Confessions of An Agile Coach

Agile Coach for 12 teams at HP and 7 at IBM - That is what kept me busy (and happy) in the recent past.  Having coached these teams and trained numerous others (more than 2000 people in 22 different organizations), I couldn't help but recognize some patterns emerging. Some patterns of great use and relevance for us, the trainers, coach and proponents of the Agile mindset.

I present these patterns or "confessions of an agile coach" hereunder in no particular order with the hope of sharing what I experienced with all the knowledgeable and respected minds out here:

1. Agile, Scrum is more of a discipline and mind set change. Its applicable to most of the circumstances - Be it Marketing teams at one organization, or scattered teams at another... I had read and advocated it before, but experienced it yet again during my coaching assignments.

2. Even if someone says, the team is a group of super-seniors who KNOW Agile well, take it with a pinch of salt - many a times what they are doing is a bad mocktail of waterfall and command and control in the name of Agile.

3. People understand things more easily when real examples are taken from their everyday scenarios rather than other organization's case studies / examples.

4. As a coach, it gives a lot of satisfaction to face insurmountable challenges and win over them. It also gives a lot of satisfaction to see real value addition to the customer.

5. Coaching needs a lot more patience and skill as compared to training. An engineer might understand an Apple as an Apple, while for another engineer / manager, you might need to go the long way to explain it as a healthy fruit with red peel and white pulp and some seeds. It nourishes your team.

6. Many a frustration is vented out THROUGH you, its not FOR you... This is specially true in an environment where "Agile" has been forced down, upon the team as a religion with a capital 'A', that gives management power to exploit them. When you face such a team as a coach, be sympathetic and understand all the rude words are frustration of the team being vented out. Once they empty their glasses, they end up loving you and thank you for helping them come out of pain.

7. There is a HUGE difference between a group of people and a well-gelled scrum team. As a coach - YOU be the difference. There is also a big gap between a team of star performers and a star-performing team - again - as a coach, YOU be the bridge.

8. As a coach, you need to approach the problem at ALL levels. If you only try to fix the teams, it will break at management and vice-versa. You need to patiently understand the problem from a holistic perspective and then suggest solutions that work and ideas that stay even when you move out.

9. Do NOT try to sell Agile. Do not be a salesman or a marketing guy. Just use your knowledge of agile as one of the probable tools you might end up using to fix their problem.

10. "Don't teach them - catalyze their learning" Your ideas coming from you are not very welcomed in a complex environment. Let the ideas (even if you believe they are yours) come from people - you may suggest a few things, but let them come up with the idea - that is when the probability of the team buying-in the idea is non-zero.

11. They KNOW the solutions already! People in the projects might be working for many years on the same things. They would know a lot of things - technical as well as non-technical. They may also understand the problems the team is facing and the best solutions thereof. Probably the layers of management, the dust of time and the current org structure has trained them that its best to stay quite and stick to their business - Let such people talk a lot, listen carefully. They provide gems of information.

12. Don't become a devil's advocate: Until you have verified facts, do not buy-in the team-member/manager's perspective and communicate the same to higher-ups. A common example is some senior guy in India asking the coach to talk tough to the US team. When you listen to both the counterparts with an unbiased approach, more often than not, you will realize that many things need to be fixed - on BOTH sides.

13. Information highlighters are one of the least used aspect of Scrum. As a coach, you might need to go the extra mile - buy the stationary, draw up the highlighters for a couple of teams, and help the team use it everyday. It really pays off - the visibility, transparency and excitement of one team, spills over to others. 

14. Planning meeting is wastely misunderstood, misused and abused aspect of Scrum. You need to hold hand, spoon feed, live with the team, and do what ever is needed, to show them how to do it in a fun way that is also a productive way. It takes a lot of pain and discipline to understand that its better to be "roughly correct than precisely wrong". It's difficult for teams to understand the difference between "acurate" and "precise".

15. As teams start to get a hold of scrum and agile mindset, they also realize that their standard metrics of measuring and comparing is subtly taken away - since they do not apply in team-focussed scrum. They are at a point of empty hands. Its important to introduce new metrics that are in sync with scrum and Agile's team-centric mindset, without which, the teams say - "Great talk! Thanks... But... No Thanks!"

16. Daily standups are frequently anything but standups - they become looong discussion sessions / sit-down meetings. That's a definite hit-point as a coach since the ROI of investing into "fixing daily standups" is huge.

17. Frequently the source of team's low motivation is the retrospective meeting which is more of either a chit-chat meeting or a whining meeting. Focus on this to fix the leak of energy and enthusiasm. I have addressed this extremely important issue in a separate blog here.

18. Teams, specially POs, frequently fail to understand the importance of the PBL being in "READY" state. This causes a lot of confusion, re-work, and demotivation for the team. Fix your PBL, fix your project problems.

I hope my friends, colleagues and peers find this relevant and useful - Looking forward for your comments and feedback...