience with all.
This time I started preparing to create course licenses, roster , & student invite letter 10 days before the course. I had to take permission from ScaledAgileFramework.com to conduct remote online course. It was simple and got my course approved within a day. (Note: It is not a requirement anymore to get explicit approval as there is a provision added to mention remote / in-person class while creating the course since mid of Jun 2020)
Duration: 4 hours every day for 4 days
I always enjoyed spending quality time with my students in Lesson 1 and Lesson 2 where the key aspects of business agility, concepts, principles are covered. It almost took 2.5 days to complete. Lesson 3 and 4 went until half of day 4. I was able to cover Lessons 5, 6, & 7 within 2 hours but had to rush through LPM. The students in the class were interactive and definitely lived up to the expectations of active learning.
Exercises
Thanks SAFe for providing right tools and templates to run a remote course. I did find difficulty in facilitating penny exercise as it was not as much as in-person one. Similarly participants were unable to roam around during PI planning exercise however it aligns to new normal where all of them going to be in similar situation in reality.
Tools
My company gave me a wonderful tool “Webex Training” with breakout option which worked wonderfully. It was so nice to switch between breakout rooms in few seconds. Participants were able to send messages to main room requesting for help. Similarly, I was able to trigger breakout with right team members within few seconds and bring them back to main Webex in few seconds. I had options to send broadcast message to all members when they were in breakout sessions. I used it mostly to send 1 minute reminders to participant before pulling them back to main Webex.
Additionally, I also used MS teams to share student workbook and templates for exercises. MS teams helped for offline coordination, questions, & communications.
Most who has not had internet bandwidth issues kept their camera on along with me on all days.
Challenges & Learnings
The start of the session takes few mins in case if you are engaging students with a quick re-cap from previous day and Q&A. I requested future sessions to be scheduled for 4.5 hours for 4 days especially to add time to enable smooth transition, technology challenges, one conversation and one person talks at a time, & to really enable active learning. My inability to reduce the conversation queue length hence increased the time box :(.
SPC Support
I had my friend Jeyaprakash Rajaram who supported me during the session. I would recommend to have an additional SPC during the session especially to look after chat questions, to deal with brief internet or technical challenges, to monitor progress & provide feedback during breaks, to help during exercises, & be available during breakout sessions as 1 person can’t cover all the breakouts. Thanks JP.
Thanks for reading,
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Ranjith Ratna Kumar Subramanian (Linked In