This part 2 of a three-part series on the profession of agile coaching. You can find part 1 here. Stay tuned for the final piece coming soon!

Now that we have covered the profession of agile coaching at high level, including a definition of agile coaching, and where agile coaches focus their efforts within organizations, let’s spend some time on what that looks like in a practical sense.

So, What do Agile Coaches Really Do? 

An agile coach brings a variety of skills and a great many experiences with agile to bear for their clients.  Based on the needs of the client, an agile coach may take any of several approaches to help an organization realize its goals with agility. 

The ACI Agile Coaching competency framework gives us a good view of four basic stances: teacher, mentor, facilitator coach.  

This is a simplification of a model shown below: 

These nine stances are explained even more thoroughly in this overview by Agile Velocity. So now we have a useful model for understanding the many stances that an agile coach may take with a client.

But what do they actually do?  What are some general areas where I can see agile coaches employed? Here are some broad categories: guide skill acquisition, build high performing teams, and build sustainable agile delivery. Let’s explore each of them in turn.

Guide Skill Acquisition, Empiricism, and Learning 

Agile coaches can guide skill acquisition. Just like a sports coach, who likely has played the game, and has in-depth knowledge of techniques to be successful at it. Agile coaches are experienced lean-agile practitioners — they bring a wealth of experiences in support of agile teams trying to learn new skills. While they may not be an expert in your particular space, a good agile coach will have experiences applying agile practices in a variety of contexts and be able to explain not only what key practices work well but also why. For example short iterations, pairing, and frequent customer involvement.  A good agile coach knows the ropes of collaboration, customer centrism, tight feedback loops, and an inspect and adapt cycle, and can guide you through it. An agile coach’s experience with other organizations only serves to benefit each successive organization they coach.  Your organization may not even know the questions to ask, and not have the answers readily available inside the organization. An agile coach brings outside perspective and outside ideas as to what might work where.  

At the very least, a good agile coach will be a champion (dare I say, a zealot?) for empiricism.  They will be your cheerleader for trying new things, experimenting, learning from mistakes, and making decision based on what is known from your current situation (rather than what can be predicted about the future).  This will be a tremendous asset for you and your organization as you experiment with new ways of working and try to make meaning out of what you discover along the way.  Agile coaches also love to work closely with individuals and teams to get one percent better every day. Again, an analogy to sports coaching resonates here.  This idea is framed well in in this post on The power of marginal gains. I often tell agile teams: “If you only improve 4% each sprint, (assuming a 2 week sprint cadence), you will be more than 100% better a year from now.”  As Atul Gawande explains, if you want to get great at something, get a coach! 

Agile Coaches work with leaders at all levels to improve their processes, culture, and product development with a habitual inspect and adapt cycle. They will help organizations embed a culture that values experimentation and embraces failure. This will help your organization become a learning organization. 

Experienced agile coaches are able to bring agile coaching outside of technology and product development, and apply agile values and principles to coaching other parts of the enterprise, including core support functions. This will help embed the agile mindset across an organization and greatly increase the odds of lasting change. 

Build High Performing Teams

Agile coaches also build high performing teams.  For a Scrum Master, their product is a high performing team.  Their primary overarching goal is to make the Scrum Team achieve greatness and high performance.  As a team coach, that is what Scrum Masters hang their hat on.  An Agile Coach may work with multiple teams, or they may work with a team of teams, depending on how the organization is approaching agile product development. 

Agile coaches, just like great Scrum Masters, understand and can coach team dynamics. They believe collaboration is paramount, and know that effective teams work together daily, with high fidelity communication, everyone engaged, and an attitude of learning by doing.  They know that the best agile teams have close contact with their customer(s), tight feedback loops, and approach their work iteratively.  They also know how to challenge and support the team as it works to improve in terms of psychological safety, working agreements, and conflict protocols.

Great agile coaches go even further to create an ecosystem for teams of teams to excel. They work broadly across a human system (organization) to connect teams to each other in a value stream of product delivery.  One way to do this is by holding up a mirror to contradictory positions and helping clients identify obstacles to their own progress.  In Group and Team Coaching: The secret life of groups, Christine Thornton celebrates the opportunities paradoxes offer for organisational growth, and advises that: The coach’s role is to help group members recognise the paradoxical positions they hold and make sense of the tension, and help them resist coming down on one side or the other. Instead, the tensions between the two sides of the paradox must be held so that the benefits of both can be gained. The paradox is not “resolved”, but “exploited”.

Team coaching is still an emerging field, and Agile coaches have a lot of experience in the space of team dynamics and team performance.  There is a real opportunity, there, I believe. More on that later. 

Build Sustainable, Agile delivery 

Finally, Agile Coaches help build a sustainable agile delivery.  One way to achieve that is by establishing an agile practice. The primary focus of this practice, at least initially, should be on forming healthy agile teams dedicated themselves and to their customer, to then create continuous flow of value through the enterprise.

Then, surely more systemic impediments to enterprise agility will surface and a team of agile coaches working in concert at the behest of leaders in the organization can be a powerful ally toward recognizing and then tackling these impediments. 

An agile practice working in this way would have deep knowledge of agile product development. They would bring extensive experience working with agile frameworks, to offer various options to their clients.  They would also enable technical craftsmanship in team culture. Finally, they would coach and mentor agilists (scrum masters, product owners, developers, leaders) and nurture and internal coaching capability by growing the next generation of agile coaches.

A word of caution, here about agile practices.  They need to be an enabler for change, not a driver.  Change must come from the organization itself, not spawn out of initiatives from a group of agile coaches. 

I will come back to this idea of an agile coaching capability later. There are some great examples out there and this is something I am seeing a lot more of as firms move past the revolving door of agile coach consultants coming in and out.

Stay tuned for part 3 of this series where will go a bit deeper into how agile coaches work.

Until the Next Iteration . . .

Jason

Continue on to part 3 here