The need for an Agile coach and a right channel for coaching has become imperative for many Agile organisations. This forces us to nurture a community of coaches who understand the role requirements and goes beyond the usual to tackle the implementation challenges. Lyssa Adkins and Michael Spayd are pioneers in coaching the Agile coaches to handle large enterprise problems. Their experience in life coaching and expertise in the industry gives them an edge. They have more than 15 years of experience in leading projects and organisations.

Lyssa is also trained as a Co-active coach and leader. She authored ‘Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition’ in 2010.

Michael is trained as a Team and Organisational coach, in co-active leadership and in executive coaching.Currently he is writing a book called Coaching in the Agile Enterprise.

Lyssa and Michael are running a workshop at Agile India 2014 for Agilists who wants to increase their overall Agile coaching skills, including in the areas of Teaching, Mentoring, Facilitation, and Professional Coaching.

We had a short chat with them to understand their views about Agile Coaching

1. What is the role of an Agile Coach in the Agile transformation journey?

Lyssa Adkins: You know Agile coach is a word that we just use generically because almost every corporation has their own version of these words. They’ll say “XP coach” or “Scrum Master” or “Agile Project Manager” or something like that. And we’re not really religious about which form or the word we use. What we care is about how the coaches help teams move beyond just getting the practices up and running and, into helping teams on their joyful and deliberate pursuit of high performance. It’s really going beyond what we would consider as a basic Scrum Master or XP coach for example.

Michael Spayd: It is, as Lyssa is saying, a pretty broad range of definitions. The word “coach” is interesting too because it’s such an overloaded term. You know, it means sports coach to some people, it means professional coach – like a life coach or an executive coach to some people, and it means kind of you having coaching by your manager which really means telling you what you need to do or you are going to get fired.And that’s created some confusion around what Agile coaches do and a really wide range of activities they do.

We’ve done some writing about that and talked about all the competencies that Agile coaches need to have. But basically they stand in a position or work in a position that’s kind of like a team leader in a certain way and kind of outside the team, helping the team, serving the team, and helping the team become a better team. Not like doing things for the team, not getting and making all the decisions for the team – anything like that, but really trying to help the team become a better team.

2. What does it take to be an effective Agile Coach?

Michael Spayd: Well this is where the term Agile coach is both overloaded and really big actually, there’s a lot of things to do as an Agile coach. So we look to impart facilitation, like professional facilitation and having skill at being a neutral facilitator of meetings and events (you know games whatever it is in the Agile environment). And help leading teams through that without getting involved in the content without voting on “Oh you should do this way” but actually helping the team get better themselves.

The thing that most people think about when they think about an Agile coach is what we call an Agile-Lean practitioner, so knowing about the Agile processes, knowing how the values relate to the principles, relate to and generate the practices, how you innovate, how you modify them in a consistent way – that sort of thing – so all the world of knowing all about Agile and Lean. That’s one big, big piece but it’s definitely not the whole shooting match.

Lyssa Adkins: The predominant role we’re playing now is to help coaches create awareness in themselves of which of those disciplines (we didn’t even go through all of them but we’ve gone through a good number of them) they have solidly and which they don’t. And how at any given moment they will choose which one serves the purposes of the transformation best.

Michael Spayd: So making for an Agile coach in terms of transforming or working with a team they have to draw on this pallet, if you think about this, because coaching, facilitation, teaching, mentoring, Agile Lean practitioner. It’s like a pallet of colours that you are painting with so to speak, and the art of it, in a lot of ways, is which one do you choose at which time to help an organization make this transition.

Lyssa Adkins: We recognize that transformation is about “transformation”. Which means you can’t consult your way into it, you can’t cajole someone into it, you can’t make them do it. It’s a lot about each individual person and how that radiates out to a whole organization. So, in the center of all of those disciplines is this thing we call the coaching stance. Which is very much just like a home base that an Agile coach comes back to as a way to help activate in other people their next positive steps towards the transformation they see needs to take place. And that’s how the results stick. That’s how an organization continues to transform once the Agile consultants have left the building. And that’s an important thing for us. I guess the higher calling of why we’re together is that Agile is this incredible positive transformation virus. It is unleashing a wave of positive change everywhere that it goes. And we believe that Agile coaches when they are well equipped are powerful transformation agents to help that virus spread in a positive and useful way. Not only for people but also for products.

 3. What are the key take-aways from your workshop?

Lyssa Adkins: Well instead of us telling you about the take-aways from our workshops, you can find the testimonials from our participants on ‘Our Impact’ page in our website.

This workshop has limited seats. Book early to avoid disappointments: http://booking.agilefaqs.com/agile-india-2014#workshops

Often companies undervalue the part-time coaching model.

What do I mean by part-time coaching model?
A coach is onsite, working hands-on with the team for a week and then offsite (accessible via email & phone, but off the project) for a week. Basically, the coach is available on-off either alternative weeks or a some other timeframe.

Personally I’ve experience the following advantages of a part-time coaching model:

From the company & its employees’ point of view:

• When I’m not there full time, teams realize they cannot fully depend on me. I’m not the bottleneck for making decisions. The teams start to take ownership and make more decisions on their own (usually by consulting me, but not waiting on me.)
• When I steps out for sometime and come back to the team, I bring a slightly fresh perspective and can pay attention to weak signals. Many times we get so engrossed in what we are doing, that we might miss out paying attention to something else.
• Coaching can be intense. Having a little time off from coaching helps the teams get a breather. Which makes the overall coaching more sustainable.
• As coaches we expect things to change much faster rate than usually they do. If we are there full-time, it might start to bother us. But with the on-off model, the slower rate of change seems more acceptable. Similarly the team does not feel pressurized to accept change at a rate that might not be sustainable or acceptable to them.
• The management seems to get more confidence in the whole engagement, because they can see things are not blowing up when the coach is not around.
• Last but not the least, it does have a good financial incentive for the company.

From the coach’s point of view:

• Having some downtime is good for the coach to build/upgrade their skills.
• Can help achieve a better work-life balance.
• From a risk management point of view, it allows a coach to take on multiple part-time client.

Hopefully, all of this leads to a more effective coaching engagement.

10 years after the introduction of agile methods, many communities are succeeding in their adoption while others are struggling or failing. Why? Many struggle because agile methods were introduced in an overly prescriptive manner. People were told to follow a set of practices instead of learning to use the agile practices and values to amplify their existing strengths and address their challenges.

In this talk, David Hussman shares successful coaching techniques he uses to grow sustainable agility that lasts beyond the early iterations or the first few agile projects. David begins with a series of tools to help you build a solid foundation: assessments, pragmatic practice selection, chartering and product planning tools. He then moves on to discuss ideas for finding a groove of discover and delivery that is best suited to your project community.

As a full time working coach, David uses coaching stories and experiences to discuss establishing strong cadence while also building the essence of coaching and coaches in your community Whether you are new to agile methods or you are a seasoned players, this session will help you grow your coaching skills and your ability to truly discover and deliver real value.

Format: Open Space

Who Should Attend? Today, in India, I believe we have many Agile coaches (internal and external, more internal coaches). If you are helping to bring Agile/Lean/Light-Weight thinking into your company, you are playing the Agile coach role (you like it or not). You could be in the leadership role doing this or you could have taken the ownership and facilitating/influencing your team. While doing so, we all need a lot of help, advice and reassurance of our strategies. This is what you can expect at this conference.

Agenda: Each day we start at 9:00 AM and end at 5:30 PM.

Each Day:

• Lightning Talks (1 hr)
• Opening the Space (30 mins)
• Creating the agenda (30 mins)
• Break-out sessions (5 hrs)
• Closing the Space / Retrospective (30 mins)
• Social Outing (optional)

Budget:

• We plan to hire the main hall for 2 days. Each day cost is roughly about 10,000 Rs. For 2 days it would be about 20,000 Rs.
• Lunch + Tea/Cofee Breaks would cost 200 Rs per person.
• Venue has good A/C accommodation. Its Rs 1500 per day for single room and Rs 1800 for double room.

(Please note that this is a special discount rate for Goa University.)

I’m expecting about 25 people to show up.

So basically each individual will be spending about:

• 3000 Rs for the room
• 400 Rs for food
• max 1000 Rs for the hall
• Evening outing: up to the individual

(if we find a sponsor, then the cost of the hall and food will be absorbed by the sponsor.)

Prep Work: Answers to the following questions will facilitate the following:

• help us come more prepared for the Coach Camp
• get a sense of the quality of the participants
• start some knowledge sharing amongst the group
• set certain context and potential topics for further discussion at the Coach Camp

We’ll confirm your participation on successful completion & submission of this form. The sooner you submit the form, the sooner we can confirm your participation.

*Dead line to submit the form: 22nd March 2010.

At the Agile India 2010 conference, there was a lot of interest for agile coaching in India.

Today, in India, I believe we have many Agile coaches (internal and external, more internal coaches). If you are helping bring Agile/Lean/Light-Weight thinking into your company, you are playing the Agile coach role (you like it or not). You could be in the leadership role doing this or you could have taken the ownership and facilitating/influencing your team. While doing so, we all need a lot of help, advice and reassurance of our strategies. To facilitate this, help people network and to push the boundaries of Agile, in 2008, Deb and I created the first Agile Coach Camp in US.

In the past I’ve considered doing something similar in India, but always felt we’ve not reached the point yet. Now (esp. after the agile india 2010 conference), I feel we might be at this point.

So if you are interested in participating in a 2 day invitation only, all open-space based conference, over a weekend in March/April, inform me by filling out the following form:

Also please vote for which city you would like to have the conference in:

And what dates work best for you?

What do we, as agile Coaches, value? What is our value system?

I value:

• Respect and Trust
• Transparency and Open communication
  • This works both ways. As a coach you want to show them that its OK not to know something. You certainly don’t know everything. But you are willing to learn.
• Safe-fail experiments
• Being hands-on and in the groove 
  • Second-hand information and knowledge can only take you so far
• Down-to-earth, humble attitude
  • Being one amongst them.
• Joy of improving things one baby-step at a time
• Motivation and self driven
  • Lead by Example
• Continuous learning and putting ourselves out of our comfort zone
  • I care, I’m here to help make things better and learn in the process. I’m not here only for the money.
• And so on…