Zooming IN & OUT
Today I’m coming to you with one topic very focused on the Agile Coaching role and “How to give good support to an organization as an Agile Coach”.
I find that I’m best able to do this by being close to where the action happens and having and holistic approach to complex situations.
Agile Coaching
Agile Coaching is a role that means many different things in many different organizations. Luckily in my experience, I’ve worked following the Lyssa Adkins — Agile Coach Framework, meaning that I focus my professional development in 5 main skills (Coaching, Facilitating, Teaching, Mentoring and Agile-Lean practitioner), with 3 masteries (Technical, Business and Transformational)
Agile Coaching Roles
At eDO we have two different roles for Agile Coaches, we have the Team Agile Coach and the Enterprise Agile Coach, these are different specializations within the same core of Agile Coaching and are complementary roles that work in collaboration and without hierarchy.
Team Agile Coach — TAC
This agile coach is focused on the teams, meaning that its focus is more operational and on the day-to-day of the teams.
TAC’s focus is related to topics like Lean Metrics, team health, team relationships and working closely with the team leadership, in our case this means the trio: Lead Engineer, Product Manager and UX Designer.
Enterprise Agile Coach — EAC
This coach is more focused on the area as a whole, looking at it holistically, and looking at the interactions that the area has with other areas. It works more on the strategic and coordination levels.
EAC’s focus on OKRs, Portfolio and Business Agility and working closely with the area leadership like Product Director, Development Director and UX Lead.
Collaboration
In each area, of the areas we have this pair, there is an intrinsic collaboration between the two coaches. There is no hierarchy between the two coaches, just brutal collaboration.
I’m very grateful that in the area I work, I was paired with the perfect team coach. We connected deeply right from the start, like a made-in-heaven pairing, and for this, we can only call it luck…
How to replicate a lucky pair?
There are some things that are easy to pin out on how to replicate a great pairing.
Trust — this is the main ingredient, first we trust each other, and we both came to this partnership with that in mind from the start.
Feedback — we are both big fans of the gift of feedback, and we make use of it daily.
Clarity — when we start working together, we define responsibilities and expectations from each other, but more important than that, we help each other and support each other, without taking over each other responsibilities.
Coordination — we have at least a once-a-week meeting where we align on major topics. We don’t micro-manage each other, we just talk about the big picture of the topics and we trust each other in doing our jobs.
Partnership — Frequently we get topics where we need deeper collaboration, like a big initiative, or the collaboration between pods, or supporting the team or area leadership. In these cases, we discuss how we can help the area the most in a holistic approach.
“Love” — We really like each other, and this happens because we allow ourselves to get to know each other. We start the week with a happy meeting where we share about the weekend and define our week.
Zooming In and Zooming Out
What we do here with this partnership is zooming in and zooming out by having two different roles of Agile Coaches that support each other to support the area.
The idea is that we look to the area as a system, and as a living small organization, that needs to deliver value and to be valuable. That needs to experiment and learn quickly, and it is very data-driven.
This zooming is supported by different data, we have lean metrics, health metrics, satisfaction metrics, agile maturity metrics, value delivery metrics that help us decide where to zoom in and how to observe the impact of zooming out.
This is one approach that I’ve seen working for 1,5y. It is an approach that makes me feel happy as an Agile Coach as I’m able to focus on the topics that I like the most, and that helps me see our contribution having a positive impact on the area’s impact and value delivery.
There are other approaches to zooming in and zooming out, this is one that works for us, in areas with more than 10 teams and more than 100 people, with defined scopes in a data-driven organization that values people.
