What is coaching?
“It is helping to identify the skills and capabilities that are within the person, and enabling them to use them to the best of their ability” — wikipedia
Individuals and Interactions over Process and Tools.
The above is one of the 4 values espoused in the manifesto but yet it is common to see many agile coaches engage with teams and organisations advocating more and more processes. This is a common sight with new teams and also with teams on the path of agile transition from few months to few years irrespective of the competency, skills and maturity of the teams. Agile Fluency model created by Diana Larse and James Shore highlights the focus on value over compliance and practices at any given level
“ Team fluency depends on more than just the capability of the individuals on the team. It also depends on management structures, relationships, organizational culture, and more. Don’t make the mistake of blaming individuals for low team fluency, or assuming that one highly-skilled individual will guarantee high team fluency ”
An agile coach responsible for building high performing teams will need right set of powerful tools and techniques to leverage while working with teams and also to set the right expectations to both management and teams. This talk will draw from experience using few such powerful tools mentioned below while coaching teams attain fluency.
1) Using Agile Fluency @ High Level to Set Expectations
2) Setting Team Norms & Working Agreements
3) Deliberate Practice
4) Creating Enablers for a Learning Organisation
5) Simple Measures
2. Setting the Stage
COACHING ? ROLE OF AN
AGILE COACH ?
1 Minute
“…helping to identify
the skills and
capabilities that are
within the person, and
enabling them to use
them to the best of
their ability”
— wikipedia
1 Minute
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5. Attaining Fluency
Key Necessities
Benefit Investment
Customer
Engagement
Business Impact
Greater visibility into
teams’ work; ability
to redirect.
Customers involved in
the review process
Value delivery
Low defects and high
productivity.
Understand realistic
market cadence
requirements.
Define IR that map to
market cadence
Higher value
deliveries and better
product decisions.
Validating market
fitment
Monitor ROI for
achieving business
success
Alignment with
organizational goals;
synergistic effects.
Synergy in laying out
future product
direction.
Strategize business
growth
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6. Team Norms &
Working Agreements
Driving Empowerment & Self Organization
makingadifference.typepad.com
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7. The 4 Ps
People
(Goals)
Product
(Outcomes)
Plan
(Success
Strategies)
Process
(Enablers)
Individual Behaviours, Goals and
Aspirations
Accountable: Agile Manager
Responsible: Team
Understand Customer
Expectations, Competition …
Accountable: Product Owner
Responsible: All
Understand current
constraints and
engineering needs.
Accountable: Agile
Manager
Responsible: Team
Execution mechanics
and measures
Accountable: Scrum
Master
Responsible: Team
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9. Key Considerations
WHY WE NEED? (OBJECTIVE)
WHAT SHOULD IT BE?
WHEN SHOULD WE ESTABLISH?
WHO CREATES?
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10. Driving Working Agreements
(As a Coach)
Team Retrospectives
Deliberate Practice
Observations from
Sprint Execution 1:1 Meetings
Product Quality
Business Objectives &
Customer Satisfaction
KEY INPUTS
WorkingAgreements
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11. Look Out For These !!!
Are these guidelines driving right BEHAVIOURS (Commitment,
Responsibility, Accountability…)
Are these guidelines consistently VIOLATED
What OBSERVATIONS you notice when the team or
individual violates.
It’s ok to call out but ensure this is done without
breaking SAFETY & TRUST
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13. Mandatory Expectations: Self Motivated, Strong Desire to Hone the Skills,
Open Minded, Willingness to Fail Fast and Learn.
People with skills at all levels- testers, developers, leads and managers.
We are not worried on the completion of task but more focused on the best
approach we can take to solve the problem.
Problem to Solve: Conway's Game of Life
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life
A Complete Day of Deliberate Practice!!!
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14. Key Objectives
(As A Participant)
Honing technical development skills.
Writing Self Documenting and Expressive Code.
Explore alternative ideas and design techniques in a ‘safe fail’ environment.
Importance of unit tests.
Test driven development basics.
Improving self-organising capability
Better collaboration and communication across team.
Ability to solve problems by slicing work.
Eliminating key-man dependency.
Embracing uncertainty.
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15. Key Objectives
(As A Coach)
Understand team dynamics and self organising capabilities.
Observe key behaviours of individuals
Open minded and strong influencers
Passive aggressive
Fence sitters
Understand cross functional abilities of individuals.
Understand communication and problem solving abilities of people.
Understand the depth of skills on agile development practices such as TDD,
Refactoring, Expressive Code etc.
WHY DO I NEED TO
UNDERSTAND?
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16. Observations
Participation
People are skeptical
initially
Unlike code retreat people
are subjected to a day long
exercise
Lack of inclination to
learn and experiment.
Individual Influencers
( specially the tech leads and
architects )
Passive pairing
Uncomfortable in
pairing(with certain
individuals) and dropping
code
Similar design and
approach
Lack of understanding and
capability on unit testing.
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17. Experiences
Skill set gap was one of the factors which was lagging for us is what I believe and due
to this kind of sessions we can assess how much we have to improve and the manner
in which we have to think - Developer
I was amazed by the number of solutions we could think off in the little time we had. It
was possible because we paired with different people - Scrum Master
Importance of having Test Driven Development and unit tests in place. The session
helped me in learning a technique to fail fast and learn to become successful. - QA
For any team being introduced to pairing, deliberate practice exercise is a pre-requisite
- Scrum Master
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19. Learning Organisation
1 Minute
Learning in organizations means the
continuous testing of experience, and the
transformation of that experience into
knowledge - accessible to the whole
organization, and relevant to its core purpose.
- The Fifth Discipline - Fieldbook
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20. Brown Bag Sessions
Create community of practitioners.
Enable peer learning
Role specific communities to learn and share harnessing
mutual interests.
Forum to discuss issues and challenges
Informal sessions that need very little organisation support
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21. Brown Bag Sessions
Weekly or Bi-weekly
Role Specific (Scrum Master, Product Owners & Functional
Managers)
Cross Pollination
Experience sharing of Team Coaching outcomes
New techniques
Team Improvements
Presentations, Talks & Small Workshops
Lightening Talks / Open Space
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22. Beware - Things go wrong
Sacrificing lunch time is a big ask.
Weekly sessions may be overwhelming.
Throwing FREE LUCNH as bait to learning
may not yield right behaviours and results.
Sessions are often thought of as training/
workshops
Lack of motivation
Challenging to commit over and beyond
work responsibilities.
Answers to specific questions
Varying customer contexts and
challenges
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24. Accomplishment & Fun
How are teams doing?
Work PROGRESSION increases
motivation
Team A Team B
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25. Accomplishment & Fun
How are teams doing?
FUN @ Work equally important !!!
Team A Team B
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26. Accomplishment & Fun
How we measure?
No Fun
It’s OK
Good
Loving it !!
None
Something
Useful Totally
Useful
Awesome !!
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27. There’s no ONE
W A Y … . i t ’ s
important for a
coach to have
few techniques
and understand
context.
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28. Thank you
?
Ravi Kumar
ravi@agilefaqs.com
We explored the following
techniques…
Using Agile Fluency @ High Level to Set
Expectations
Setting Team Norms & Working
Agreements
Deliberate Practice
Creating Enablers for a Learning
Organisation
Simple Measures
Hope this was useful…
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