Agile Instructional Design: Sprints, LLAMA and Examples
Agile instructional design explained: the manifesto for training, sprints and learner stories, Torrance's LLAMA, real examples and two free templates.
Each sprint aims for a usable, checked increment. Release to learners only after the required reviews and approvals.
- Megan Torrance's LLAMA is agile rebuilt for training: start from the learner and the business goal, then write the work as learner stories.
- Agile can support changing content and regulated training; plan expert availability, acceptance criteria and the approval route.
- Agile is a way to manage and release a project. SAM and rapid prototyping are ways to design one.
- AI gets you from story to reviewable draft fast, but every update still needs a human check.
Five prompts to guide a review of one project. This is an unvalidated editorial check, not a certification of model fit, completeness or learning effectiveness. Check each answer as well as the total.
Go from storyboard to an interactive course in minutes
Take a hypothetical software company that ships new features every month. Its support team gets a training course for each release, built over six weeks and signed off by product, legal and the head of support. By the time the course goes live, the next release has changed half the screens it shows. The course was well made. It was made for last month's product.
Agile instructional design organises training work around short feedback cycles and small usable increments. This guide uses Scrum-inspired sprints; agile approaches can also use continuous flow. Each cycle gives the team evidence to adjust the work. Required accuracy checks and compliance approvals still happen before learner release. I’m an instructional designer at Coursebox, which makes instructional design software.
What is agile instructional design?
Agile instructional design applies the values of the 2001 Agile Manifesto to building training. The manifesto, written by seventeen people at Snowbird, Utah, values:
| Agile value, adapted for training | What it means for a training project |
|---|---|
| People collaborating | Talk to subject-matter experts and learners, rather than routing everything through documents |
| Usable learning experiences | Build a usable, checked increment early; keep documentation needed for decisions and approval |
| Collaboration with the business and learners | Review each release with the business owner, rather than fixing every detail upfront |
| Responding to new evidence | Change the backlog when the product or the need changes |
These are training interpretations of the manifesto’s values. Plans, documentation, contracts and tools still have a role; the emphasis is on making them serve the people and the working learning experience.
The manifesto’s principles encourage frequent delivery and regular reflection on how the team works. For training, that means frequent opportunities to inspect usable material and a deliberate review of the process, not a rule that every sprint must launch to all learners.
Case study: Call-centre training at OptumRx in the United States
In its OptumRx call-centre training account, the team starts with a meeting between the business manager and learning delivery lead to understand the need. The process identifies the subject-matter experts and brings curriculum, material, scope and timeline decisions back for agreement.
The useful mechanism is early access to the people who can validate the work. For a feature update, agree the learner task, the reviewer and the acceptance criteria before building. Keep approval ahead of learner release.
This is a practitioner account published in 2019. It does not provide measured learning or business outcomes, so it supports a process example rather than a quantified claim that agile is better.
How an agile training project works
Our hypothetical software company releases product changes every month, while its support training takes six weeks to build. For this project, agents need to set up a new scheduled-report feature for customers, starting with a weekly report in a test environment. We'll develop and test that usable part first, then add further tasks as the feature changes. This shows how short feedback cycles can help a training team respond to changing requirements.
1. Build a backlog of learner stories
Instead of a list of topics, write what people need to do, as stories. I start with the task that causes the most tickets: "As a support agent, I need to set up a scheduled report for a customer so that they stop raising tickets for manual exports." Each story gets an acceptance test that says how you will know the training works: "the agent sets up a weekly report in the sandbox without help."
2. Plan a sprint
A sprint is a fixed period. The Scrum Guide describes sprints as "fixed length events of one month or less" and teams of "typically 10 or fewer people." For the support training, the team runs two-week sprints timed to the release calendar and pulls the top two stories into each one.
3. Build and validate a usable increment
By the end of a sprint, the team aims to have a usable increment that meets its agreed Definition of Done. For scheduled reports, that might be a five-minute module and a one-page job aid, with realistic practice and an aligned check. The expert verifies the current product behaviour before learner release; accessibility and required legal or compliance checks are complete too. The team may pilot it, release it or hold it for a coordinated launch. A sprint does not require public release.
4. Review with users and stakeholders
Review the usable increment and test evidence with support agents, the product manager and the head of support. Watch where agents struggle and add changes to the backlog. Book expert review during the sprint so accuracy is checked before release. The sprint review helps decide what comes next; it is not a substitute for the checks required to make the material safe and ready.
5. Hold a retrospective
The team asks what to keep doing, what to stop and what to try next sprint, and picks one change.
Write learning user stories with acceptance tests, then prioritise them into sprints, with the support-team example filled in. Editable Word file, no email required.
These publication events do not show whether the content changed or whether the team used agile. They show that repeat publication occurs in this cohort. Plan how to handle reviewed updates, and check what actually changed before interpreting a republish as an improvement.
LLAMA: agile adapted for learning projects
Megan Torrance's company, TorranceLearning, adapted agile for learning design and calls the result the Lot Like Agile Management Approach, or LLAMA (TorranceLearning). Earlier writing expanded it as "Lot Like Agile Methods Approach". Her book, Agile for Instructional Designers, was published by ATD in December 2019.
LLAMA's steps are:
- Identify the business goal.
- Define a primary learner persona.
- Define the scope of the project with learner stories.
- Chunk the work.
- Plan the work and work the plan.
It changes agile in a few ways that suit training:
- A learner persona and a business goal first. The project starts from who the learner is and what the business needs.
- Learner stories from action mapping. LLAMA "incorporates Cathy Moore's action mapping, which uses proposed user actions to generate stories". Torrance warns that "using traditional Agile story mapping for training projects tends to result in very information-driven courses" (ATD).
- Built for how designers work. "Most instructional designers work on several projects at once, while software developers usually are dedicated to a single team," and designers "often need to wait for content or input from subject matter experts."
Case study: A NATO cultural awareness course at a military university in Poland
In 2012, Poland's National Defense University (now the War Studies University, Warsaw) built a game-based NATO cultural-awareness e-course using Gottfredson's A.G.I.L.E. model alongside ADDIE (New Trends and Issues Proceedings on Humanities and Social Sciences, 2018). A core team of two people and a multimedia specialist designed, developed and released it in three months, after about a year of analysis.
- Limits: this is a single case written up afterwards, and the team said the working environment felt "unstable and chaotic".
Running a sprint update in Coursebox
I tested an agile-style request in Coursebox, the course builder we make. I asked for a short training module on a new "scheduled reports" feature as a first increment, to update after the next release. Then I sent the next sprint's change: the October release adds PDF attachments, so update the module without changing the parts that are still correct.
The first version came back as a full module, with five sections, 13 pages, a quiz and an assignment. For a first increment I would ask it to cut that back to the one task the release changes, and I had given it no product documentation, so an expert would need to check the feature details either way.
The sprint update went well. It added a page on PDF attachments and a page on troubleshooting them, and kept the other sections as they were. The one change I had not asked for was a shorter "Build a Scheduled Report" page, which went from six blocks to four, so that page goes on the review list.
In my test, the step from a backlog item to a reviewable increment took minutes, which leaves the sprint for the parts that need people: checking the product details with an expert and watching real agents use it. Every update still gets a review against the request, because "without changing the parts that are still correct" is an instruction the reviewer has to verify.
Inspect the usable increments and test evidence, then run a keep, stop, try retrospective. Includes quality and approval checks before learner release. Editable Word file, no email required.
Agile vs ADDIE vs SAM
Agile is often confused with other iterative approaches. Lou Russell draws the line clearly: agile delivers complete, usable pieces in sprints, which "is not prototyping" (ATD, 2015). Choose agile when the content changes often, reviewers are available every sprint and scope can flex.
For the detail on the others, see the Successive Approximation Model, rapid prototyping and the five ADDIE phases.
When agile instructional design struggles
- Subject-matter experts with no time. Agile needs reviewers every sprint. If experts can review only once a month, sprints stall waiting for them.
- Fixed contracts. Prioritisation is easier when some scope can change within agreed constraints. A fixed-price or fixed-scope contract does not prevent agile work, but the team needs clear rules for changes, approval and acceptance. Sprint duration is fixed in Scrum; project cost is not automatically fixed by the method.
- Compliance sign-off. Regulated training may need full approval before anything is released, which limits how small an increment can be.
Case study: Scrum teams at BYU Independent Study in the United States
Brigham Young University's online course unit moved to scrum teams in 2016. A study of the change (Erickson, 2018) found the main issues were "how to accommodate for part-time schedules, the complexity of working on different projects, and how to facilitate communication in scrum teams if co-location is not possible" (BYU ScholarsArchive, 2018).
Make the next increment useful and ready
Agile instructional design helps a team respond to changing needs by working in small increments and using frequent feedback to choose what comes next. The useful unit is a learning experience that supports a real task. A sprint ending is not, by itself, a reason to release material to learners.
Take the highest-priority learner story and agree its acceptance criteria, expert reviewer and Definition of Done before building. For the scheduled-report module, that includes realistic practice, an aligned check, current product behaviour, accessibility and required approvals. Inspect the increment with users, adjust the backlog and use the retrospective to improve how the team works. Release when the material is ready, even if that means coordinating several completed increments for one launch.
Frequently Asked Questions
An approach to managing training work through frequent feedback and usable increments. Scrum-inspired versions use sprints, but not every agile approach does. An increment must meet the agreed quality checks and required approvals before learners receive it.
The Lot Like Agile Management Approach, created by Megan Torrance of TorranceLearning. It adapts agile for learning projects, using learner personas, action mapping and learner stories, and allows for designers working on several projects at once.
ADDIE describes five instructional design functions and can be used iteratively. Agile organises work and feedback in short cycles. Teams can use ADDIE functions within an agile project; formal sign-off after every ADDIE phase is a governance choice, not a universal requirement of the model.
Yes. Keep the required approval and audit trail, and agree what can be reviewed in small increments. Internal iteration can continue even when learner release needs a coordinated sign-off.
Carolina Martin
Carolina is a highly experienced learning designer with tech start-up experience. She is based in Sydney and previously designed courses alongside Coursebox founder Travis in a previous job. She is passionate about delivering engaging learning experiences and brings the same perspective to customer experience too. She manages our customer support documentation and product testing processes.
