Scaling agile education at Accenture

CHALLENGE

As a Business Agility Senior Manager with Accenture, Kit Friend champions Agile practices that drive greater speed to market and efficiency. This includes delivering training and coaching on Agile ways of working to both internal teams and clients. These sessions and workshops have been expensive to deliver in person, with attendance mostly restricted to people in regional hubs, and preparing in-person learning materials is time-consuming for the leads and facilitators.

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SOLUTION

Friend and his community first turned to Mural during the Covid-19 pandemic, where they needed to rapidly translate slide-based course materials into engaging virtual classrooms with highly interactive elements. Initial efforts when the pandemic hit used a mix of tools, but the pivot to Mural made running each training session more cost effective, allowed significantly more people to be trained at one time, and has helped facilitators on his team save hours of prep time by using templates to create repeatable sessions. 

And the benefits have not been only financial. The quality of learning has also improved, with instructors seeing more engagement and understanding from participants when content is available in a mural instead of an over-engineered PowerPoint or physical whiteboard. Friend is able to quickly bring to life how an everyday Agile practice can be run in a mural, versus explaining a process while showing only a bulleted list on a slide.

“Mural has enabled us to visualize and contain a plethora of random working bits into one cohesive space and way of doing things. We’ve broken down silos to now be in one suite for the vast majority of our work, which is really powerful,” says Friend.

His team plans to continue incorporating Mural into live training sessions, and Friend estimates that at least 50% of sessions in the future will continue to be fully digital based on client and team preferences.

And Mural helps improve collaboration skills after Agile training is over, as practitioners can go on to incorporate design thinking methods into their new Agile workflows. Friend recommends incorporating LUMA System™️ practices like the Importance/Difficulty matrix within sprints to prioritize tasks and clarify requirements. 

“Mural means that participants can both learn and test key practices in one space. After completing Agile courses, everyone can transition directly to using Mural for approaches like design thinking, including utilizing LUMA System methods available easily via templates in the platform.”

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IMPACT

Friend estimates the faculty team has seen the following Mural benefits over one year:

• 300% increase in Agile workshop participants (with no increase in the number of coaches and facilitators)
• 200+ hours saved in workshop prep time
• Almost £600,000 in travel cost savings in a hybrid work environment

TAKE ACTION

Try leading your next retrospective with this free Mural template.

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