The evolution of the Agile Coach role: 2/3 of cases
An Agile Coach and Scrum Master since 2016, Anton Voronko supports teams and leaders on their journey towards Agile process and mindset. Using Scrum, Kanban, XP, and SAFe practices enhanced with Theory of Constraints, Lean Six Sigma, Lean Startup, and Design Thinking tools, he helped with improvements for companies in both public and private sectors. As a part of SoftSErve PMO, he participated in a conference in 2021 and shared three stories that depict the evolution of the Agile Coach role.
Since I wanted to make it a bit more fun and not so dull explaining to you how the role of an Agile coach is changing, I will try to illustrate this with three stories. We don’t know if these are real people, but we’ll find out at the end of this article.
Story №1: Head Coach
In the beginning, there was the Holy Waterfall. It promised that we would ask our users what they wanted. Then we will design such a system. After that, we can just write the code and test it, and everything will be fine.
But there was one person, let’s call him Kent, who found that users were changing their minds. Because of the long development cycles, we couldn’t adapt quickly to these changes, so users and workers were unhappy. So, he said: “It doesn’t seem to be working, and we need to do something about it.” He started thinking about different approaches, practices, etc. how to solve this dilemma.
By sheer coincidence, a major corporation has been struggling with a new application for over a year and a half. They have been trying to develop an app to replace several legacy ones. During this period, they failed to finalize just about every functioning part. So, Kent was brought in to solve this problem. There was a failed project, a team of 10 developers, and a set of experimental practices. They had nothing to lose, so he agreed to take the job.
Kent began to implement these practices, worked closely with the team, changed the whole way of working, and in the end, it was a success. It wasn’t just a local success. These methods became known throughout the industry. It was a great success as many teams began to work the same way and get the same benefits. It brought great fame to Kent himself, and new opportunities opened up in front of him.
Kent was invited to a fast-growing startup with 200 people working on it, 20 times as many as his previous team. Of course, he was an experienced guy and knew what they needed to do, what practices to use, and so on. Here, however, he was in for a surprise. They didn’t follow his practices. Kent said: “I don’t mind if someone doesn’t do what I recommend; that’s fine; I just want them to fail.” Nevertheless, the startup succeeded without his recommendations. It was a changing moment.
Kent decided he needed to learn it and figure out how they could succeed without his methods. That learning spanned seven years. He just watched, analyzed, and tried to figure out what he needed to do to have the same success. He understood one more thing about the concept of anti-fragility, and as a result, after seven years of observation, he came up with a new model that changed his worldview. It was a three-step model that showed how organizations change throughout life and cannot be universal. That was a horn sound for the new wave.
Story 2: Coach in practice
The next man, let’s call him Henrik, was one of those who followed Kent’s practice and succeeded. He was a widely known practitioner. He had worked with many different products and helped them implement Agile ways of working. He became a good coach. The products of the companies he helped started to grow. Suddenly, he found that when products snowballed, all the benefits of Agile disappeared. That frustrated him a little bit, and he just saw that different teams were working on the identical product because a complex product requires more than one team to do everything in an Agile way. Still, they get results that we do not consider good results. So, Henrik started to work on that.
He tried different emerging frameworks regarding scaling products. He was even involved in developing a new framework that became widely known. Ultimately, he created a model encompassing all those patterns that helped develop complex products with multiple teams. He knew these things, started offering these methods and models and succeeded again. He could help large companies and corporations develop their products, but he knew something was missing.
When teams develop their product, they are surrounded by a pretty great environment, the corporate environment, the enterprise environment, and as they dealt with the problem of team alignment, there was a new problem: how can we work with an environment that can’t accept all the values and ways we work with them. He thought about it and came up with some models of how we can test our ideas and how we should make decisions. However, that was just the beginning, the drums for the next wave.
We hope you enjoyed these two stories! We still have the third one for you, so stay tuned; we’ll post it next week. If you do not like waiting, hit the link and check the YouTube video with Anton’s speech.
