Agile Coaching
Building On and Moving Beyond Agile Practices
Agile Coaching is about helping people, teams and organizations be better at agile, often by tackling the challenges with people and relationships! Agile, and certainly agile coaching, involve more than simply reading the Agile Manifesto and saying “poof” we are agile. Doing agile is tough, tougher than sequential processes (e.g. waterfall) by far! However, the rewards and value are well worth it.
Different organizations have different needs based on where they are in their agile implementations and ongoing improvements. Some organizations have more success than others when implementing and maintaining momentum with agile.
While lean and agile principles have been around a long time, we continue to find that every organization gains success with guidance. Hiring an agile coach, or an agile coaching company, is not a simple process. There are many types of agile coaches. Some focus more on general agile practices, some on leadership and teams, others on technical practices – there are a lot of options.
Agile Coaching Aligned to You
General Agile Practices – These include sprint planning, backlog grooming and re-factoring, retrospectives, release planning, and estimating. Coaching on agile practices is an important place to start for many organizations. People have been through training, know a lot about agile, but require coaching to help them see areas they are missing. Many people see agile practices as a set of “rules” that must be followed – this is not correct. Agile practices should be supporting agile principles; coaching should be aimed at helping people first understand the practices, then start to move from “follow-the-rules” to “embody agile principles and value”. This approach helps organizations move from okay, to good, to great.
People and Teams – Coaching for people and teams goes beyond the basics of agile practices and addresses more challenging topics, such as building stronger and more capable teams, team conflicts, decision making, burn out, turnover, stress, and politics. Coaching in this area is often what helps teams move from “getting started in agile” to the next stage of their agile journey.
Leadership and Executives – Agile coaching for leaders and executives is absolutely critical to companies succeeding with agile. As teams expose organizational impediments, leaders have to react quickly – both by understanding what is happening and working to resolve these obstacles.
Leaders are very often the limiting factor in an organization’s ability to succeed with agile, DESPITE their best intentions.
We work with leaders to identify areas where they are limiting value delivery – and we work with them to expose these issues so they can solve them. We often start our process with leaders and leadership teams by completing a Leadership Circle Assessment to help us identify and focus on key areas that influence leadership effectiveness.
Organizational Change – Organizational change, or organizational transformation, is important as agile grows beyond a few teams and begins to affect all areas of an organization. Being agile goes beyond IT and software development… it involves sales, human “resources,” leadership, finance, executives, marketing, operations…everyone! Culture change does not just happen because someone wants it to, it takes a lot of time and is based on what is really happening. We help organizations with cultural assessments, goal setting, and forward focused coaching.
Interested in learning more about our approach to agile coaching, our leadership and team assessments, and coaching engagement roadmap? Contact us, we’d love to talk with you and learn more about your needs.
We start off with a simple conversation to find out more about what you are looking for, if we might be a fit for you, and if you might be a fit for us.