Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/gevjen/archive/2016/07/22/186960.aspx
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management was outdated.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.