Being Agile – Need of the hour for Corporate, Start-ups and Teams! Rethink, Restart, Regroup, Re-grow!

How do I restart my business after the lock-down? How do I regroup my team and keep them motivated to navigate through the tough times? How do I grow back to the levels before the pandemic?

I am sure these questions are hovering on your mind if you are an entrepreneur, senior executive or a start-up founder. Yes, last few months have been really challenging for all of us and the question is what’s next? In my experience of working with numerous organizations and start-ups, agile approach to sustainable growth would help answer all the above questions. In this article, I am attempting to explain what Agile Philosophy is and how an Agile Coach can help you negotiate the difficult times and bring the organization back on track of growth and sustainability. The efforts are also in the direction to help you adopt Agile as a culture in your organizations and teams.

Hope this attempt of explaining agile philosophy will help you feel and prepare better in getting back your business on track of sustainable growth. In addition, connect/message me if you want to discuss about how agile can benefit your team/organization.

What is Agile Coaching? – Agile and Coaching

While several organizations are accepting the need to become more agile in their approach, it is very important that we understand the concept well before incorporating this change into the system. This article is an effort to understand the nuts and bolts of Agile Coaching and the role that an Agile Coach plays to ensure the smooth transition towards transforming teams and organization to become agile.

Let us first understand the terms Agile and Coaching separately and then dive deep into the details. Agile, from teams/organization perspective, is to establish a model where people collaborate to work towards achieving a common goal. As the teams and organizations move towards becoming more agile, the agility provides the ability to evolve products, processes and people quickly and continuously that result in customer delight which eventually leads to improved bottom line. 

While coaching is the ability of the individual, in this case, a coach, to facilitate the change in the teams and organizations that will help them move towards practicing agile. There are various roles that an agile coach plays that helps team understand and practice agility. While we talk about coaching, it is important to understand what coaching is and what it is not. In the later part of this article we shall further discuss on the role of an agile coach.

Coaching is a very sensitive instrument that can make or break the transformation process hence it is advisable for any coach to get into the coaching mindset with certain belief. Coaches should refer to some of the coaching beliefs and mindset below and see for themselves as to where they are in terms of living these beliefs.

• Everyone is unique and their needs are different. Same solutions don’t work for all.
• Human beings are naturally creative and it’s just a matter of letting their creative juices flourish in a collaborative environment.
• There is no failure, only learning and feedback. All upsets can be turned into success by providing the right kind of feedback.
• There is more than one solution to any problem. What’s required is the contribution from everyone to come up with multiple solutions by taking a holistic view.
• Good or bad in the world are subjective. Empathise with people and try to look at the problems from their perspectives.
• Everyone makes a choice based on available resources. Resource crunch or unlimited resources defines the solutions considered.
• If one can do, anyone can do. Removing limitations from one’s own mind will make them achieve some of the most difficult tasks.

There is a common misconception that Agile Coaching has been most useful in the IT/Software industry, in reality, it is industry agnostic. Any team or organization willing to move towards being more people centric and wants to achieve high level of customer satisfaction and overall growth, can adopt Agile philosophy.  To validate this, I have worked with companies and teams across the segments and sectors ranging from IT, Banking, Manufacturing, Education, Retail, Logistics, Fashion, FMCG etc helping them incorporating Agile philosophy in their cultures.

So what is the Agile Philosophy?

To understand the Agile philosophy, let us go back about a couple of decades where some developers who were not happy with the entire heavy lifting software development process and the customers’ contracts that were needed to be followed to the T. They discussed and debated the ways by which how we can bring about the change that will make the software or product development process more people centric and also involve customers/clients in the process so that the products that are developed have better quality and gain market acceptance.

While there are various frameworks such as Scrum, XP, Kanban, Scaled Agile, Lean, DSDM and others that lead teams towards agility, the Agile Philosophy is not restricted to any one framework. It is the way of working that helps teams get the best out of themselves by becoming people and customer centric. With this in mind, they came up with Agile Manifesto which includes four values and twelve principles to ensure Agile development. Have a look at the image below to understand the four values and twelve principles of the Agile manifesto. (Image credit: DZone)

Benefits of Becoming an Agile Team or Agile Organization

There must be some tangible and intangible benefits for which teams and organizations are moving towards agility. Below are some of the reasons that will help understanding the reasons especially to those who have been resisting the transformation;

• Agile makes you more people focused than contract focused.
• It helps teams and people in the organization share better relationship with each other which results in shared vision and common goal.
• It helps in quickly developing products with improved quality.
• It significantly optimizes resource utilization by developing fast, learning fast and growing fast.
• It involves customers/clients in the process that helps validation process more transparent and acceptable.

Above are some of the tangible benefits of becoming agile, however, the intangibles are numerous which in long term helps organizations sustain, gain and retain new and existing clients.

Who is an Agile Coach

Now that we understand the concept of Agile and how teams and organizations can transform themselves using Agile philosophy, let us talk about the Agile Coach, the person who enables the system to move towards agility. Agile Coach is often referred to as the change agent or the facilitator that uses agile philosophy to initiate and incorporate the transformation.

The Agile Coach works with teams to understand the issues and problems at hand that resist change and uses his coaching abilities to engage teams in overcoming the problems and resistance to change. The reason behind referring the Agile Coach as change agent is because the coach does not become the part of the change but remains as only a facilitator that helps teams change.

Agile Coaching Competency Framework

Let us look at Agile Coaching Competency Framework that describes the role or an Agile coach in an organization and the values that he/she brings in. As we can see in the image below, Agile Coach comes with all the facilitation competencies such as teaching, mentoring, coaching and facilitation. These are some of the essential skills for individuals who aspire to become Agile Coaches or Change Agents.

Based on Agile Coaching Competency Framework, an Agile Coach is expected to demonstrate teaching, mentoring, coaching and facilitation skills to imbibe Agile Philosophy within teams. While most of participants who introduced Agile Manifesto were from Technical Mastery background and expertise, Agile Coaching requires coaches to have Business Mastery and Transformation Mastery as well. Essentially, Agile Coaches may demonstrate expertise in any or all of the mastery levels.

Facilitating Change

Agile Coach facilitates change by engaging with the management and teams to identify purpose of the change and the system that will support the entire change or transformation process. One of the critical responsibilities of the Agile Coach is to identify the impediment types and the resistance types and drive them towards ensuring that the relevant people and teams are on the same page. For transformation to happen, each member of the team accepts and shares the same views with each other. Facilitating brain storming that includes participation from the support system to generate ideas that will make the change process seamless.

Agile Coach Hats/Roles

As described in the Agile Coaching Competency Framework, Agile Coach, while facilitating the transformation, wears different hats or plays variety of roles to foster team wide understanding and acceptance of agile philosophy. During various stages of the change/transformation, Agile Coach uses facilitation techniques such as trainer/consultant, counsellor, mentor, and a coach to ensure the team moves towards shared vision and a decisive action plan to receive maximum leverage from the engagement.

How Do You Transit To Agile

Well, transition to agile is an important decision. The good part is, that you can decide to adopt Agile as an organization wide culture/philosophy or functional (product development/ marketing/ operations etc.) wide transition. It is entirely up to the leadership to take a call. 

To conclude, I sincerely hope that this attempt to explain Agile philosophy helped you plan better to restart, regroup and re-grow your teams and organizations. Let me know your views, thoughts and suggestions on [email protected] . And as mentioned above, will be happy to talk to anyone to address an organization/team specific need.