Our client is an American oilfield services company. It is one of the world's largest offshore drilling companies and the largest offshore drilling contractor by revenue.
Our client hires graduates from top-tier universities in India and runs a freshers boot camp to ensure they are project/program-ready. While the client aims at bringing awareness around agility across the boot camp, they want to stress on:
1. Promoting one team mindset
2. Problem-solving
3. Collaboration in and across the teams
4. Growth Mindset that fits their organizational values.
This boot camp serves as a solid environment for the freshers to learn, practice, and become their best possible version to ensure a smooth transition to their respective projects by making them project-ready.
On successful completion, they are given the opportunity to move to any department within the organization based on their interest and aptitude. The extensive onboarding program for newly hired freshers helps them absorb organizational culture and the client's attrition rates are very low compared to the industry average.
Our journey started with designing a learning outcome-led induction roadmap considering the. Since the freshouts would have known very little or nothing about agile, it was necessary to give them a practical understanding of how projects are delivered in large teams working towards common business objectives.
We designed a learning outcome-led induction roadmap considering organizational context, customer inputs, nature of Projects, and client stakeholder-led identified live projects and problems including personas, storymaps and completed the discovery session to be ready for the boot camp.
Our whole boot camp was designed keeping in mind the balance needed between theoretical sessions and practical simulations. The intention was to give a practical experience of a project from scratch till the end. We designed the boot camp to give the freshers hands-on experience around:
1. Working as a team
2. Multiple Agile frameworks
3. Multiple sprint duration
4. Dependency management
5. Predicting failures and risk management
6. One-on-One Coaching
7. Pull-based work culture
8. Collaboration and problem-solving
9. Breaking down work
While every sprint had a key takeaway from a practice/process point of view, we injected scenarios like change of requirements, ad-hoc requirements, etc to give them a first-hand taste of actual scenarios as well. Our boot camp effectiveness was also quantified with the help of DORA metrics and health assessment.
Simulation-led learning on actual projects was necessary to bring in the rigor of the program. Our audience had no reference point - a huge plus and a minor negative. Mentors from the client technical & business team were leveraged to give fresher cohort project scenarios and experience which was as close a simulation of the actual work environment as possible. The entire lot of freshers was allotted projects and each project was further divided into pods, giving them a sense of working as a small cross-functional team and giving them an opportunity to understand that they needed to communicate and coordinate with other teams, internal and external stakeholders and most importantly they needed to learn to ‘know’ & ‘solve’ problems.
Our client-side mentors acted as the architects and product owners and gave the requirements for the final product to be delivered. Teams did product discovery, created a focused backlog, did estimations and prioritizations, and leveraged ceremonies to deliver meaningful outcomes in iterations. We changed sprint durations and used Kanban along with Scrum extensively to impart an understanding of all possible ways they might have to work to deliver the project once they were deployed to their projects. Simulations were done in a manner that everyone in the team got a chance to work as a scrum master and take new initiatives.
All fresh outs were coached on an individual level to help them realize their potential and perform to the best of their potential.
Most importantly a well-rounded professional ready to be deployed and start being an asset for the firm and a change agent in their respective projects
All the freshers had a good practitioner-level understanding of Agile ways of working using Scrum and Kanban methodologies.
All freshers are exposed to and are ready to handle various anti-patterns which may come up.
Exposure to all the possible tech stacks, tools, and technology the fresh outs will be working on in their potential projects viz. backend, front end, and DevOps.
Hands-on experience with Azure DevOps as an Agile lifecycle Management Tool.
Exposure to the best practices in agile, Scrum, Kanban, Product Discovery, User Story writing, estimations, prioritization techniques, DOD, DOR, various agile roles, ceremonies, demos, metrics like burndown, velocity, and more, coding standards and deployment metrics like DORA.
Shift in the mindset - from an individualistic outlook to a team player. This is one of the most important shifts a new professional has to make as they start their career. Almost everything we do and accomplish in organizations is as part of a team.
Quantifying the growth of the team’s agility by performing an agility health assessment which rose from 3.95 in the middle of engagement to 4.46 towards the end.
