Another option for the Agile Coaching guide

Introduced

Over the past six years, the role of agile coaches has emerged in the IT labor market. I've been working in this role for the last 5 years, and most of the work is done in Suncorp. Suncorp is a large company in Australia's insurance and banking sector with more than 16,000 employees. As you all know, Suncorp is a leader in agile, and it is also a typical example of agile helping organizations to achieve outstanding results in transition.

As early as 2007, Suncorp invited me to help them transform the entire IT services organization of about 2000 people into an agile way to work, which is a daunting challenge. At that time, the world was not yet a system that could cover all roles and levels of maturity available. There is no agile training available for team managers, project managers, or change managers. We have to create them from scratch, and that's why agile colleges are born. At that time, the lack of experienced agile project managers, most of the team's agile maturity is very low. Moreover, it is difficult to find agile experts with extensive experience and management knowledge. So we had to split the only few agile experts into multiple projects and take turns as agile coaches. They report to an (executive) Central coaching manager and are obligated to report (operationally) dashed lines to the project manager or to the team they are directing. The coaching model fits the goals of the time, enabling us to work better over the past five years and slowly and steadily build the agile capabilities of the entire organization. Coaching did achieve its goal, and that was the only option at the time.

But now, regardless of the level and role, there is a large number of high-quality agile training available, and in the industry has a considerable number of agile experts, the overall level of agile maturity has improved a lot.

So, is there a better, faster way to build an organization's agile capabilities? Is there another way to improve coaching?

It's time for us to critically and constructively delve into the coaching guidance model (coaching models) in a truly agile way and see if there is another alternative way to build agility.

The original goal of the coaching role

Today, the benefits of agility have been proven, and I do not want to go into the details here. Organizations must realize that agile is a proven way to improve productivity and deliver value faster, cheaper, and better quality, he said. Its core principles are teamwork and collaboration, iterative delivery, resilient change, focus on business value, and continuous improvement and transformation of teams and organizations, with the benefit of faster time-to-market, reduced costs, higher morale and improved quality from the start.

The key goal of the agile coaching role is to help the transition and enhance the agility of each member of the team. With change teams and sponsors defining success criteria, the start of the reform journey means the end of the coaching role (ie no longer needs a trainer).

Challenges for Agile coaching roles

Looking back, I found that the role of agile coaches is facing a series of challenges, so it is difficult to achieve the best results.

Lack of "risk sharing"

Agile coaches do not have to be responsible for delivery, so there is no "risk sharing". They often do not view project success and deliverables as obligations, and they focus more on processes than on results. Because there is no "risk sharing", many agile coaches do not take a pragmatic approach and sometimes get far away from the team and the results. If agile coaches are involved in too many projects or just short and intermittent participation, you will probably find that they will work in a similar way to "seagulls", just floating in the air, rambling complaints, ripping through the whole project, and then flying away. This approach actually increases the resistance to transition and defeats the goal of improving the agility of the entire team and achieving transformational change

is considered an unnecessary expense.

Some projects often say they need agile coaches to help them, but they shrink when they talk about the need to use the project budget to pay for agile coaches. This is usually because they don't include agile coaches in their original cost estimates, or because they think the role is an extra cost to the project. The value of agile coaches is difficult to quantify and measure, so that the project is reluctant to spend.

Lack of rights or clear roles in a team

Agile coaches have little power in the team and usually report to the project manager and team leader. They offer advice and advice, but do not have the right to ensure that the team follows these instructions and eventually learns the right way.

That's why we usually see the team as just "partial" or selective with agility. Most of the time they will go against the coach's advice, and the coach can do is complain a few words and finally leave. More importantly, it is difficult for coaches to ask anyone in the team to be responsible for practices that do not follow the recommended approach. It is often the project supervisor or the project manager who makes the mistake and the coach reports to them. If they have not been given proper responsibility, it will be difficult to find the relevant persons responsible.

Simple "coaching" is not an ideal model

Unlike consulting, coaching involves not giving answers, but proposing the right questions so that individuals or teams can give the right answers. In the agile immature team and the internal opposition to the reform team, it is not appropriate to simply take the form of coaching to build capacity, and the effect will not be good. A more consultative, instructional, and training-centric approach is needed for the team taking the first step of agility. Agile coaches must be trained to provide advice and guidance based on this form. The proportion of real mentoring activity is small compared to counseling and training. When agile coaches are consulted, team and project managers may have a bit of a defensive and conflicting mood because they are asking for an "agile coach" rather than a counselor or trainer.

The level of coaching

At a recent Australian Agile Forum, there was a discussion on the subject of an agile coaching expert group, one of the questions from the audience was "how many of you have been in formal coaching?" Only one person in five has had some form of coaching training.
In my years of agile career, I have seen some super agile practitioners who have in-depth knowledge of agile, breathing agile experience, but few have been trained by practitioners or coaches.

The main criterion for being an agile coach is to look at his knowledge of agile and his experience, but he rarely takes into account his skills in training and coaching. Recently, as more and more companies try to transform agile, the demand for agile coaches has grown. A large number of agile practitioners, with little or no formal coaching, no certification (International Association of Coaching Associations) and experience, also advertise themselves as "coaches".

In the words of Bruce Weir, an executive manager of Suncorp, "give me someone who can lead the team in an agile way and improve their agility at the same time." I hope this person will be able to share the risk with the team and be responsible for clearly measurable goals. "I need experienced and capable agile project managers and change managers, rather than Sandra coaches, whose value is too hard to measure," said Arps, a PMO director at Suncorp.

I think that the agile coaching model does have a value in the period when overall maturity is low and there is little systematic training in the period when we cannot find experienced agile leaders, project managers, or the IM (Manager/scrum coach). But the times have changed and experienced agile practitioners are now easy to find. I think the agile coaching model has its drawbacks and is not the only model or the best model for improving agility.