So, did you get hired as the new Agile Coach?

What do you think you should do first?

1. Attend daily standup meetings and coach team members on utilizing timeboxes effectively.
2. Participate in Retrospective meetings and propose methods for identifying and implementing improvements in current practices.
3. Recommend improved prioritization strategies for planning sessions.
4. Take part in planning meetings and raise concerns about the readiness of the requirements.
5. Schedule meetings with the leadership team to address organizational silos and agile anti-patterns. Offer to develop a formal transformation plan to enhance current work processes.

GOOD LUCK! These strategies can help you establish a solid foothold in the organization but may also result in resistance. Your team might perceive you as “just another Agile Coach.”

BETTER APPROACH

“Use Agile by Example.” What’s this? Is this a new framework? Is this a new methodology?

Not Really, it follows the Kanban Method’s Evolutionary Change Principles

1. Start with what you do now.
2. Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change.
3. Encourage acts of leadership at all levels.

First and Foremost:

It is essential to understand the current ways of working and to visualize how the team completes the work with their current practices. The work should be the service provided to the customers rather than any interim stage of work. In other words, visualize the complete flow of work from when the team starts working on it until it reaches the end customer and the customer begins using it. The completed work should not be an interim stage like “with the QA team,” “with the DevOps team,” or “under UAT.”

Visualize this on a physical board or use collaboration tools to draw the complete flow of work. Once drawn, please refrain from taking a photo on your phone and emailing it to the team members, asking them to review and refine it. Always come back to this physical board or online collaborative board and do all the discussions in front of it. Encourage collaboration over offline solo thinking.

This exercise will give an understanding of the following:

• The hidden work.
• The invisible dependencies.
• The need for specialized skills to complete the work.
• The waste in the complete workflow.

Next, Manage the Flow:

After visualizing the current workflow, measure the cycle time from when the team began work to when the customer started using the service or product. Then, measure the time it takes to move the work through each workflow stage.

This exercise will give an understanding of the following:

• Predictability of completing the work.
• The workflow stages, where the work spends more time.
• The workflow stages, where the work waits longer.
• The correlation between the estimation vs duration. Or it could be that there is no correlation at all.

Then, determine the Actionable Metrics:

Encourage the team to act as a leader. Have them evaluate the outcomes of the previous two steps and identify the most important three gradual, progressive changes to their current work methods.

In other words, work together with the team to create a list of the following:

• What are those workflow stages that generate waste? Can we omit them? What is the value that they are adding to the work? Is there any other way to add this value?
• What are the customer expectations? What is the predictability of completing the work? What is the variance between the two? What steps can the team take (incrementally) to reduce this variation and achieve better agility?
• What should we measure? Should it be the time taken to resolve the dependencies? Should it be the time taken to complete the work? Should it be the time taken to perform testing? Should it be the time the work waits before the DevOPS team deploys it? Should we measure the amount of effort spent on rework?

Finalize it:

1. Consolidate the above to create a plan for incremental, evolutionary change without completely revamping the current ways of working.
2. Execute, measure, and report.
3. Repeat the above three steps and bring an evolutionary change.

And remember to unburden your team. Limit the work in progress. Start finishing and stop starting.