All articles about Agile Coaching

The Night Sky and the Tea Koan

As a coach, there are a number of stories that I usually talk about to my new teams to help them understand what my job is all about.

One I like to use with teams that think they already know agile is one I call “the night sky” which I based on my own personal experience. It goes something like this; when I was a kid growing up in the suburbs, I frequently played games outside with my friends at night. Sometimes we would look up at the sky and try to identify those constellations we knew. Most often we found the big and little dipper, but our limited knowledge (and limited view) allowed for little else. Nevertheless, to me this was the night sky.

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Apke's Law

Most of my 7+ years of Agile coaching and scrum mastering has been working with existing waterfall organizations and helping them become more agile. During this period I have seen a wide range of companies and a wide range of successful adoption, but I have noticed one thing that is constant. This was brought home recently as I reflect on my most recent agile presentation/discussion given at Geekdom in San Antonio last week.

In this Agile open forum the majority of the questions dealt with transitioning from waterfall to agile. This is where I first publicly broached Apke’s law which states:

Your transition to agile will only go as far as the highest ranking manager who understands and supports it.

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Want a Quick Agile Win? Try Office Hours

When you are an Agile Coach you sometimes must resign yourself to the fact that it will usually take team members awhile to get it and victories can be few and far between. One thing that I can recommend for a quick win and something that has worked well for me on multiple occasions (when it could be implemented) is something that I called office hours. I can only assume that I am not the one who invented this, but it is something that I “discovered” independently to solve the issue of resources being pulled into unproductive meetings when I needed them to be on task for our stories.

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Looking for Agile Success – All You Need is Love

Like any professional should I spend a great deal of my time attending user’s groups, reading professional articles, speaking with leaders in my field, etc in an attempt to find ways to do my job better. This morning I stumbled upon a couple of interesting articles, The Unintended Consequences Of A Leader’s Lack Of Trust (whose link has gone inactive) and Employees leave managers, not companies. While not exactly writing about the love, these got me to thinking about love and its place fostering Agility.

It is the nature of my job to bond tightly with the teams that I work with and also to have to leave these teams frequently, as they achieve a high level of self organization, to pursue opportunities to help other teams. I am currently faced with one of these moments and the feeling, as always, is bittersweet. I am excited about my new opportunity but will genuinely miss the teams I have worked with over the past few months.

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Thoughts on Agile Coaching

When I tell people I am an Agile Coach, unless they are in IT, I tend to get a lot of strange looks. Most of the time they will say something like, “I get the coaching part, but what the heck is Agile?” It is at this part of the conversation that they experience immediate regret as I launch into an endless barrage of commentary on Agile development.

Lately, however, I have begun to re-examine my own assumptions about what it the Coaching aspect of an Agile Coach is, especially now that there are so many professional coaches looking for work after the end of the regular NFL season.

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Are You a Scrum Master? Be a Gardener.

I have recently been reading Jurgen Appelo’s book Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders. For those wondering what management’s role in an Agile organization should be then this is a good read.

In my current consulting gig I am coaching someone to replace me as a scrum master so we spend a great deal of time talking about Agile, Scrum and what it means to be a scrum master.

One of the things I have always used as a metaphor is the concept of Scrum Master (and managers) as gardeners. Though I may have heard it somewhere and forgot it or it may have reached my subconscious somehow, I came up with the metaphor of gardener because my in-laws live with me and are retired. They spend a great deal of time gardening. It is from their work bringing forth trees, flowers and mountains of vegetables that I took my cue.

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