Tag: Coaching

I, like many since the COVID-19 pandemic started, was released from my contract in April. I’m not sending resumes out every day to every agile coaching job I see on the market, though. In fact, I am being much more selective in what I am looking for and what I’m doing. It’s not vacation time, either. I’m up every day, working.

What am I up to? 

• Building this blogging habit. Thanks for joining me, by the way! 
• I am also figuring out how to edit video and audio in order to launch a video/audio series with one of my colleagues, Tyler Haycraft.
• I am participating in coding projects where the customer is first and the art of the craft is second.

 But why?

Why am I focusing on blogging, video editing, and seemingly anything but “finding a real job”? Because I’ve spent the last 10 of my 12 years in the industry dealing with situations that put me in dissonance with myself. And after a decade of being quiet, or even passive – I’m sick of it. So I’m going to spend the next several months saying what I have to say, and doing what I want to do. Period. Because It’s time I stop shutting up about it. 

I’ve always used coding and technical practices as a way to do good in the world.

I’m not great at carpentry, metalworking, sewing, drawing, or other maker skills. Code is how I make things. I don’t code just for the sake of coding though. I code for people. I code to solve problems for people. And it’s the moment I see my software solving that problem, and the smile on the face of the person using it, that makes me think all the toil was worth it. 

I adopted agile principles at my core two years into my development career because it made so much sense. It stopped releases from being late because it got rid of big, risky releases. It made us developers constantly talk with the customer so we would do the right thing. 

Blending my technical skills and my people skills to become what’s been labeled as a “Technical Agile Coach” has always been my superpower, of sorts. 

But looking around…

… a lot of the agile industry has gone away from doing what is right for the customer or the craftspeople. Scrum has come to be a synonym for agile (it isn’t) that gets forced onto teams. SAFe is becoming a synonym for agile at large enterprise companies (it isn’t). If you look, really look inside most corporations, especially in insurance and in finance industries, you can see that we haven’t changed at all. If anything, “Agile transformations” made things worse by wasting millions of dollars and making developers more miserable. 

No more. 

No more scrum mastering just to actually be expected to be a manager’s right hand. No more “Agile transformations” that are actually just big let’s-lay-a-bunch-of-people-off-and-do-more-with-less scams. No more. 

Will I work again?

Absolutely. But I’m not actively looking for 40 hours a week “Agile transformation” positions right now, and that’s because I’m pretty frustrated with my industry. I’m frustrated with what we collectively have done to our own industry. And I want to get back to basics. I’m not sure what the next evolution is for a Developer turned Scrum Master turned Agile Coach, but it’s time to change. 

So what’s next? 

As you might have seen from my first video, Should Agile Coaches be Technical?, I am passionate about coaches having technical skills. I’m not just going to sit here and pontificate on a soapbox about that. I’m going to build some playbooks, some courses, some worksheets, maybe even an app or three, that help agile coaches, coaching software teams, get better at the craft. If that works out, cool. 

I’m also going to keep blogging. I have a lot to say about my time working in this industry and it’s time I uncorked this bottle.

What I will probably do is talk with my network and, if the connection is right, do some non-transformation team level coaching, part-time. Teams that just want to get s#!t done but need an extra perspective. No SAFe, Scrum, or other framework BS. Just a radical focus on the customer and the team. 

If none of this works out, I’m sailing away. You might find me on an island near the equator sipping something blue from a coconut.

Photo Credit: My lovely wife, Victoria Studley

How do we navigate the Agile Industrial Complex to make sure we are getting the right people and solving the right problems? Most of the A.I.C. revolves around a coach or a team of coaches. I’m going to talk this week about how to go about starting a turn towards agility. 

Before you start, make sure you are focused on hiring help for an organizational problem, not a departmental or team problem. I wrote a blog post on this last week, make sure you check it out.

If you are asking an organization-level question – and you understand that you’ll be changing the way the entire organization works (this means the entire corporation: marketing, sales, HR, finance, no really… everything) in order to achieve better results – then you’re ready to look for some coaches to help you through it. 

By now you know that this isn’t going to be easy. Having some help is a good thing.  

The first thing to understand about an agile transformation is what I call the Transformation Paradox: 

You become agile by being agile. 

What this means is that agile is not a noun. It is not a person, place, or thing. It is an adjective. You use agile practices, behaviors, and mindsets applied to the action of accomplishing your organization’s goals. It’s not about being agile. It’s about being better at reaching your goals. 

My first piece of advice: Avoid choosing an agile framework when you first start out.

Do not get tempted by SAFe, Scrum at Scale, or any other framework. There is no framework for “Agile practices at company XYZ”. You and your team, guided by a good coach, help you author this.

Instead of trying to find a framework, you want to find one coach, or maybe a few at most, who can do the following: 

• Work with you to flesh out the desired measurable outcome of the effort invested in moving to a more agile way of working.
  
• Build a trusting relationship with you and the rest of your executive team. 
  • Chemistry and trust are critical to success but are hard to objectively measure. You have to be able to work with this person. 
    
• Objectively, and honestly, look at the flow of work through the organization and spot the issues affecting it. 
  • The coach has to have access to all corners of the organization. The coach has to be able, to be frank with you, and you have to listen. This is why having the correct problem to solve is so important. 
    
• The coach needs to have experience and knowledge of multiple patterns, tools, practices and can use his or her experience, backed by data and facts, to present a unique combination of actions and behaviors that bring your organization closer towards an agile mindset.
  

The best way to find these coaches? Look towards individual coaches or small, independent practices. Individual expert coaches will have a profile site, some sort of an LLC, or otherwise are incorporated, and should have a portfolio of previous companies where they did work. 

Here’s a quick tip: Surf Twitter and LinkedIn agile groups.

Watch for those who ask good questions and foster good discussions, and start from there.

If a coach or agile practice leads with a pre-made, certification-heavy framework rather than a business outcome that they worked with you to create, reconsider whether working with them is in the best interest of your organization. 

A lot of large staffing agencies have started to build or purchase agile practices. Their recruiting network can get a lot of coaches in front of you quickly, and it can be easier to have another organization do the vetting for you.  But take heed. They also have disadvantages. Sales staff, tempted by sales goals, may advise you to hire more coaches more quickly than is appropriate, leading them to push quantity and not quality. Trust, but verify.

I personally believe you have enough problems as a business leader without also dealing with a third party organization trying to hit some sales goal that is not aligned with your business outcome. 

Like my tip above about surfing Twitter and LinkedIn, you can help detect certification factories by what they post. If they post lots of certification classes, offer an “easy button”, and put more emphasis on their title than their outcomes, then consider what their focus is. 

They should be focused on you.  

Finally – do not set aside a huge staff budget for agile transformations. Most successful agile transformations start with a single team experimenting outside the normal constraints of the organization. A single coach can run this experiment. This is how your organization discovers what will actually work in your real, actual business. 

If you hire ten coaches all at once, you invite a lot of thrash and chaos into your organization as they try to figure out what works. Please don’t do that.

Run one experiment, with one, or maybe a few senior-level coaches. Then work with them on how to scale what is proven to work, by having done it already at your company.

Hire a coach. Work with that coach to determine a definition of success, a logical first step, and then fund and support that step. 

Plan. Do. Check. Act. Repeat. 

Photo by Micheile Henderson on Unsplash