mentoring

Mentoring ensures theory is properly put into practice. It gives the necessary safety net for you to try out the new practices on live work. Ideally mentoring would come a couple of weeks after a course — by that time there will be plenty of hard questions accumulated for the mentor!

Skills transfer on the job.

Faced with a task for which your team lacks sufficient skills, the obvious thing is to call in the experts. External consultants can apply their experience to get the job done quickly and reliably. But when they have completed the work and gone, your own people may be left without the skills to maintain and take it further.

At the other extreme is the option of training up your team on a course, and then letting them do the work. Inevitably, though, a complex new area requires both formal learning and experience. You would have to schedule plenty of time for them to get it wrong first time around; and a poor start can leave its mark on the rest of the product life.

Mentoring is a method of training people while the work gets done.

• You do much of the work;
• TriReme assists, guides, and reviews in your work;
• TriReme provides informal training and workshops;
• TriReme pushes the work forward in selected areas.

Mentoring can work two ways:

Full-time mentoring

Your assigned TriReme consultant works as part of your team, and is present for large parts of the development work.
Full-time mentoring is appropriate where there are several team members who are developing their skills.

Keypoints mentoring

The TriReme consultant visits regularly to review progress, and to discuss issues and next steps with team members. Often, some of this work can be carried out via email, fax, phone or videophone.
Keypoints mentoring is appropriate for a small project.

Daily rates are lower for full-time mentoring than for keypoints mentoring.