Book Notes From: "Coaching Agile Teams" By Lyssa Adkins
Will I Be a Good Coach?
- Nothing prepared me for the
power and simplicity of agile done well.
- Project management was
serious business - project managers orchestrated the working of the whole
machine.
- Mental model of project
management was outdated.
- First week - had produced
real work. - that would have taken us months to do in the past.
- If agile teams are going to
have these kinds of stellar experiences with agile - they need coaches who
can provide the right teaching, coaching and mentoring to make it
possible.
Why Agile Coaching Matters
- If you're like most aspiring
agile coaches - very little has prepared you to be an agile coach.
- Questions like
- What is my role in a
self-organizing team
- How do I help the team yet
still stay hands off.
- Understand the world you
coach in - and the people you coach.
- Most coaches will go too far
in either extreme.
- The world feels far more
uncertain than anyone can remember.
- The people I coach want to
know that they matter - they are no longer happy being a cog in the wheel.
- Their contributions are seen
as valuable too.
- The people I coach are not
motivated by carrots and sticks - they are motivated by a sense of worth
and purpose.
- Agile coaching is important
because it helps in two areas:
- Producing products that
matter in real, complex and uncertain world
- Adding meaning to people's
work lives.
- Agile focuses us on the
critical products to create and makes it possible for us to create them.
- Most important after most
important.
- Teams need coaches who bring
a view of agile done well.
The Agile Coaching Context
- Agile itself is sufficient -
coaching deepens it.
- Small set of practices to
teach.
- Easy to get going - but hard
to do well.
- Agile exposes the dirt that
has been swept under the rug for years.
The Doing of Agile Coaching
- Agile is a set of values,
practices, principals and roles we uphold as we coach people.
- Become their facilitator,
teacher, coach, mentor - bring to them other things we have learned.
- Model has room for what you
have learned.
The Being of Agile Coaching
- You must know your job as
coach and your way around agile and be constantly searching for that next
breakthrough idea for the team.
- Agile coaching is 40% doing
and 60% being.
- An agile coach - models agile
all the time. How you interact with the team.
- The most important thing you
can do in in the face of a mistake is to model the agile value of
openness.
- Imagine a team that admits
mistakes, reinforces their shared values, forgives one another, and moves
on.
Lets' Get Our Language
Straight
- A scrum master who takes
teams beyond getting agile practices up and running into their deliberate
and joyful pursuit of high performance is an agile coach.
- Coach multiple teams - seen a
range of possibilities and limitations and successes and failures across a
variety of situations.
- An Agile Coach is:
- Appreciates the depths of
agile practices and principles - help team appreciate them too.
- Someone who has faced the
big dragons, organizational impediments, has become a coach to managers
and other outsiders
- Someone who can help
management see the benefits of agile practices.
- Someone that has brought
ideas from professional facilitation, coaching, conflict management…
- Agile Mash-Ups
- When teams mashed up scrum
with something else - such as lean or user-centered design - when they let agile fall by the
wayside - they often struggled and sometimes outright failed.
- The seed of the downfall -
is finding a way of working that fit them best.
- Agile Coach - plays the field
and keeps its options open.
Moving Toward Agile Coaching
- Each person's journey to
becoming an agile coach follows a different path - some of the street
signs along the way may look familiar
The Road From Scrum Master
to Agile Coach
- A scrum master gets a team up
and running with scrum practices and agile principles.
- After a few sprints the scrum
master often notices a significate depth to each of the scrum practices
- Scrum master realizes that a
significant amount of time gets spent coaching people in the wider
organization to support the team.
- An agile Scrum Coach is
- Appreciates the depths of
agile practice.
The Road From Project
Manager to Agile Coach
- A project manager and agile
coach are like a house cat and a jaguar - they are simply not in the same
family.
- A project manager plans and
controls - supervising throughout.
- An agile coach - Guides
- The road from project manager
to agile coach may be a bit longer for some.
- Order to become an agile
coach
- Training in agile
- Practice on teams
- Leads to multiple teams in
succession
- Mentored by someone who has
made this transition from project manager to agile coach.
- An agile coach mentor offers
in-the-moment coaching to help you see how agile works and to bring it to
your attention when you inadvertently fall back into plan driven mind
sets.
- The coach focuses on the
getting teams to do agile well.
The Role From Tech Lead to
Agile Coach
- Sometimes agile coaching
skills get added to one's bag of tricks as a way to further assist people
developing their technical skills
- Over time they being to
mentor other developers.
- Then the teaching and
coaching cross multiple teams.
- At some point the tech lead
starts using the term agile coach.
An Agile Coach Emerges
- As you successfully being to
work with agile teams - you begin to change
- What you do as a coach and
what you talk about shift as you move from managing to coaching.
Native Wiring
- People who make resoundingly
successful transitions into agile coaching have a few things in common
- Ability to read the room. -
read the emotion in the air.
- They care more about people
than they do products. - caring about people.
- They cultivate curiosity -
they know what they don’t know.
- They believe that people are
basically good. Meet people where they are.
- They know that plans fall
apart. So they act in the moment with the team.
- They have a thirst for
learning.
- They believe that any group
of people can do good things in the world.
- They have a low tolerance
for institutional reasons that hold people back from excelence
- Yeah I know it’s a waste of
time - but that is how we have always done it.
- They believe that
disequilibrium is essential - chaos and destruction are simply building
blocks for something better.
- They risk being wrong. - own
up to it and move on.
Make Agile Coaching Your
Personal Experience
- Find your own voice as an agile coach.
- No one does agile coaching
the same way.
Refresher
- Becoming an agile coach -
education, experience, and practice.
- Being an agile coach in all
that you do - is a powerful example.
- Path to being an agile coach
are many and varied.
- Qualities of successful agile
coaches
- Openness
- People Orientation
- Deep and passionate pursuit
of personal and professional excellence.