My time at ARCA is drawing to a close. It has been an incredible experience for me and for those that I work with. I came here as an agile project manager or scrum master, fresh out of the Army. I was eager to make the transition into a career in technology and probably more eager to learn as much as I could about the principles and practices of agile. I got all of that and then some.
This past year has been an amazing journey of self-discovery, professional development, and the development of others in an organization. I am excited to continue my journey to becoming an awesome agile coach. Leading and growing my own agile practice as a form of Agile PMO was a challenging and rewarding experience. The 21 teams we worked with across product development, and the myriad other teams in manufacturing, tech support, and sales taught me so much about team coaching and the art of Scrum applied to any discipline.
Working inside of a Holacracy has been an especially rewarding experience. I hope to seek out other non-hierarchical operating systems or at least try to implement them with future clients.
Whether I land as an internal agile coach, or a consultant with some firm somewhere, I have so many experiments that I want to dabble with as I build out my approach to agile coaching. Sure, I jotted down a lofting description of my coach approach in May. But I will certainly be honing my craft as an agile coach for years to come.
Here is a quick list of some ideas I want try out, and some experiments I want to run with my first client wherever I land.
- Team Level Work — become and excellent multi-team coach
- Open Space event to create an invitation for org change (Open Space Agility[OSA] model)
- Model good facilitation, and create disciples – perhaps a training course?
- Define what agile is (start with the manifesto values and principles); empower teams to develop their practices — within the guardrails
- Use core protocols for team engagement
- Coaching agreement – make and use with leaders
- Team health checks or check-ins quarterly (an assessment)
- Make agile roadmap – what is in our transformation backlog?
- Start team CI Experiment Kanban board — write experiment stories with hypothesis
- Develop SoS model, and have daily meetings with own team
- Develop team working agreements and core values — use CV-1 exercise
- “Community journey” live animation mural
I am sure this list will grow as my client list expands. I am eager for the next opportunity to lead change at an organization interested in adopting an agile approach to the way they work.
Until the Next Iteration . . .
Jason