- Chapter Return on Investment
- Mentoring vs. Training
- Training
- Mentoring
- External Mentors
- Internal Mentee
- Summary
Mentoring vs. Training
Often, there is a flawed perception that you can map out a training curriculum for a given role and discipline that may encompass anywhere from four to five complete, eight-hour days of successive training for a given person and have them ready to be up and running on a "RUP" project that will utilize the IBM Rational Solutions as its tooling. Sometimes there are even a few extra days of cross training that are included into this type of a curriculum, which can result in a staggering two full weeks of continuous training—YIKES! On top of that, because of this type of a training model, you often have resources that go through all of these training courses, only to wait weeks or months before they are assigned to a project that will use the adoption models and or Rational tools. What little was gleaned from the training is lost before they ever get a chance to put it into practice. This type of checklist training does more harm than good. It is expensive both in terms of real dollars spent as well as the time everyone is spending in class and not working on active projects. It is also expensive in the respect that it rarely delivers any meaningful results, which results in the implementation of RUP and the tools getting negative publicity. Not what you want.
I personally have yet to be part of a successful, large-scale organization change effort implementing RUP and the IBM Rational Solutions without mentoring. I have also not had any colleagues who could say their implementations were successful without mentoring. Mentoring is a key factor to success in transferring knowledge from experienced RUP practitioners to project team members.