Digital transformation can be defined as the integration of digital technology and solutions into all aspects of a business’s processes in order to solve problems.
While this differs organization to organization and industry to industry, at its core, digital transformation requires a shift in culture and in the way products and services are produced and delivered.
According to Salesforce, digital technologies can create new or modify existing business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements. This “reimagining of business” in the digital age is digital transformation.
The learning function within an organization has been undergoing a digital transformation for several years now. Incorporating Agile Learning processes into building learning experiences makes a perfect fit to help the L&D team ensure digital transformation.
Let’s have a look at some ways that this makes sense.
1. Focuses on speed and rapid development
Digital transformation is all about urgency: if one company digitizes its processes and offerings, competitors feel the need to do so, or else they will feel left in the dust.
Further, customers expect a company to go digital. As they are accustomed to everyday digital experiences on their phones, via a range of apps, consumers fully expect a company with whom they do business—or one in which they are employed—to provide a digitized experience.
Digital transformation is essential for L&D to create and deliver digitized learning experiences quickly to learners.
Agile Learning methodologies embrace speed. Content creation, design, and development are expected to be churned out quickly. Daily Standups and accountability measures baked in to Agile ensure that courses can be developed and delivered to learners much faster than if they were to be built using traditional methodologies.
This need for speed stimulates digital transformation. L&D teams will consider adopting new platforms and processes that will get courses built and delivered rapidly. Beyond an LMS and authoring tool, L&D teams will digitize and perhaps even automate additional processes in order to fulfill their mission.
Don’t have a training request form? No problem – download this template form for your learners and standardize your training requests straight away.
2. Encourages collaboration
Closer collaboration doesn’t simply mean more meetings. Agile methodologies ensure that everyone is on track and is aware of what others on the team are working on.
By now, most companies have some type of meeting or collaboration platform, whether for formal or casual meetings.
However, more effective collaboration encourages further digital transformation because the decision to meet itself requires some decision-making:
- Should there be different platforms for one-to-one and one-to-many interactions?
- Should there be more meetings—or fewer?
- How can the team make the Daily Standups work for everyone, especially when there is a large team? (i.e., should you give time limits, to encourage the importance of talking points?)
- How should snags and backlogs be handled?
- Will there be a Scrum Master to keep everyone on track?
Indeed, thinking about collaboration in the context of leveraging Agile Learning methodologies for the purpose of developing learning experiences helps further an organization’s mission towards digital transformation.
3. Accepts and responds to change
Agile accepts that change will occur and helps teams to prioritize tasks to achieve valuable learner experiences—delivered faster, of course.
However, Agile does try to minimize surprises. An Agile approach does incorporate frequent testing into the process, as a way to capture immediate feedback from stakeholders. Have the objectives shifted? Has the content from the subject matter expert (SME) changed? Learning teams need to be able to accept and address changes along the way. The result is a more relevant experience for the learner.
This component of the Agile process helps to bring about digital transformation. When a team anticipates that changes will need to be addressed along the way, they realize that they will need a system that digitizes and prioritize these changes.
Some components may already be digitized, such as the original training request form, or the SME’s PowerPoint. However, the process for evaluating, accepting, and incorporating changes—this is the part that may not yet be digitized.
Indeed, this seemingly small part of the Agile process can be quite significant, and it can spur further digital transformation within the L&D team.
Have you started digitizing your knowledge capture from SMEs? Check out this free ebook on how Agile can help to power your digital transformation in L&D.
