AGILE COACHING
As an experienced Scrum master with advanced training and a higher level of expertise, our Agile coaches work with your agile teams and scrum-masters to increase company-wide agility.
What Is Agile Coaching?
An Agile coach is a person who is responsible for creating and improving Agile processes within a team or a company, and whilst they can either be employees or work as external contractors, often a coach is brought in to guide and support a transformation such as when a company is transitioning from their existing working practices, such as Waterfall, into working with the Agile methodology principles.
Our Agile coaches work with you in spreading Agile at a multi-team level and throughout the organisation. While sometimes they might engage with teams on an individual basis, more often they will work with existing Agile scrum-masters and other internal ambassadors of Agile to identify and remove any obstacles hindering the implementation of Agile.
Areas where our coaches will deliver value include:
- Integrating Agile teams or departments within the wider processes of a predominantly non-Agile company.
- Encouraging the proliferation of Agile best practices between different teams.
- Mentoring and coaching of Agile teams and scrum-masters.
- Overcoming resistance from top management due to a perceived reduction of control.
- Measuring the results of transitioning to Agile.
How can our Agile coaches help your project managers?
Engaging and working with our coaches can provide many benefits to you and your project teams, such as in typical scenarios where:
- Maybe you feel that daily stand-ups are not providing real value or maybe the team finds it hard to understand why they should use story points for estimation. Our coaches will be able to guide you in the right direction and will often deliver a workshop or a lecture on a particular Agile topic that is relevant to you.
- Even if you don’t feel like you have any major problems in your Agile process, it is usually beneficial to invite the Agile coach to sit in on your main ceremonies and do a soft audit. They can provide valuable feedback on what could be improved or even unearth some problems that you were unaware of.
Typically, Agile coaches mostly come from project management, product management, IT, or software development backgrounds. They usually have a lot of experience with different Agile methodologies, such as Scrum, Kanban, and Scaled Agile approaches (LeSS, SAS, SAFe). Our coaches are proficient in coaching and mentoring and are able to guide and help people to figure out the right solutions for their challenges.
It is because Agile is easy to understand, but hard to master, that many leaders run into problems when making the switch. Most often this is due to unrealistic expectations of how easy it is to implement Agile within a team, department, or the whole company, and this is where our experienced Agile coaches add value.
Our Agile coaches possess knowledge of organisational design, enterprise change management, and executive leadership coaching, and they have a good grasp of at least some enterprise Agile frameworks like Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Large-scale Scrum (LeSS) or Disciplined Agile Delivery (DaD).
At an enterprise level, our Agile coach will be less involved in the day to day tasks of helping teams to implement Agile and more concerned with helping to change the overall structure of the company to facilitate the Agile principles. This task requires working with the senior leadership and helping them understand the benefits of Agile as well as the structure needed to make it sustainable within the organisation.
