I started a few weeks ago now to jot down some thoughts on the profession of agile coaching. This has been on my mind for a few months now, and I have had some great discussions with agile coach peers in various spaces about what our job really is. This turned into a rather lengthy, and dare I say, comprehensive, explanation of the profession of agile coaching.
I have divided this into three posts, one following the other. Look for the rest very soon.
Getting Started
The profession of agile coaching is not well defined in the agile community. While it surely can be a lucrative trade, responding to the demand of organizations that seek to become less traditional, bureaucratic, hierarchical, slow-to-market (or any other myriad ails of a decently large human endeavor) and more adaptive, nimble, and future-proof. Organizations across all industries have seen disruptors totally change the landscape of their industry, and they are watching tech giants foray into new spaces, creating an alarming threat to traditional business models. And now we have a global pandemic with COVID 19 forcing industries to pivot rapidly to meet the challenges necessitated by public health policy.
Most technology organizations, which includes those that use technology to deliver their products or services, have had at least some small experiments with agile practices. The 14th State of Agile report shows that 95% of organizations are practicing agile development methods. We also see larger organizations using agile methods for 5 years or more. Yet, in many cases, it is just a handful of teams in one part of the organization. To get to something broader (say, enterprise agility?) and thus more impactful, you need an experienced agile coach that can guide you.
Agile coaching, to many, is a nebulous role and there is certainly some confusion in the industry. Organizations want agility, but they often struggle with where to start and lack the experience to navigate an agile journey. Responding to this demand, more and more agilists with some agile experience market themselves as an agile coach. But ask many agile coaches out there what they do . . .
. . . and you will get a wide variety of responses. We have some places to turn to for ideas as to how to define the discipline of agile coaching. You might get something a bit more comprehensive, perhaps pointing to something like this Agile Coaching in a Nutshell infographic (nothing against the fine folks at Dandy People, it’s just that that while it looks nice and is chock full of information, it does not fully explain the discipline of agile coaching and the nuances involved).
I, too, have struggled to explain my role to client organizations, and to my friends and family. I decided to finally write down some of my own ideas on the profession, and also provide as many resources as I can to help you, dear reader, on your agile journey. I hope you find it useful.
Here I will explore the profession of agile coaching and shed some light on where they focus their time and energy. What is an agile coach? What do they do? What value would one provide an organization? I will explain the value proposition of a certified agile coach and what a professional of this caliber can bring to an organization. I will then explore what agile coaches do for organizations and how they might go about it. Agile coaching is an established profession that can take many years to attain the skill, discipline, and experience needed to be effective. Make sure you know what to look for in a professional agile coach.
What is an Agile Coach?
A good start at defining the profession came to life recently from the community at whatisagilecoaching.org where a group of agile coaches, including many guides from the Scrum Alliance, created a site dedicated to articulating the discipline of agile coaching. Featured prominently on the site is a definition of agile coaching:
Agile Coaching is…a collaboration with people in a thought provoking and creative journey using coaching approaches with an agile mindset and principles to help individuals, teams and organizations be the best they can be.
whatisagilecoaching.org
I love this explanation. I would only tweak it slightly to add that agile coaches actually help create the best ecosystem for teams and organizations to be the best they can be. This gives a little more responsibility to the role of the agile coach. Response-able in the sense that an agile coach is able to respond to meet the organization’s needs, which will ultimately serve as a guide to a deliberate modification in the ecosystem of an organization (be it cultural, structural, operational, etc.). What the definition above drives home is that true agile coaching relies on the agency of a client organization to decide how it wants to evolve into something more adaptive. Agile coaches do not lead that operation. Nor are they the agents of change that many organizations are looking for. They may be a harbinger of change, but should not be the ones to lead and implement. If you want to “make change happen” consider hiring a consultant who can give you a punch list of changes to implement and then serve as a scapegoat when those changes are imposed and then poorly received (wince). Leaders of agile organizations that hire the right kind of agile coach are signing up for the support of a guide who can work with them, not for them, to help them navigate their own agile journey, in a variety of ways.
For many years I have referred to the Agile Coaching Competency Framework from the Agile Coaching Institute (note the incredible list of resources further down on that page, and also see my own resource list). This was developed by Lyssa Adkins, who wrote “the book” on Agile Coaching and developed an incredible agile coach bootcamp, aligned to the ICAgile Agile Coaching track. This was my agile coach training in 2017, and I would recommend it to anyone wanting to really understand the profession before labelling and then marketing themselves as an agile coach. In the ACI framework, we see areas of focus, or competencies, for agile coaching: mentoring, teaching, facilitation, and professional coaching. There is a bedrock foundation as an agile-lean practitioner, and then other focus areas in the vein of business, technical, or transformation mastery. If you want to read even more, Jack Calabrese does a nice job of exploring the model in part 1 and then part 2 of this series.
Yet, I think we need a bit more to fully understand the discipline of agile coaching. So let’s go a bit further . . .
What Does a Good Agile Coach Focus On?
In the profession of agile coaching, just like any other profession, there is a vast array of skills needed to obtain mastery. A good agile coach will focus on different specialty areas, depending on the nature of an agile coaching engagement and the needs of the client organization.
At a team level, this may be team dynamics and self-organization, product ownership, Lean UX, XP and other aspects of software craftsmanship (including tooling). When working with multiple teams, this could be a focus on coordinated agile product development, considered scaling agile or distributed agile. For departments, this could be a focus on portfolio management, lean startup, R&D, or DevOps. And then at an organizational level, the focus would surely be agile transformation, including structure, culture, and leadership.
An agile coach may also choose to pursue expertise in a particular specialty based on their own background and skills. If we look back at the ACI Agile Coach Competency Framework, we see that it leans toward a lens of agility for software development organizations. Perhaps the framework needs revision with a more inclusive product development lens? Regardless, it provides a useful set of areas to consider where an agile coach might specialize. An agile coach might have a technical background, and pursue coaching in the technical space (this could include either how we design products, or how we build them). An agile coach might have a business background, and be interested in the product leadership (product management, sales, growing a product) or aspects of adaptive budgeting (see beyond budgeting). Finally, an agile coach might be more interested in the transformation mastery space, which would include aspects of organizational development and change management, with a leaning toward Agile HR.
The thing to realize here is that no Agile Coach is an expert at everything. In fact, be wary of any Agile Coach that comes to you proclaiming to be an expert on agility or “all things agile” — we are all on a journey. The array of practices that an agile coach could harness in support of client outcomes is so vast. In many ways, it is emerging as we explore better ways of working and different models for human endeavors to organize, ideate, fund, and execute. Yet, an experienced agile coach can provide expertise in leadership, business, relationship systems and emotional intelligence, in goal setting and measuring success, and in many other areas described above. And, they bring their expertise from past experiences with agile in other organizations.
So you can see here that we have a funny little paradox. Our clients don’t need experts, but they do need expertise. The goal of agile coaching is to guide toward internal competency with agility; it is a collaboration with people in a thought provoking and creative journey using coaching approaches. It is not a consultancy doling out expertise for a daily rate–that can actually be quite damaging, not only to the people in the organization being “changed” in the name of agility, but also the leaders who fail to gain any real competency with agile practices. This post by Geof Ellingham does a nice job of starting a dialogue around the idea that our clients don’t need experts, but they do need expertise. You may think you need an expert for a quick fix, but in reality, you need a guide who can help you find creative solutions to your problems. This is a topic that I plan to explore further here in the future.
Until the Next Iteration . . .
Jason
Continue on to part 2 here