We cannot teach people anything; we can only help them discover it within themselves. ~Galileo Galilei
Meet Joy. She’s an Agile Coach who has been working with teams for several years. She loves coaching individuals and teams and gets fulfilled by helping teams bring their whole selves to work and deliver value to customers.
It’s Monday morning and her team is trying to get the stories “Ready for Iteration Review”. The iteration ends on Tuesday and the review is planned for the next morning. There are some issues however that came up during testing and the team is trying to resolve before the review.
It’s Wednesday afternoon and while the review went okay, there were many missing functionality. Fortunately, this team is serious about getting better so they setup a retrospective to talk about what went well and what could be better. One of the team members however pointed out that their retrospectives are becoming stale.
She said, “There must be a better way to make it better.” WOW, a retrospective about the retrospective. Talk about continuous improvement.
The team agreed with her so they reached out to Joy. Joy proposed a different retrospective technique using cause and effect to identify possible root causes. The team was able to identify a few possible root causes and came up with potential “experiments” to run. Joy also ended the retrospective on a high note using the appreciation game.
Another team was about to kick off a new project. Joy worked with the team to facilitate a chartering session as a liftoff and getting things started on the right foot. Joy also introduced them to the Agile manifesto (values and principles) as well as Modern Agile.
Joy also worked with the team to build their product backlog and proposed the 3-amigos to discover examples and scenarios. Joy helped them build their user story map and define their product roadmap and planned releases. She also introduced the team to Behavior Driven Development (BDD). The team was motivated to try the new concepts and techniques.
Later that day, Joy had coffee with Mary (an Engineer on another team) and Mary was frustrated about stories that are vague and hard to test. Joy shared the Agile testing quadrants with Mary and introduced her to the testing manifesto (yes, there is such a thing!).
So, what do Agile Coaches do?
Joy’s story is not unique. Agile Coaches have a variety of responsibilities such as introducing Agile to new teams, facilitating practices that are context relevant and situation specific as well as delivering sessions on new techniques that are useful to teamwork and product delivery. They might also facilitate workshops with leaders on what Agile means in their context, why they want to be Agile and what it will help them do.
What are the different levels of Agile Coaching?
Agile Coaching happens at different levels of the organization. Agile Coaches work at the team, program (multiple teams and functional managers) and the enterprise level (working with leaders across the enterprise).
Each level has a different focus and it is not necessarily a progression. There are many Agile Coaches who have been working with the teams and that’s where they focus. Agile Coaches who work at the enterprise level focus on culture, organizational learning and leadership with the goal of improving learning and agility across the enterprise.
Agile Coaching Institute (ACI) developed an Agile Coaching Competency Framework that offers good insights into the skills and techniques Agile Coaches need on their lifelong learning. There are different skills needed for coaching at different levels of the organization. Experienced Agile Coaches usually have the ability to work at different levels but they tend to focus on one or two areas.
How do I become an Agile Coach?
Agile Coaches come from different backgrounds including and not limited to Product delivery, Technical domain, Culture and Organizational learning, etc.
Regardless their background and experience, Agile Coaches are lifelong learners who are curious, ask questions, listen and motivated by making a difference and a positive impact.
How to develop a coaching capability?
To develop a coaching capability, coaching needs to be more than a role, it needs to a discipline. The coaching capability needs to enable and deepen the learning. It also requires a community that supports coaching at different levels of the organization. There’s no one approach to developing a coaching capability however the two main ingredients I discovered were mostly around learning and community.
Being an Agile Coach (or a Professional Coach) is a fulfilling journey. It’s a journey of discovery. Not only you get to help individuals and teams discover what’s possible and accomplishing things they didn’t think they could accomplish, you also continue to grow, learn and uncover better ways of doing things. After all that’s how it started when the Agile manifesto came about in 2001.
