Whole-Team Mentoring

Your test team needs to regularly refresh its skills and its approaches. Team Leads and Managers help by giving the team time to change and experiences to absorb. But it can be hard to consistently make the time to improve while also working on the wider business obligations.

That’s why Alan and James’ “whole team mentoring” program will help. We’ll work individually with everyone in your team, consolidating with regular group sessions. We’ll help your people to find the right lessons, help those changes to stick, and help your team to learn together. Your team draw immediately-useful lessons from their day to day work, growing to fit your organisation’s changing context. No matter what you need to attend to urgently, our focus will remain on individual and team improvement.

We’d love to help your team.

We’ll work:

• one to one with your team members, individually developing their skills.
• with the whole team, to share knowledge and develop a mind set.
• in mastermind sessions, that can include other teams and departments to help build a shared culture.

All of this will be done remotely. We don’t want location to matter. We want to be involved regularly, but not for days on end. We don’t want to turn up for a day and then disappear for ever. We don’t want to up your costs to cover our travel expenses, nor to travel unnecessarily. And it means we can record your sessions so you can revisit the lessons learned when you need to.

• Each team member gets four one-on-one remote sessions with either Alan or James - video-call mentoring, shared-screen testing and more. We’ll know your work.
• One group session for the team focussing inwards on sharing and learning, typically a video call, poentially involving demos, round-tables, games and discussions.
• One group session for the team and more, focussing outwards on dependent / supporting teams, typically a video call Q&A.

We expect any engagement to be for at least 4 months / 17 weeks. Alan and James review your progress weekly with each other, spotting opportiunities and worries, setting goals and approaches for the next week.

James is a teacher, speaker and consultant test strategist. Testing since 1996, he has helped dozens of organisations to find the surprises in their systems. He’s taught exploratory testing to corporate clients from 2002, in wide combinations of agile, waterfall and whatever else.

James kicked off the TestLab and the London Exploratory Workshop in Testing, built the BlackBox Puzzles and received the 2015 Tester Excellence Award. He studied experiential learing with Jerry Weinberg, improvisation with Keith Johnstone, and Physics at Trinity College, Oxford.

@workrooomprds.