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Exploring Solution Spaces, Keith Ray's blog on Software development and other topics.
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2003.Oct.03 Fri
How much time do you allocate for learning new things? Have you been told you don't have the budget for training? Learning doesn't require classes and workshops. Jim Little tells his experience with "continuous learning" on the Industrial XP mailing list:
Back in 2000, I saw a post John Brewer made to the Extreme Programming mailing list. Every week, he said, his team took half a day to "play." They could use that time for anything they wanted.
I saw that post and thought it was a great idea. I was leading an XP project at the time, so I went to my manager and proposed it. She thought it was a great idea. [...]
Eager to try it out, I told the team that I had convinced management to give us free time. Every Thursday afternoon, we would experiment with any technical concept that interested them. The only rule was that it couldn't be project related. Using spike solutions to demonstrate the concepts was highly recommended.
I thought the team would jump at the opportunity. Instead, they balked. "That's a waste of time," they complained. "We're here to write software for our company, not play."
I pushed the issue anyway, and the team grudgingly agreed. People went off and learned about XML, XSLT, JavaMail, and other technologies. The effort paid off within weeks as we incorporated the new knowledge back into our product. For example, we used our newly acquired JavaMail knowledge to start sending HTML email.
It took a month or so, but people's objections to continuous learning faded. [...]
I think the initial reluctance to play time came more from a sense of being lost. There's so much to learn how do you find something that's really interesting? Half a day isn't really all that much time. Working in pairs helped people get over the hump, as did plain old pushing from the coach. Once people got used to it, they liked it.
I've heard companies claim that they allocate 20% of their time for learning. Half a day every week is 10%. Doing all 20% in one chunk would be ten straight weeks of learning. (Yeah, like that's going to happen.) If you're serious about that much learning, the only practical approach is continuously.