Levels of Agile Coaching and Organisation Size

In my work as an Agile Transformation Coach, I often find Customers who do not discern what could be called Levels of Agile Coaching and which Levels are suitable for their organisation. They usually want only an “Agile Coach”.

For the novice reader, who might not have had any contact with Agility, it all started in 2001 with the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development” (see https://agilemanifesto.org). The “Agile Manifesto”, as it is commonly referred to, showed a way to adaptively and iteratively develop quality software. It takes advantage of face-to-face communication and fast feedback loops to learn and change, improving both the products and the process used to develop them. It has since spilled out of IT and spread across all parts of a business. It is now widely perceived as a good tactical answer to a fast changing marketplace.

As organisations come in all shapes and sizes, Agile Coaching has to address their specific circumstances and many organisational aspects. One aspect discussed here is the organisation Size.

The above picture gives a relatively simple model that I’ve used in large Telcos, Banks and Insurance organisation. It can serve as a guide to levels of Agile Coaching in respect to the Organisation Size.

Note that the Organisations Sizes here are somewhat loosely defined and for numerical sizes you could use the Dunbar’s Number ranges (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number) of 30-50, 100-200 and 500-2500 for Small, Medium and Large organisations respectively. Startup is assumed to be only one Team of 5-15 members.

Can’t the same coach cover all these levels? 

Well… yes and no. Each level of Agile Coaching has a different “puzzle” to solve, a different roadmap to navigate, different goals to achieve. The skills to achieve these goals are somewhat different. So an experienced coach will be able to cover all of them, especially in Startups and Small organisations.  However, the huge amount of work that is needed to be done in Medium to Large organisations will require multiple coaches to cover different parts of “the puzzle”. This naturally leads to their specialisation, hence the levels of Agile Coaching.

A Team Coach is concerned with creating a unit that can consistently and sustainably keep increasing its throughput, while decreasing its lead time. This is the most common level of Agile Coaching seen in organisations, where the Coach establishes team roles, sets up boards, teaches and facilitates ceremonies, introduces continuous learning, etc. Often a Team Coach will need to have domain knowledge or background in what the Team is doing. An example would be a Team Business Coach in a Fintech organisation with background in Banking or a Team IT Coach with DevOps experience.

A Program Coach’s concern is the coordination of multiple teams working on the same Program or Value Stream. Programs and Value Streams emerge when an organisation has large Product/s that need to change fast. The required volume of work exceeds what one team can deliver in a given timeframe, so work gets done in parallel by multiple development and specialist teams, and across a larger timeframe, e.g. months instead of weeks. Some of the teams, e.g. infrastructure teams, may not even be working in an agile way, which further complicates the coordination and synchronisation of Program/Value Stream work, increasing the need for a Program Coach.

A Portfolio Coach is concerned with an organisation’s Investment Agility among the Program/Value Streams. The “puzzle” at this level is how to finance multiple streams of work with a finite budget to maximize the value generated by the Portfolio. This will require achieving progressively shorter lead times at Program/Value Stream level, in order to get fast feedback of actual Value achieved. With fast feedback, the funds can be moved faster to more profitable Program/Value Streams. However, fast change of funding at Program/Value Stream and Team level would mean a certain amount of reorganisation, which is disruptive to work at those levels, thus reducing the Value they achieve. This is where a good Portfolio Coach’s knowledge and experience will help establish common patterns serving the Program/Value Streams. For example, establishing Guilds or Communities of Practice will standardise the work across Program/Value Streams and increase the Portfolio Agility.

An Enterprise Coach is concerned with an organisation’s strategic Agility in its marketplace: how quickly can we move to a new position without “breaking the bank”? Each marketplace has a certain speed of change, inertia, at any given time. The organisations that compete in the marketplace need to move “slightly” faster in order to be ahead of the competition. However, too fast, and they may lose too many customers who do not need to change fast. Too slow, and the competition will overtake them. 

So which direction to move in? Your customers will “tell you”, after you have given them a “new Feature” to experiment with. They will either use it, or not, which will tell you what your next step is for that Feature. The more Features the organisation experiments with, the better the chance of “striking gold” - to find and follow a “gold vein” so to speak. More Features means more investment in these expensive “market research” activities. Too few, and the chance of finding the “gold vein” is reduced; too many and the organisation may “break the bank”. Enterprise Coaches have a range of approaches to help an organisation find the optimal mix of people (roles, organisational patterns), processes (agile ceremonies) and tools (technologies, techniques) to reduce the cost of experimenting and bringing the Portfolio(s) of Features fast to market, hence maximizing the strategic Agility of the organisation in the marketplace.

Conclusion

As a Customer, when you intend to hire Agile Coaches, consider the size of your organisation and its complexity.

Does your organization need all of these levels of Agile Coaching? If the organisation is big enough, yes! If not, a single experienced coach would cover more than one level of coaching, as show on the table above.

Always be reminded that your organisation and culture are unique, so your Agile Journey will also be unique. The appropriate levels of Agile Coaching will help your Agile Journey be a successful one.

About the author:

Mihail Sestakov is an Agile Transformation Coach who helps organisations introduce and improve their Agility. Having directly managed and transitioned teams of 150+ staff to Agile ways of working, he has first hand experience in all aspects of introducing Agility, such as Finance, HR, DevOps, etc. Classically trained as an MBA and Engineer, he is able to blend the key elements of Agility, Systems Thinking and Lean Startup into an organisation’s existing ways of working, reducing risk and cost, and maximizing the Value that Agility brings.