Everything you need to know about an Agile Coach

The goal of an Agile coach is to make a team more efficient, transparent, and cohesive, and to enable better outcomes, solutions, and products/services. It is not about using one particular method over others, but empowering people to rise to business challenges smarter, faster, and with less risk. Selecting the right tools and methods is important whatever your role, though the Agile coach has to be like a good bartender and know how to mix them together to create a perfect combination tailored to the organization. The role of an Agile coach includes discovering the organizational goals of both teams and individuals, identifying the method/s that will help in their journey, and teaching these practices. An excellent coach empowers people to the point where they won’t need their services anymore and are positioned to employ Agile methods in their future working practice. Agile Coaches work with everyone in an organization, from a Scrum team with junior developers right up to the CEO. They give Agile coaching workshops, help spread agile ways of working, and often help shape the vision and structure of an entire company. An Agile Coach is an experienced agile practitioner who supports an organization in creating and improving its agile processes and practices. An Agile Coach does this at all levels of a company, working on the micro level with individual teams and on the macro level with executives. Agile Coaches teach, show, and embody agile values that help companies and their people build an agile culture that’s tailored to their needs. Agile Coaches may work at organizations on a project basis or on permanent contracts. And they may exist in many different forms. Agile coaches help train corporate teams on the agile methodology and oversee the development of agile teams to ensure effective outcomes for the organization. They are responsible for guiding teams through the implementation process and are tasked with encouraging workers and leadership to embrace the agile method. The agile coach’s ultimate goal is to arm agile teams with the right knowledge, tools and training so that they’ll be able to use agile to its full potential.

The Agile Coaching Institute offers three certification levels for Agile coaching:

• Agile team facilitator: The starter level, working with existing teams
• Agile coach: The advanced level with a specific domain focus, working with teams that are currently forming
• Enterprise Agile coach: The expert level, working on leadership and strategic level with the organization 
  
  

An Agile coach has a few common specialties:

• Technical coaches: Technical coaches work closely with developers and typically have experience with coding and integration since they’re necessary skills when working with any development team
• Process/management coaches: Process or management coaches focus more on establishing leadership for Agile teams and overseeing successful adoption of the Agile method
• Non-directive coaches: Non-directive coaches offer individualized support for people or organizations looking to solve specific Agile-related problems
  
  

Agile was first used in this context in 2001, when 17 “organizational anarchists” who recognized the need for an alternative to documentation driven, heavyweight software development processes got together. The result of the meeting was the Agile Manifesto signed by all participants.

The participants all agreed that while there is value in the items on the right, they place greater value on the items on the left:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

Agile coaching is an evolving field though by following many of the concepts outlined in the Agile Manifesto, Agile coaches are able to drive innovation, growth, and transformation.

Why do you need an Agile coach?

An Agile coach helps with organization development, growth and change, and implementing Agile processes across a business or team.

Here are some goals and challenges where an Agile coach can come in super handy:

• Ensuring there is alignment between strategy and development
  With the help of a coach, you can create a system where it is easy to prioritize work according to its value and ability to advance your strategy. This system can also assist in redirecting development resources where necessary to maximize growth. Organizational alignment can be the difference between the success or failure of a business – this is one area where an Agile coach can add huge value.  
• Delivering products and services that your customers want
  A coach can help teach your team how to identify customer needs and develop their roles and responsibilities accordingly. Once this is done, a coach can also help break down delivery into short increments. Helping deliver smart, high-value improvements to your products and services is an area where the Agile coach shines.
  
  
• Making fast, critical decisions to avoid common failure patterns
  By improving team dynamics, communication and transparency, a coach can instill practices that help leadership avoid pitfalls and minimise risk. Agile teams are better equipped to identify issues and develop quick, intelligent solutions. With the right methods and approaches, Agile coaches can give employees the tools they need to be proactive in their problem solving.
  
  
• Improving progress visibility
  By focusing on transparency, communication and inter-departmental collaboration, an Agile coach can ensure the development process can be conducted with the least friction possible. Progress visibility means employees at any level have project oversight and can contribute meaningfully to the process.
  
  
• Ensuring better quality
  An Agile coach makes sure that product testing is not left to the end of development and issues are solved as early as possible. By ensuring a product is used and tested early in the process, Agile coaches can not only help improve the product, but also discover any areas where the product could expand or pivot.
  
  
• Increasing collaboration and ownership
  An Agile coach is responsible for improving team collaboration and ownership of tasks while providing a trusted, safe environment for teams to operate. Organizations work better when ideas and teams can communicate and share ideas while still having ownership of their product area: Agile coaches make this possible.

What are the responsibilities/roles of an Agile coach?

According to the coaching roles originally taught by Agile experts, Esther Derby and Don Gray, there are nine roles that sum up the responsibilities of Agile coaches. These roles cover a spectrum from observation to partnering (from watching someone perform a task to doing it with them) and are all important in being an effective Agile coach.

• Hands-on-expert: This role is most commonly required in organizations just getting started with Agile methods. A coach needs to be more hands-on at the beginning when individuals are unsure where and how to start with these new methods. Often, a hands-on-expert will directly lead and implement Agile methods and instruct teams and organisations
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• Coach: With this hat on, an Agile coach believes that everyone can solve their own problems, they just need a little guidance in figuring out how. A good coach gives people the tools they need to grow on their own
   
• Teacher: If the individual or team is missing information, this role’s purpose is to fill this gap and impart new knowledge

• Technical advisor: This is where the above-mentioned domain expertise comes in. When teams hit a technical roadblock, a coach in this role has the ability to help them overcome it, often working closely with a team throughout the process

• Counselor: Like a good therapist, active listening is key for any Agile coach. A coach in this role creates a safe environment where, for example, tensions regarding the adoption of Agile practices can come to the surface in free and honest discussion. This role of a counselor is required any time someone feels unsure about their role or any part of the working process    
• Facilitator: Instead of giving exact answers and revealing solutions, a coach in this role helps team members discover these on their own. The facilitator role also assists in conflict resolution and improving group dynamics
• Modeler: While modeling, a coach focuses on changing behaviors. This is crucial when adopting a new practice as the old habits tend to kick in instinctively
• Reflective Observer: This role can provide valuable outside perspectives that immersed team members may not have recognized before, helping guide them to new understanding and revelations
• Partner: In order to play this role effectively, an Agile coach must be aligned and invested in your organization’s goals and vision. A word of caution here: most Agile coaches are external contractors and therefore cannot completely fulfill this role. They aren’t an employee and while they may be concerned and deeply interested in your goals, they aren’t ultimately responsible for achieving them

Note that as an Agile coach works with a team, these roles can fluctuate and change. A good Agile coach tailors their role and approach to the task, team, and individual they are working with. 

What does an Agile coach do?

The job of an Agile coach can be broken down into 5 areas:

1. Catalyzing improvement
   Using Agile methods means changing your organization’s processes and responding to future changes better. A coach has to kickstart this first and biggest change – the adoption of methods that will help an organization during its journey.
2. Promoting awareness
   To kickstart changes, a coach has to make a team aware of the need for change and create buy-in across the organization. Open questions, visualizations, data, and metrics can all help in identifying problems and gaps and ensuring the whole team is on board. 
3. Boosting ownership
   If a coach has succeeded in promoting awareness, this can lead people towards greater engagement with the organization and their role. Awareness increases responsibility and commitment to finding a solution and helps staff be a part of the change they want to see.
4. Developing competencies
   One of the key activities of an Agile coach is imparting knowledge. Creating a collaborative learning environment and promoting emergent learning cultures are the key to sustain an Agile approach long after the collaboration with the coach is over.
5. Facilitating barrier removal
   As a company transforms into an Agile organization, the process can face numerous barriers and challenges. The responsibility of an Agile coach is to remove obstacles and facilitate change so that an organization can continue to grow and collaborate without issue.

Here are some specific examples of activities Agile coaches might undertake as part of the Agile coaching process:

Preparation

• Help the organization to establish Agile practices and governances
• Assist to create strategy
• Proactively organize opportunities for colleagues to learn more about Agile, inside and outside the company
• Providing training on Agile practices
• Identify process issues and improve them
• Expose wasted resources and opportunities, wherever they are
• Interact with HR to make sure HR policies support Agile, team-based thinking

Application

• Help managers and leaders to implement and apply Agile practices
• Helps team members put their training into action
• Work with all stakeholders to set up and maintain a structured way to continuously improve the teams and product development flow
• Facilitate sessions to envision changes
• Facilitate brainstorm session for new product development
• Conduct assessments
• One-on-one sessions

Passing on knowledge

• Deliver on-demand training on specialist topics such as user stories or refinement 
• Continuously and proactively improve existing training material for courses
• Encourage a culture of continuous experimentation to further improve the Agile practices
• Provide capacity calculator template for the team
• Help scrum master to plan meetings like preplanning, planning, daily scrum, review, and retrospective

What is the difference between an Agile coach and a scrum master?

Agile coaches and scrum masters aren’t rivals. These roles complement each other and can both be instrumental in delivering organizational change and growth. The key difference in how these roles operate is in scope, with some overlap. A scrum master typically focuses on a single team or at a maximum 2 or 3. If they handle more teams than this, they are either superhuman or very likely won’t be that effective. Scrum masters are at their best working very closely with a small team on a specific task. Scrum masters will help ensure that the team lives and breathes Agile processes outlined by the Agile coach and in accordance with the company vision. An Agile coach will work with many teams either directly or through management personnel. Because of this, they can’t develop the same level of personal relationships with employees as a scrum master, though they have a larger degree of oversight and organizational ownership of the Agile process. They work with the managers to increase the overall agility of a number of teams and across an entire organization. An Agile coach’s work always begins with a longer observation period. After this, and because they tend to have more experience in organizational and process development than a scrum master, theysssssss can recommend more effective and far-reaching changes. They also tend to have more influence as they work with management and can implement these ideas faster and on a wider scale.