Projects cycles and Training cycles as sprints.
One of our participants form our highly intensive business English Seminars, Regional Sales Manager from Russia, referred to a Project management system called Scrum. -This is one of the most exciting things about Business English teaching. If we are open enough, we learn as much as we teach (but we shouldn’t be saying this, right?). I got intrigued and I started reading this book by Chris Sims & Hillary Louise Johnson on The Elements of Scrum. A very good read indeed. Easy to follow with a lot of inspiring ideas.
The main idea is the following: a project does not need to be planned in linear form (or else Waterfall form), moving to step 2 having completed step 1 etc. We can design projects in small, largely autonomous, cycles, with inherent stages of evaluation and retrospect. So please visualise the following:
You have a project. Think of all the goals and end results of your project. Take one and organize a sprint for it. We start running on a Monday and we break the finishing line on a Friday. On Monday morning we split tasks among our team. Every morning we meet, briefly, (and we really mean briefly here: standing up in front of a task board for no more than 15 minutes) to discuss the progress of each task, so as to make sure that we will all reach the finishing line together (this is important). We take corrective measures if necessary. We help each other. On Friday we celebrate victory! Or, if we don’t, we reflect on what went wrong. Either way, we evaluate what we did, how we did it, our strengths and weaknesses. Retrospect is essential in this process.
All this is a very insightful discussion topic for our Executive participants (after all, no matter what field they are in or exact position they have, they are all involved in projects). But it’s not only that. It is very interesting to see the application of this project management approach to a Business Language Training Programme. My suggestion here is that we can view the contents of a Business language programme in terms of short sprints.
We could be breaking down the elements of final success in small success stories and celebrate small victories every time!
Written by Zoe Hadjianastasiou, LTES Co-Founder and Academic Director
