Coaching Agile Teams

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 responsibility process is a natural mental pattern that helps you process thoughts about taking or avoiding responsibility. How you navigate it determines whether you are leading toward meaningful results or just marking time. This book gives you precision tools, practices, and leadership truths to navigate the responsibility process and lead yourself and others to freedom, power, and choice. It provides abundant tools, practices, and wisdom for taking ownership, solving problems, and developing your consciousness as a leader.

Helping teams and leaders work together in fast-moving and challenging situations -Would you like to work better in an agile way? -Would you like to achieve benefits such as flexibility, productivity and adaptability? -Do you want practical, tried-and-tested, simple yet effective ways to build all of that, as a leader, Scrum Master, project manager or (Agile) coach? Veronika Jungwirth (fka Kotrba) and Ralph Miarka have years of experience with helping teams work agile, and agile teams work better. In this book they offer an accessible, detailed and practical guide to approaches, methods and techniques to help teams of all levels work more collaboratively and effectively. They combine the laser-sharp practice of solution-focused coaching with experience of agile environments to produce a winning combination of fresh angles on everyday situations. This book will be both a great starting point and a continuing reference source for teams, leaders and team coaches alike.

The Agile Self-Assessment Game is used by teams and organizations to self-assess their agility. Playing the game enables teams to reflect on their own team interworking, discover how agile they are and decide what they can do to increase their agility to deliver more value to their customers and stakeholders. This is the first book specifically about Agile Self-assessments. In this book, Ben Linders explains what self-assessments are and why you would do them, and explores how to do them using the Agile Self-assessment Game. He's also sharing experience stories from people who played the game. This book is based on his experience as a developer, tester, team leader, project manager, quality manager, process manager, consultant, coach, trainer, and adviser in Agile, Lean, Quality and Continuous Improvement. It takes a deep dive into self-assessments, viewing them from different perspectives and provides ideas, suggestions, practices, and experiences that will help you to do effective agile self-assessments with your teams. The book is aimed at Scrum masters, agile coaches, consultants leading agile transformations, developers and testers, project managers, line managers, and CxOs; basically for anyone who is looking for an effective way to help their agile teams improve and to increase the agility of their organization. With plenty of ideas, suggestions, and practical cases on Agile Self-assessments, this book will help you to apply assessments and help teams to improve. Note: The agile coaching cards needed to play the games described in the book can be downloaded for a nominal fee at benlinders.com/downloads.

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.

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.

Coach Individuals, Teams, and Organizations to Greater Success with Agile As Agilists work to increase an organization's Agility, they will run into major obstacles with mindset shifts, moving to self-organization, and organizational adoption. Over the past decade, more Agilists have been using Professional Coaching to help individuals, teams, and the organization as a whole uncover these obstacles and move forward faster. In Professional Coaching for Agilists, Damon Poole and Gillian Lee draw on their experience with thousands of Agile coaches and practitioners to show you how to use Professional Coaching to accelerate your Agile adoption. The authors' approach of "learning by doing" teaches by using well-honed exercises, real-life stories, and example coaching conversations. This guide is framework-independent and has been designed for Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, and any Agilist involved in Agile adoption. It teaches high-value coaching skills, step by step, from "coaching by objective" to managing mutually successful engagements. Leverage coaching to create aha moments that lead to real change Learn dozens of coaching techniques and more than a hundred powerful questions Help people uncover blind spots and assess their opportunities more clearly Offer your expertise while maintaining your coaching mindset Help people improve performance by connecting them with their values, goals, and strengths Blend professional coaching with group facilitation so both work better Become a great coach by making coaching a natural extension of who you are The coaching exercises and resources in the appendices are available as free downloads. Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.