Leading digital transformation in professional learning and development with Reed Learning

Breaking into the emerging digital learning marketplace

For over 20 years, Reed Learning has successfully delivered courses, programmes and training to individuals and corporates. Facing fundamental changes to how people learn, and an emerging digital learning marketplace, they approached us with a vision to transform the way they design and deliver their products and services.

Creating a team of agile pioneers

Embedding into the Reed Learning team and working within their offices enabled our team to introduce agile and lean ways of working in an organisation that hadn't used these ways of working before. Before beginning this transformation, we had to ensure we were in a position to start delivering from day one. With Scrum ceremonies, systems and our working space all set up, in place and ticked off our checklist, the newly-formed Reed Learning and Unboxed team was in a strong position to begin delivering.

Piloting Reed Learning’s first agile project

Starting small, as a first step, our team launched a pilot agile project for the organisation. This pilot wasn’t so big that it could be a major risk, but was large enough to make an impact and create positive waves across the organisation. Fortnightly Show and Tells were scheduled to include stakeholders in this new way of working and used to provide updates on the most important delivered work and priorities, building up trust.

Key features validated through customer engagement

To understand the features customers would immediately start using, the team took a lean approach, talking directly to real customers. Working side-by-side with these customers, the team developed, tested and iterated prototypes. Early on, they began to understand exactly which specific features customers would immediately pay for and use.

New product in the hands of customers within weeks

Within just a few weeks of collaborating, the team were able to fully prototype and build a working digital Ruby on Rails product that addressed a specific, validated user need, which was then immediately adopted by several active customers. Sharing this result with stakeholders increased confidence that this transformation had already begun to show results, which were not only benefitting the internal team, but also the customer.

Scaling transformation to increase delivery

With a working digital product providing invaluable customer insight and full stakeholder buy-in across the organisation, the Reed Learning team have taken great strides in their vision being realised. The next step is to scale up the efforts, iterating on the product and introducing new features based on genuine customer needs and their own innovation strategy.