Are You Value and Principle Based in Your Coaching?
There are oodles of agile frameworks and many official-sounding “ways of working” that are easy to get lost in today. Some people (teams and companies!) are very strictly adhering to frameworks and forgetting or ignoring the underlying values and principles. Scrum is not the destination. Nor is Kanban. Agile, too, is not the destination. The point is to deliver value consistently, rely on feedback to deliver the right products and services to delight customers and end users. Processes are supposed to fall by the wayside, barely be noticed, to enable us to do the actual work that matters. Although, it’s easier to measure whether you are “doing” Scrum or “doing” Kanban… it’s easier for managers and executives to scrutinize the process instead of the outcomes.
I wish more people would ask themselves these kinds of questions:
Are we following the Agile Mindset? Are we adhering to the Manifesto Principles? Does our team embrace Scrum Values or XP Values in the way we work?
Sadly, there’s no good way to get a certificate for properly applying the Agile Mindset. You can get Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, LeSS, and 1000 other kinds of certifications. But how do you know if you are following the more abstract principles. How do you know if your team actually understands the concepts hidden in the often misunderstood term “the Agile Mindset”?
Agile is a mindset, not a set of rules or a framework.
I’ve been thinking about this for years. Anytime I coach, I very rarely use the framework my team has been asked to use as the backdrop for lessons. We start with why. I reinforce principles. We center the work around people, process, and common sense. I purposefully tell them to ignore some rules while we’re learning. It’s more important to appreciate the Agile Mindset first. What is our purpose? What value are we trying to deliver? What’s the smallest thing we can do to prove or disprove if we’re on the right track to delivering that value?
So, if you have an Agile Coach or Scrum Master leading your team and they are helping you learn to think like this, you are lucky. But what should you do if you don’t have a coach? This is what I’ve been working on.
Guidebook
In the next few months, I’m launching a book called Make Teams Awesome that is a Practical Agilist Guidebook for just this very purpose. I want to take a short list of guiding principles and concepts and then share what a coach might tell you or teach you to learn and improve on that concept. The book is centered around 24 topics, providing guidance, advice, and overviews of the principles and concepts with specific examples. The basis for a lot of my guidance is based on practical advice, not any specific framework, but broader concepts like Lean, Design Thinking, Systems Thinking, and borrowing lessons from the Agile Manifesto, Extreme Programming and their values and principles. What results is a modern way of thinking… and a modern way of working that is centered on value delivery, delighting customers, and a set of cultures and mindsets that are familiar to those who study anything Agile, Scrum, or Kanban related.
Assessment
If you’re interested, please let me know. Part of the book includes access to a very simple assessment tool to see if your team is in fact “being” agile as I describe above. The assessment service is available now.
Please reach out if you’d like to discuss.
Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the practices and frameworks of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense. I offer fractional agile coaching services to help teams improve affordably. See more at FractionalAgileCoach.com
How well is your team “being agile”? Our self-assessment tool focuses on 24 topics of modern ways of working including the Agile Manifesto and Modern Agile basics, XP, Design Thinking, Lean, DevOps, and Systems Thinking. It comes with deep links into the Practical Agilist Guidebook to aid continuous improvement in teams of any kind. Learn more at MakeTeamsAwesome.com
The Practical Agilist Guidebook is a reference guide that gives easy to understand advice as if you had an agile coach showing you why the topic is important, what you can start doing about it, scrum master tips, AI prompts to dig deeper, and tons of third party references describing similar perspectives. Learn more at PracticalAgilistGuidebook.com
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