In addition to the delivery of material, the wealth of life experiences really sheds light on individual topics that I would not normally have access to.

To Linda’s point about managing content with available time, that continues to be my issue. There is, as many of you know, a mountain of material to cover in the BABOK review. We are trying to find the correct balance between getting it done before 2037 and having adequate time to perform a thorough presentation and discussion.

Doug Goldberg

I’d encourage the use of study groups

But like any powerful tool, it requires some care in application.

There seem to be four parts to the value generating mechanics:
1. prompt answers to questions so gaps are corrected and associated within the full, rich, question context rather than as a point fact to be integrated later.
2. prompt challenge to mistaken ideas, again with the advantage of being associated with the full context.
3. opportunity to articulate answers to questions clearly, which contributes to solidifying the learning (telling ‘the story’ is as valuable for the teller as the audience)
4. peer interaction that provides an immediate existential motivation

If you buy these value statements, some of the conditions for a good group emerge:
1. There needs to be a s.m.a.r.t goal that matters to each participant. Open ended “this is interesting, lets collaborate” groups don’t work. “CBAP prep” is specific and measurable but needs some thought to attainable, realistic and time boxed. My experience is that a problem set due tomorrow provides pretty effective time boxing.
2. Participants need to be evenly matched, equal contributors to the group. A participant who is ahead becomes dominant (teacher or source of misinformation) and reducing the interaction value. A participant who is behind becomes a freeloader and time waster. The “just listening” participant adds no value, doesn’t get much value, and can become a burr on the saddle.
3. Participants need to be “mid range” in mastering the relevant material. Starting from nothing requires either rtfm or lecture. The dynamics are also different at the “near mastery”, becoming more challenge/response review than new learning.
4. It’s a strongly interactive team to the 5+-2 rule applies.

There are lots of other group learning structures, and I’ve probably taken a more narrow definition of a study group than is necessary. Binary/partner interactions, extending to networks for larger teams, and larger groups with a facilitator, extending to hierarchical leader for larger teams, bracket the study group. These along with the more social ‘get-together with a theme’ are good and effective vehicles.

But, I think there is so much advantage to the ‘right sized’, highly correlated interaction of the small team pursuing a well defined goal that hitting that sweet spot is worth the effort.

People learn best from stories. By hearing others stories about certain tasks in the BABOK really heps solidify your understanding of the BABOK.

If you excel in a team learning environmnet join a study group or start one on your own!

We met every two weeks, and tried to cover a knowledge area per month.

Our sessions took the format of someone preparing a brief 5-minute presentation on a section of a knowledge area, to generate discussion (and it always did).

Everyone else had the responsibility of preparing 5 multiple choice questions on the same section (ensuring we all had to read and understand in advance).

It didn’t always run smoothly, and as BAs will, we often got bogged down in the definitions, but it was a real boost to know that others were going through the same process. I can greatly recommend them to everyone else.