I probably shouldn’t have been surprised by this, this week
Just like everyone this week who may be working for a bigger company, my team and I found ourselves abruptly working from home. As an agile coach who has been traveling for a year, this was a welcome change. But it was also very disruptive, especially to the hundreds of people our coaches have been working with.
Some of our teams have been working for quite a while on their process, applying what they’ve learned of the agile mindset and had great momentum leading up to this past week. Other teams had only just started learning new ways of thinking and new ways of working with us. But of the 35 teams or so we are connected to, almost all have been fully co-located and reliant on their in-person, face-to-face habits and agile processes. Our client has also only recently adopted Office 360, Microsoft Teams, and just updated new infrastructure technologies that we’ve had to leverage immediately at scale to be able to adjust to working remotely.
To be honest, I was expecting a much more difficult first week adjusting to an agile coaching model with 100% remote teams.
And while yes, it has been exhausting to engage in conversation over video, chat, email, and text mediums for eight hours a day, it turned out to be a really great week. I’ve personally enjoyed eating meals with my family and not having to commute. But working remote is something I’ve done before and, like riding a bike, it’s come back to me and I adjusted quickly.
But the teams we’re working with really surprised me. They jumped in and adjusted right away too. All physical boards full of stickies were adapted into online versions. Teams hopped on video conference calls and kept their agile events going without missing a beat. It probably says a lot about the culture of our client and the resilience of the individuals. But I’m also proud of what it says of the agile mindset they’ve all embraced and the teachings they’ve absorbed from my colleagues. Of that, I know, I really shouldn’t be surprised.
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
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