Program

Coaching & Mentoring Stage

The Agile Manifesto demonstrates the necessity of coaching in its first sentence: ”We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it…” Coaches help others implement the right change for their context through listening, feedback, facilitation, guidance, and skill transfer. Coaching requires a diverse set of skills and tools to enable teams with different organizational, cultural, and technical challenges.

Coaching and mentoring are critical in agile organizations because responsibilities are more distributed to self-organizing and cross-functional teams. In most organizations, the agile coach is embodied in other roles as a manager, architect or ScrumMaster. Some organizations have created internal agile coaching roles, while others seek assistance from external coaching consultants.

This stage explores coaching and mentoring across multiple levels within the organization, across different functional domains, and across different stages of agile adoption. From individuals, to teams and programs, to whole organizations, coaching skills and responsibilities differ. Furthermore, agile coaching can be applied to technical and architectural agility, quality, project and product management and organizational change. Finally, coaching differs depending on the stage of adoption within an organization as newly agile organizations have many different needs than more mature ones.

Questions this stage will attempt to answer:

What is an agile coach and what do they do?
What do coaching engagements look like, where do they start and end?
How do internal and external coaching models differ?
How does one become an agile coach?
Can agile coaches also be a manager, ScrumMaster, developer, tester or project manager?
How does coaching differ with individuals, teams and whole organizations?
What are the typical challenges facing a coach and how are they overcome?
How does a coach work across so many realms: technical, quality, team, process, project, product, and organizational?
What techniques do agile coaches use to form teams, engage people, facilitate meetings, interact with leadership, and teach agile concepts?
What techniques from other fields (i.e. organizational development, psychology, executive coaching, neuroscience, etc.) have been applied?