Agile Coaching

The Provocative and Practical Guide to Coaching Agile Teams As an agile coach, you can help project teams become outstanding at agile, creating products that make them proud and helping organizations reap the powerful benefits of teams that deliver both innovation and excellence. More and more frequently, ScrumMasters and project managers are being asked to coach agile teams. But it’s a challenging role. It requires new skills—as well as a subtle understanding of when to step in and when to step back. Migrating from “command and control” to agile coaching requires a whole new mind-set. In Coaching Agile Teams, Lyssa Adkins gives agile coaches the insights they need to adopt this new mind-set and to guide teams to extraordinary performance in a re-energized work environment. You’ll gain a deep view into the role of the agile coach, discover what works and what doesn’t, and learn how to adapt powerful skills from many allied disciplines, including the fields of professional coaching and mentoring. Coverage includes Understanding what it takes to be a great agile coach Mastering all of the agile coach’s roles: teacher, mentor, problem solver, conflict navigator, and performance coach Creating an environment where self-organized, high-performance teams can emerge Coaching teams past cooperation and into full collaboration Evolving your leadership style as your team grows and changes Staying actively engaged without dominating your team and stunting its growth Recognizing failure, recovery, and success modes in your coaching Getting the most out of your own personal agile coaching journey Whether you’re an agile coach, leader, trainer, mentor, facilitator, ScrumMaster, project manager, product owner, or team member, this book will help you become skilled at helping others become truly great. What could possibly be more rewarding?

"Agile Coaching" is all about working with people to create great teams. Readers learn how to build a team that produces great software and has fun doing it. The authors share their personal coaching stories, giving insights into what works and what to avoid.

The profession of Agile Coaching is, in a word, confusing. That's because of a number of factors, including:?It gets conflated with Professional Coaching and it's so much more than that;?There isn't a standard or generally accepted model for what it is and isn't;?Clients don't understand it, so shared accountability is unbalanced with their coaches;?There is specialized nuance around the skills of coaching at the Team, Enterprise or Organizational, Technical, and Leadership levels.This confusion has created a space where nearly anyone can claim to be an Agile Coach with little experience and narrow skills. Resulting largely in mediocrity and negative impacts for our clients, who by the way, are counting on and paying us for help.Bob Galen has written Extraordinarily Badass Agile Coaching to help alleviate the confusion. The book centers on the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel as the competency and skill maturity model to baseline your agile coaching skills against. Its core goal is to "raise the bar" as to what true excellence looks like and to help you establish a personal development and growth plan.Bob intentionally uses the term Badass to create a vision of professionalism, craft, passion, accountability, and expertise that you need to bring to bear in service of your clients if you represent yourself as an "agile coach".Being an Extraordinarily Badass Agile Coach isn't easy, quick, or for the faint of heart. It takes lots of hard work and dedication. It also requires a map to point you in the right direction. Consider this book that map to coaching badassery, personal growth, and client service.

Responsive Agile Coaching documents a clear, well-researched model that lifts the lid on how agile coaching actually works.

When an Agile coach leaves an organization, the changes developed during their tenure should not roll backward. Compliance is somewhat easy to install and takes hold rather quickly. The challenge with that approach is that when the forcing mechanism (Agile coach) is removed, much of the compliance rolls back to the original position. Sustainable change requires a different strategy. This book introduces the concept of utilizing an Invitational Approach to Enterprise Agile Coaching which can be a crucial catalyst for integrating sustainable change by putting the client in the seat of responsibility.

Samman Technical Coaching is an approach to Agile training that focuses on technical questions concerning how code is written. It is a highly effective way of increasing agility in your software development organization. The first part of the Samman method involves the coach working in an ensemble with development teams, programming in their production codebase. This hands-on mentoring is accompanied by daily "learning hour" sessions for mastering particular techniques. In this book you will discover how to put Samman into practice, improve your coding procedures and how you collaborate. It is a practical guide for aspiring and experienced coaches looking for fresh ideas and new ways of teaching Agile. It is both challenging and fun for developers and coaches alike.

This book outlines how coaches and leaders use Agile frameworks and coaching psychology to create behavioural change and to lay the foundations of success. Using the latest coaching approaches from executive, team, and systemic team coaching, the book shows how coaches can use Agile frameworks at the level of mindset and behaviours. The book demonstrates well-known frameworks such as Scrum, DSDM, and Lean Startup to support change and success. Readers will learn about the Six Lenses of Systemic Team Coaching including the individual mindset, interpersonal skills, team working and collaboration skills, and awareness of the external business environment, to create true business agility. Becoming Agile is an indispensable resource for professional coaches who work with organisations that want to become Agile, as well as business leaders looking for a meaningful way to reap the benefits promised by agility. “This book is perfect for business leaders, entrepreneurs, and indeed anyone new to the world of agile leadership.” David Taylor, Founder, Naked Leader “Here we have a pragmatic and readily applicable approach to integrating both concept and practice across these two evolving domains.” David Clutterbuck, Special Ambassador, European Mentoring and Coaching Council “This book is a great resource for coaches who want to continue developing skills that will support leaders, teams, and organizations in building business agility.” Ahmed Sidky, Ph.D., President of the International Consortium for Agile (ICAgile) Laura Re Turner is an accredited coach, trainer, and facilitator who works with leaders and teams to develop an Agile mindset, behaviours, and the skills to thrive through change. Before becoming a coach, Laura delivered enterprise software projects as a project and programme manager, technology consultant, and software developer. She is the Founder and Managing Director of Future Focus Coaching.

With the current dire shortage of real agile coaches, we need more than just superficial knowledge – we need experts. Many books merely describe agile theory, methods, and processes but for a successful agile coach, having a mental model of their own is crucial. Successful agile coaches see the organization as a system and assume the role of a system developer. They facilitate an organic process that breaks through old patterns, paving the way for the agile organization. All this is done according to the system approach, built up based on the mental model and the meaning assigned to it by the people who are part of the system. This book does not purport to change you and prescribe what you should or should not do. This book describes in detail the beliefs and steps with which you can become a successful agile coach, while staying true to yourself. I hope you enjoy reading this book! Adrie Dolman MSc Preface Ahmed Sidky (Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, USA) Adrie Dolman's book is a true gift to the agile coaching community. Years of insights and experiences coaching individuals, teams, and organizations are curated into this amazing book. There are countless practical tips, tricks, learnings, models, and tools that will enhance any agile coach and accelerate their growth and skill development. Adrie's focus on Agile as a mindset and how to coach to that mindset is brilliant. This book is truly a great addition to any Agile coach's library. If you are an aspiring agile coach this is a must-read. Ahmed Sidky, Ph.D. President of the International Consortium for Agile (ICAgile) Head of Business Agility at Riot Games Preface Andrea Fryrear (Colorado, USA) There are no shortage of resources on Agile coaching in the world, but many of them assume that you’re doing two things: developing software and using Scrum exclusively. What Adrie has created here, however, is a deeply practical guide for any and all Agile coaches, leaving such unhelpful assumptions at the door. Adrie is diligent in avoiding prescription and leaning into description, but I can guarantee that the following pages will nonetheless be enormously practical for agilists looking to build up their coaching capabilities. Despite having spent many years of my own in the trenches working with Agile marketing teams, I found myself highlighting entire sections for reference. I’m already looking forward to sharing the illuminating charts and diagrams with my own team of coaches to help guide their individual growth. And yet this book isn’t just a simple how-to or a compilation of exercises. Adrie shows us the full arc of Agile’s evolution, tracing its origins far beyond twentieth century software development and back into the minds of pioneers of the scientific method hundreds of years ago. He skillfully connects this history to how coaches need to show up for their teams, freeing them from dogmatic adherence to practices that may or may not apply to the kinds of work their teams are doing. From Francis Bacon to Steve Denning, Adrie deftly tracks how Agile came to be the defining method for getting stuff done in the twenty-first century. What’s more, he plucks out important takeaways from all its phases to guide Agile coaches whose working life is far more complex, uncertain, and ambiguous than the one Bacon found himself in. Being an Agile coach is one of the most severely challenging and deeply rewarding jobs on the planet. Sometimes it feels like both of those things in the course of a single meeting. At times being an Agile coach is akin to trudging through the desert with no supplies, trying to reach an uncertain destination while herding a reluctant pack of cats. Resources like this one are an oasis on this difficult journey. If you’re an experienced Agile coach, rejoice. Here’s a careful, considerate fellow practitioner who’s opening his toolkit to share ideas with you. If you’re looking to start on your Agile coaching journey, great news. Someone who’s spent years traversing that path has come back to offer guidance. Agile coaches of all kinds will find value in these pages. For those, like me, who spend our days bringing Agile outside the realms of software development or IT, you won’t encounter overwhelming references to releases, demos, bugs, or code bases. Anyone who tries to nurture the Agile mindset and its corresponding ways of working should stop messing around with my introduction, and dig into this outstanding resource right away. Andrea Fryrear Agile Marketing Coach & Trainer, Co-Founder AgileSherpas Preface Michael K Sahota (North York, Canada) When Adrie Dolman reached out to me to see if I would write a forword, I wondered to myself: Who is this guy? How can he contribute to such a crowded field? How does his work relate to the work I am bringing to the world? Agile Coaching is a complex, broad topic: there are many valuable, distinct and even contradictory views. What this book delivers is a practical, human in-the-trenches view of what it takes day in and day out to operate as an agent of change. The book is full of many useful tools and models that will help anyone aspiring to be an effective Agile Coach. The part of the book that resonated the most with my own views is the importance of your own development. He says “Your most important tool is you, and you have to master that tool properly before you start using it.” This is a point that often gets missed and is actually the foundation of one’s effectiveness. What may happen as you dive into the practices of this book is that you discover your own leadership and how to make local change to culture without talking about it. My hope for you is that you begin to model the shift of what Agile is really all about. I hope you enjoy it. Michael K Sahota Certified Enterprise Coach, Author, Trainer and Consultant Preface John Cass (Washington, USA) In 2008 when I became aware of agile for marketers. The Dutch were ahead of the curve with the practice. So I was excited to learn when Adrie Dolman had written his new book "Agile Coaching - The Dutch Way". His book is all about how agile coaches approach agile coaching. This book is a how-to for coaches. What stood out for me was the thorough review of how to become an agile coach for an organization; from maturity models, to toolboxes, to personal insights from Adrie on what to expect. Great stuff for the team member wanting to become an agile coach the Dutch way! John Cass Organizer, Boston Agile Marketing Meetup Podcaster, A Deep Dive into Agile Marketing with John Cass Preface André Felippa (Sao Paulo, Brazil) Do you aspire to become an Agile Coach? Or maybe you are already an experienced agilist looking for new inspiration, examples and practical tools? For a long time I've been searching for great practical recommendations for Agile Coaches like myself. And there are already plenty of books in the market which cover the Agile frameworks, team-forming and scaling-up, but Adrie's book is quite unique. Adrie skillfully draws from his own extensive coaching experience to offer us a structured pathway to become a great Agile Coach, covering all aspects of this delightful job, whilst also sharing a wealth of helpful and practical examples, tools and techniques, which can easily inspire and be applied by any agile enthusiast, regardless of your own agile maturity level. I hope that you may enjoy the reading and extract as much value from this great book as I did. André Felippa C-Level Agile Coach and MD at Adventures Inc. / Brazil Preface Evan Leybourn (Victoria, Australia) At the time of writing this preface, the Agile Manifesto is just about to turn 20 years old. And yet, as Adrie makes clear in his book, agile is much older than that. This is nowhere clearer than in Æsop's Fables, a collection of stories and fables from ancient Greece over 2500 years ago (between 620–564 BCE). Let me share with you the fable of the Oak and the Reed (translated by George Fyler Townsend in 1887) A very large Oak was uprooted by the wind and thrown across a stream. It fell among some Reeds, which it thus addressed: "I wonder how you, who are so light and weak, are not entirely crushed by these strong winds." They replied, "You fight and contend with the wind, and consequently you are destroyed; while we on the contrary bend before the least breath of air, and therefore remain unbroken, and escape." This remains one of the best descriptions of agility today. So the question must be asked, if agility has been valued for millenia, why is it that we have so many Oaks in modern business? The simple answer is that agility is harder to achieve and maintain than rigidity; and when the winds are calm no one values agility. But, to extend the metaphor, the winds aren't calm. Just take a look back at the last decade, from 2010 to 2020, to see how volatile and unpredictable the world we live in is. Which is where agile coaching comes in. Whether in a marketing team, product development, or across an entire organization, agile coaching helps people who aspire to agility, achieve it. And for any aspiring coach, Adrie's book is a must-read, and practical, guide to the craft. Evan Leybourn CEO, Business Agility Institute 5 stars review Dr. Arnold Brouwer (Apeldoorn, Netherlands) Agile coaching reads like a sincere book that radiates the writer's passion. He takes you along many models and his own practical examples. That gives image and sound to the still quite abstract concept: "agile". And that makes the writer Adrie Dolman an inspiring and experienced agile coach. The writer focuses on agile coaching from a mental framework. He makes concrete and clear what is initially expected of the agile coach himself. The lessons that the author presents to us are valuable for those who are open to them to grow and develop themselves as a person. This makes the writer's lessons and experiences a valuable message which the reader can continue to refer often and easily in daily practice. In addition to offering the writer a mental framework, he also pays attention to the area in which the agile coach works: the organization. It is explained how the systems approach can help to intervene at the different levels in the organization. In a nutshell: the agile coach himself, the individual, the team and the organization as a whole. In this way the writer makes it clear which images and patterns deserve the right attention at what level. This makes the book a practical guide for both the agile coach and the entrepreneur who is eagerly looking for ways to keep up with the ever-changing world. All this means that the book has a lot to offer for various target groups. And that may also be the book's potential pitfall. The author has so much to say that they are in fact several books in one. For readability, a series of "agile" would certainly be in order. By dividing the content of the book into separate parts and elaborating it further, the writer does more justice to his own story. All in all, Adrie Dolman has written a practical guide that clarifies the necessity and usefulness of the field "agile". Dr. Arnold Brouwer CEO RCEC