From time to time people ask about Agile Coaches and what they do, how they help, and how you can start working with one. While there are many different aspects to their role and also how you can start working with one, I wanted to first describe how they can help your team, since this is the most obvious reason to start working with one.
Let’s start with defining what an Agile Coach is and loosely define how they can help your team. The most prominent training organization led by Lyssa Adkins who wrote the book “Coaching Agile Teams” and Coaching the Agile Enterprise” defines the Agile Coach as someone who exhibits aspects of a teacher, mentor, facilitator, and professional coach rolled up with some specific domain knowledge and technical prowess.
What is an Agile Coach?
“A person who works with multiple teams engaging the forces within and outside the team that hinder agile’s full promise (values and principles). A coach may use the four disciples of teaching, mentoring, facilitating, and professional coaching to maximize the impact they have on the team or individuals within the team”. — Agile Coaching Institute
Now that we understand what an Agile Coach is and somewhat of the skill set they maintain, we can describe 8 simple ways Agile Coaching can help your team.
1. Living and Practicing Agile Values and Principles (Role Model)
An agile coach knows the agile values and principles and can immediately spot gaps or areas for improvement on the team. A coach will model the right behaviours and coach the team to develop those same behaviours.
2. Acting as a Professional Coach (Direction)
According to the ICF (International Coaching Federation) a professional coach partners with the team in a creative process that inspires their personal and professional potential. Having a professional level coach on board that will help you grow both personally and professionally is a huge asset when working toward transformation and high performance.
3. Acting as a Team Facilitator (Decision Making)
A good team facilitator is needed when the team has to make daily decisions and navigate through what can be a bloated process. A coach can help in this capacity or coach the Scrum Master if you are doing Scrum or another team member to do this. The art of facilitation is a core strength of the agile coach.
4. Acting as a Transformational Guide/Master (Advisory)
Their are people who describe themselves as change-makers or change agents this is the same with the agile coach. An agile coach is a master of organizational change which is a natural gift due to the fact that it is rooted in the agile principles of welcoming change.
5. Acting as a Business Value Optimizer (Domain)
A coach should have some level of domain knowledge when working within an organization. A coach can help your team clearly see the business value when the team starts working on a product.
6. Acting as a Technical Advisor (Hard Skills)
Most agile coaches come from a software development background, that's not to say they don’t come from other places, but they do in fact have a good understanding of the technical aspects of the work the team does and can easily speak to that when working together. This does not mean they are the best coder or architect, only that they understand what and how something works.
7. Acting as a Mentor (Soft Skills)
An agile coach can help the team by mentoring them with tactical and practical ways of doing things based on past experience. Consultants are the best mentoring because they worked with teams at other organizations and can draw from the patterns seen across this wide landscape.
8. Acting as a Teacher (Teaching)
A coach will have the ability to teach in a way that helps the team grow both technically and personally. This could be about agile or about the way to address a problem like how to best work with a specific tool.
Understanding the ways an agile coach can help your team is one of the first things to perceive before engaging a coach (which is very easy FYI). Each agile coach has a different approach to how they engage a team and ultimately help them to become high performing.
Source: everydayAgile
