Daily Agile Coaching

My experiences as an aspiring Agile Coach — Day 3

Today’s topic is persistence. This might sound arrogant but it’s just how things are so bear with me. For quite some time now I have not only tried to push Agile through at our company but lately also bring up the idea of Agile Coaching and its possible benefits to the organization.

Today was a good day on that field. I presented to the CEO my proposal on what kind of Agile Metrics there are and which ones we should be experimenting with. The strongest proponent for actual implementation has been what I've described here earlier: Spotify’s Squad Health Check.

Other than that the conversation was very fruitful and it can clearly be seen that the conversation is turning more to how we should do Agile than should we do Agile.

Concrete example of a conversation that we had was that: I suggested we let Agile Coaches handle the results of the Squad Health Checkup whereas the CEO seemed to think that if there’s a lot of red it might beneficial to bring HR to the matter as well. In my opinion the Agile Coach should be able to handle this friction as he’s expertise should be working with people. But I agreed that if the problem persists and people feel like nothing’s being done it’ll hurt the morale even more now that the problem has surfaced.

In the end we’ll let the Teams decide. If they trust HR enough to release this information to them it’s fine, if not, well I guess we need further discussion on the topic.

Conclusion of the conversation seemed to be that we should definitely begin to look at how to bring a culture of Agile Coaching to Wapice. We’ll begin by observing and listening to Teams within a platform for one of our customers and we’ll do it as an internal project. The starting point is that we’ll try to find positive things first, what do the Teams feel like they’ve done right, something that other Teams could benefit from. After that we’ll go into metrics through Health Check and then move to inspect current traditional Scrum metrics we’re utilizing.

Again, keeping in mind that nothing is forced down the Teams’ throats and the Coach is there to mentor AS NEEDED and not as a know-it-all.