Why I Think Fractional Agile Coaching is the Future
It may just be a lull. The market has gone through tons of ups and downs and the (capital A) Agile industry tends to mirror the technology industry. Layoffs last year. Big dry spell in new agile jobs. Tons of people searching for jobs and hundreds and hundreds applying for the few that come out.
Everyone has blogged or talked about it. Maybe it’s inflation and interest rates, fear of recession, or the fact it’s an election year. Maybe “agile has won” and the idea of agile as a role is becoming more of a skill that everyone needs to have. But agile is not dead. The industry is just shifting a little. Adapting, if you will.
If you’re like me, you’re trying to navigate your way through this time period job hunting, thinking about what’s next. Both applying to jobs and expanding your network. These are things we should always be doing I suppose, because it is most certainly a VUCA world.
One thing I’m doing is spending time writing a book. Putting down the things I teach and coach agile teams on in order to be more agile. I’ve also created a behavior based and agile mindset based assessment so your team can create a meaningful dialog around which behaviors they need to work on. It’s 24 simple agile topics. If your team needs to improve topic 7, you should read chapter 7 in my book to hear what an agile coach would tell you to do, why it’s important, how to get started, and what 3rd party content is out there to dig deeper. Then, I suppose, if that’s not enough maybe people will hire me to really drive change in specific ways that matter. This is one way I hope to find fractional agile coaching opportunities.
But I’m also considering something new, targeting more strategic agile coaching as well.
What is Fractional Enterprise Agile Coaching?
My theory is that the days of getting hired as a enterprise agile coach for $200/hr or over $250k salary are dwindling. And yet, importantly, I think the world is not yet ready for any of the agile coach roles to go away. They still need us. Transformations have stalled or outright failed. And… budgets are not what they used to be, at least for now. So, I’m hoping to offer myself up for short-term engagements. Continuous improvement lends itself very well to short bursts of learning, change, inspecting and adapting. And organizations can, if they’re smart, decide how much they want to tap into this without hiring another full time person. Headcount and capital expenditures are hard. But short term expenses are easier!
And while you might read my book or come up with tons of ideas about how to be a great team level fractional agile coach, I think a lot of those roles are already taken by Scrum Masters and others (often spread too thin, but that’s another challenge to be solved on another day).
What could a Fractional Enterprise Agile Coach do for you?
- Help build role based or skill based workshop training, to fill in any gaps you have for Scrum Masters, Product Managers, Leaders, etc.
- Record a series of videos to help instill in the agile mindset outside of technology. Are you working on Business Agility yet?
- Create a leadership-based Community of Practice to help quietly educate those often forgotten in transformation training plans. Do you have a senior agilist who can help mentor managers willing to learn?
- Be an outside speaker at general Agile Community of Practice events to help reinforce your company’s agile points of view with 3rd party stories
- Be a silent partner in the Agile CoE or LACE to help be a sounding board with strategic plans to scale well and accelerate the transformation
- Work with individual senior leaders to turn their ideas into action, translating vision and strategy into intentional OKRs that inspire the right work in the right direction
- Mentor Product Managers and Product Owners to help the culture shift from old ways of working to one that is truly Design Thinking inspired, customer-centric, and evolving into a product-centric culture
- Work with leaders to understand the complex dependencies between teams to help untangle the organization structure challenges that will help improve flow and deliver value faster (most companies don’t change their org structure before starting a transformation!)
- Help assess and build a meaningful career path in HR to encourage the right growth and responsibilities through the levels of SM, PO, Coach, RTE, and Senior PO. These are table stakes to compete for great talent.
- Build a Transformation Kanban dashboard to help hold the leadership accountable to the progress and timelines they intend to uphold in rolling out the change plans. WIP limits and transparency is critical everywhere.
If any of these ideas feel like something you’d like to explore, please reach out. If I can’t help you I’m quite sure people in my network can, and I will refer you to someone who has great breadth and depth of experience. I’d love to see our entire industry bounce back quickly, make progress with the very talented people that are available today.
Free Consultation: https://tidycal.com/practicalagilist/fractionalcoaching
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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 complexity of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense.
How well is your team “being agile”? Find out at MeasureTheMindset.com. 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.
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
