Interview excerpt in which Lisa Henkel describes stepping in as executive sponsor for a failing project during the pandemic. She explains that pre-pandemic waterfall requirements were obsolete, which motivated her to learn Agile; she found an interactive, multimedia Agile training that tied theory to practice, delivered bite-sized modules with a clear cadence, and she strongly recommends investing in that quality training.
And the president asked me to step in and become the executive sponsor of this project that was going really, really south. And I got into it and it was an absolute train wreck Mike. But that's when I really personally saw the value kind of from that helicopter view that all that work that we had done in waterfall and I was part of those requirements gatherings, you know, years prior to that and all, none of that mattered in the least. Our business had changed so much because of the pandemic that requirements we wrote pre pandemic were absolutely worthless. And for me that was like, like a scary wake up call. I felt I walked away really, really being able to, you know, hold my own in a conversation about Agile. Not, you know, I was not going to pass myself off as some expert, but it's pulled together the pieces that I didn't understand before from when I was like on the fringes of a project or involved here a little bit there it for me I had some baseline knowledge, not a lot, but it pulled all the pieces together so I could understand kind of the theory of agile. I could see it in practice and I, you know, I had some hands on things that I could do. So I felt it really prepared me to at least, you know, not sound like the village idiot in a conversation when talking about it. And I could start to understand I had enough knowledge after that that I could see applications for it in my role. It just never, it did not feel like your standard work at your own pace type of thing. It almost felt interactive. Like it didn't feel like I was just like this was a one way thing, you know what I mean? It was this mixture of things that you had. First of all it was multimedia, it was inter, you know, you would do some flashy graphics to wake me up at times, but there was a cadence and a rhythm and that's really important when somebody's learning, you know, there's a flow even if the learner doesn't realize there's a flow. There was a cadence to every module that I could follow. So as it went on I knew exactly what to expect and what was going to come where. But it was really being able to do it in bite sized pieces and feel like I was forward momentum, you know, like, okay, I got that, like I'll go to bed and feel like, okay, I accomplished something. In fact, before I left my previous organization I told the head of our, the current head of our PMO about it. Like, dude, this is something like just spend the money on this, quit doing this in house. Crap. I would highly, highly recommend it, absolutely.
