Paul Anderson (speaking in a customer-success video) describes using a standard course as a key part of FCA Technology’s onboarding for anyone joining an Agile team. The approach levels up new hires quickly, accelerates time-to-value when launching teams, creates shared language among leaders, and includes tracking completion and a follow-up (congratulatory lunch) to reinforce learning. The process reduces onboarding friction and promotes team alignment and faster delivery.
Ultimately, we want to have all of our team members on the same page and just have a foundation of understanding so we can move together, we can move fast. This was just a great way of kind of leveling everyone up at the same time. The other thing is, it's a critical part of our onboarding process. So every new FCA technology person, everyone that's going to come onto an Agile team, even if they're in another department, we just automatically send them through this so that we're on that same playing field. And then when we launch a new team, start a new team, there's no need to learn a bunch of new things. They've already got a base foundation, so ultimately it's to deliver value and it just accelerates our time to be able to do that. I'm starting to see our other leaders, other executives, use new language and talk about things and think about things differently as a result of this. Historically or normally, they would have approached a problem one way and they would have just had some assumptions about that. They're starting to understand and talk about things in that new way, which allows the team to better align with it. It better sets expectations and there's just more synergy, I guess. Whenever piece of work comes up and it's like someone's like, how are we going to do this? Well, it's pretty straightforward. We're going to put a team together and we're going to, we're going to start sprinting. You know, that's just our de facto way of getting things done. Now it's pretty effortless. When we want to onboard someone and send someone else through, we basically just go in, create an account for them and send them the information. They go on and start the course and away they go. And we can see where they're at and track it. And then when someone completes the course, we reach out to them, say congratulations, and we actually take them to lunch and talk about what they learned. So that's been fantastic.
