7 Agile Practices to Leverage on your L&D Team

As L&D organizations are evolving and trying to deliver greater value to learners, they've started borrowing Agile design practices from the software industry. In this article, I'll share some considerations for adopting Agile practices based on my experience having worked on both traditional and Agile teams.

What is Agile?

Agile is an iterative approach to project management that originated in software development. While Agile can take different forms, its four key values are to prioritize:

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

2. Working products over comprehensive documentation

3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

4. Responding to change over following a plan

In contrast to the traditional waterfall model, the Agile approach relies on short iteration cycles with high degrees of collaboration and frequent ideation and testing. The end goal is to produce deliverables faster and generate the best products possible.

What does Agile look like in L&D?

A pure Agile approach has not be popularized in L&D due to the nature of instructional design projects, where the requirements are based on learning objectives and often one designer is leading multiple projects simultaneously. However, there have been various attempts to incorporate Agile into hybrid instructional design methodologies, like the Lot Like Agile Management Approach (LLAMA) and Successive Approximation Model (SAM).

7 Agile Practices for Instructional Design

Here are seven practices your L&D team can use to leverage the benefits of Agile:

Not sure which approach is right for your project?

While Agile has certain advantages, it isn't right for every project. You may find that taking a hybrid approach, or integrating a few Agile practices, can help you better accomplish your goals based on the characteristics of your team and project.