The evolution of the Agile Coach role: 3/3 of cases
In 2021 SoftServe PMO organized PM GOOD NEWS CONF — event for Project Managers and those interested in this direction. This event was dedicated to innovations in the PM world. One of the speakers — Anton Voronko, an Agile Coach and Scrum Master since 2016, shared three cases to depict the evolution of the Agile Coach role. You can check the previous two cases here; below, we got the final, the third case for you.
Story 3: Coach for complex systems
Our third guy, like Jez, figured out how to help different companies overcome the fear of the big bang. It’s a pretty non-trivial issue within Agile: when you know that the actual release takes a lot of effort and coordination. So it’s expensive, and companies try to avoid frequent releases. They do internal iterations, develop some increments, and implement them in their environment. Still, they don’t release it to the actual user until some time later, and therefore, they have no honest feedback from their users.
Jez said: “ Okay, guys, it seems a little difficult for us, so to overcome our fears, we need to make something routine. So, let’s create an environment for everyone. It can be done very quickly, and if we don’t have to spend much time on it, we can practice it. We can do it once, again, and again, and then it becomes routine. We’re not going to see this release as a big bang that we must prepare over a long period.”
It was a great move. He supported a lot of companies, and they succeeded with that approach. They brought him in as a consultant, and he did all kinds of internal analysis and implementation of these systems. Because Jez was committed to an empirical approach, he decided that we needed to test this method continually. So he took part in various surveys and studies concerning high-performing teams. He analyzed a lot of data to find some patterns that could help improve this continuous delivery system. However, one thing he found out wasn’t related to what he was working on.
There was a question about decision-making. They surveyed a lot of companies about how they make decisions. The results impressed Jez. We’re going to think that businesses and corporations have rigorous models for decision-making, proven models associated with some data, proven approaches, and methods.
We imagine businesses and corporations have rigorous decision-making models, proven models linked to specific data, and tested approaches and methods. But as we see from this study, 13% of companies rely on the opinion of the person with the highest salary. We pay someone the highest salary and expect them to make decisions. We don’t have a system in place to validate their decision. We accept it and start working on it. As a middle way, sometimes companies can bring in a committee to decide the potential options.
That’s not the best way as we have some opinions. For example, only 24% of respondents have some economic value optimization modeling. Jez decided that’s an issue we have to solve. We need not just to implement new processes and help teams improve, but we need to change the environment in which they work. We must think about how we make decisions, work with budgets, and deal with risk. It also needs to be embedded in all organizations.
We must understand if we want to change how an enterprise works. So, what is an enterprise? Jez started to consider it a complex, adaptive system filled with people united by a common goal. Of course, we must believe that we must be adaptive, think that we rely on people, and know the environment in which the enterprise operates. That’s how we came up with some models for responding to changes in the marketplace. If you see what’s called an s-curve in the chart below, it may remind you of something from our first story about Kent and what he learned from watching a large, rapidly growing organization.
After these three stories, you may ask, why we told them? It’s just waves. I tried to illustrate these changes in Agile with the well-known model of three waves.
The first wave brought up Agile thinking and offered us some techniques for team excellence, for team power. That is how we can decentralize our solutions, empower our teams, and what tools and sets of practices they can use to help us succeed with our products. Once large companies realized that a small group of 10 people could make a digital revolution in 24 hours, they started demanding the same practices and toolkits in their larger environment. When you develop and support some complex products, you can’t do it with a small team.
Or rather, you can, but it takes an infinite amount of time. So, they started looking for ways to bring groups together. Then various large-scale Agile frameworks came along, thanks to which we have a second wave of implementation focused on cross-team collaboration. After that, they realized it wasn’t the end game. We can’t be agile only partially; we need to embrace business agility; we need to change how we plan budgets, manage risk, make decisions, and respond to market changes. That’s the third wave coming: a wave of business agility. Again, it’s working with management, with shifts in their mindset.
So, let’s summarize. There were three people. You might think these guys were Albert Einstein, but they weren’t. So, I suggest you discover the real personalities behind these stories. Maybe you can find some of their work and their books and try to understand why they came up with these different ways of working with Agile and how it can help you in your regular work.
That’s how the role of an Agile coach changes. It has to go through all three waves. We can’t just decide that we’ll go with business agility. We can’t take this massive structure and go with it.
Sometimes it’s not that big of a company, and they need an Agile coach to improve the team. Sometimes they need an Agile coach for broader products or if it’s a startup framework.
So, an Agile coach has to go through all these waves and have some specific areas of toolkits that they apply to help companies succeed. They can do facilitation or actual coaching. They have to coach teams, companies, and executives. They can participate in coaching sessions organized across the organization, from team members to executives.
In the first wave, the Agile coach was more like the coach of a sports team. They supported the team in its technical excellence. They applied some frameworks, such as Scrum, Kanban, and Extreme Programming, and thus created the conditions for adopting Agile working methods. They empowered them to make decisions and thus began a fantastic self-organizing team.
Then time passed, and new frameworks came along:
- SAFe
- LeSS
- Nexus
- Scrum@Scale, etc.
These frameworks focus on cross-team alignment. They show how we can build a specific team of teams, get them to scale their practices, and help them get end-user feedback for a large and complex system or a great product. They also show how we can still take our iterations, minor batch releases, and release the big integrated product rather than tiny little products that are not connected and direct us to different goals. It was the second wave, but it was a time when many small companies went to the market and changed their forces.
We know how big corporations fail because they don’t see small startups emerging that are changing the forces in that market. For example, companies like Kodak thought there would be no digital revolution in photography. Here we can find new approaches such as Lean startup or customer development. These approaches showed us how to make decisions and invest, where to spend money and how to create different investment horizons. But, of course, this was only for small companies, and at first large corporations also thought they didn’t need these approaches. However, these small startups grew year after year, and now we see that some of the biggest companies in the world were just such startups. They were born into Agile, and so they started to create this Agile way of thinking in all of their functions: financial, human resources, operations, and so on.
Big companies, which we had already defined as complex adaptive systems, started looking at how to do the same. They started turning to Agile coaches, executive coaches, and consultants to help them with Agile transformation.
According to the latest research, Agile transformation has already spread through the IT industry and is going worldwide in different areas. We can see it now in banking and healthcare systems. The first wave is irrelevant because they’re focused on another way of working. Nevertheless, they’re still working with products and markets. So, they need to figure out how to create those products that will fit the market.
Of course, digital transformation has a significant impact. As we know, most companies these days are digital companies. Even if you’re providing services in different healthcare, banking, or transportation areas, you’re trying to back that up with data and creating a specific application that helps you manage various services. That means that almost every company worldwide is or will soon be a digital company. That’s why they need that business agility. We must go through this wave when working with Agile coaching.
