Coaching in Agile Methodologies

What is an Agile Coach?

Starting out with the Agile Methodology is difficult, and not straight forward. Paying for one of your team to get a 'Scrum Master'' certification, putting all your work in a 'Product Backlog' and having a daily 'Stand up' might yield some benefit, but you're unlikely to see a fraction of what is possible by understanding this mindset.

This is a big subject. It's not a week of study and suddenly you're Agile. Getting a new process in place and working in a Sprint, doesn't mean you're there. It takes time to understand how to apply this mindset, but once it's understood, your team will be getting better every week, you live Agile, you don't just do it.

A coach will have the real life experience of how Agile can work for you. They will have an extensive understanding of different frameworks, tools and processes which can work, and know how and when they can be adapted for maximum benefit. They should also be a master of metrics, being able to show tangible results to you and your company.

By getting a seasoned professional to work with you will shortcut the extensive research which is required. You will avoid the common failures and anti-patterns, and you will start realising the benefits faster. They will train and guide your whole team on how Agile can work with minimal disruption to your business as usual.

The application of Agile isn't straightforward, but it shouldn't be hard. An Agile coach should have the experience to make it easy.

What does an Agile Coach do?

The size of your organisation and maturity of your Agile implementation will massively influence the role of an Agile coach.

The application of an Agile mindset at scale will require more than a single Coach. However, they will be able to advise on an appropriate course of action, to explain what Agile can do for you and train smaller teams to validate this mindset. There are a number of frameworks available for scaled Agile, such as Nexus, SAFe, Spotify, Less and Less Huge, but implementing these requires a high level of organisation and substantial training.

Here at Neuro-Tick we're mainly focused on smaller teams and start ups, anything from 3 to 100. The reason for this is that the resources available online and with standard training for Agile are usually focused on big organisations, or companies with an established Agile mindest. The simple fact is smaller companies will also massively benefit from Agile, we want to help them understand and implement that.

An Agile Coach can help in many areas, but common challenges are :

Your team keep missing their deadlines.
You're producing products or services, but know you can do it better.
You're a small team and growing, orders are coming in, but you need a better way of doing things.
You're using an Agile framework such as Scrum, but just aren't seeing the benefit.
You've got too much work on. If your team could work smarter you're sure you could get more done.
You struggle to forecast, every estimation is wildly out and you find yourself doubling estimates.
Your developers seem to be running riot and testing ten times more than they're actually developing.
Your team are getting work done, but you've got no idea on how they're getting on, or what they're doing.
You know Agile should work, but don't know where to start.
There's no way you can get this six month project done quicker, Agile just can't work.

All these situations can be improved massively with an Agile coach, with the utilisation of the right processes and the right toolsets. A coach will have the experience in these areas from a technical and a business perspective.

They will work with you to understand your environment, your work patterns and your current processes. By assessing your existing experience with Agile, they may design custom training which is specific to your organisation.

There are many different tools and processes which can be used, which will be specific to your requirements, teams and working patterns. A coach will be an expert in the utilisation of tooling and optimisation of process, without slowing your current rate of work.

Depending on the size of your company and complexity of your processes an Agile coach will probably not be required as a full time commitment, short experiments with validated results are the key to proving the effectiveness of this mindset. I'd advise not jumping in and employing someone full time to drive this, as a bad Agile application can be hugely disruptive, get some advice from a seasoned expert, it will save you time and money.

An Agile Coach will help you get the most value from the team you already have.

Is a Scrum Master an Agile Coach?

An experienced Scrum Master will coach the team and the wider business in the application of Scrum, but this alone does not always make them an Agile Coach.

Scrum is a very popular framework which requires a Scrum Master, but this isn't the only framework. Extreme Programming, DSDM, Crystal, Kanban, Spotify are all Agile frameworks which work differently and don't require a Scrum Master.