BECOME AN AGILE COACH

Don't just learn the theory

Our Academy for Agile Coaches focuses on students becoming Coaches. We do not send people through Certification Programs, but rather help them to bring relevant, applicable knowledge, skills, behaviors and practices from real-world experiences.

The program is separated into 6 different levels of a repository of chapters, from which students can choose independently based on their aspiration. Already after the second level (currently ~4-6 month learning time), the student will have enough competences to be able to support individuals and teams. An internship program supports the student to apply the competences into the real world.

 

Definitions:

Experience Level
Experience Level is like a "year" or "semester" in university terms. The number of Experience Points define the advancement from Level to level.
Chapters
Chapters are like classes in university terms. Students enrol into chapters. Some Chapters are in-person trainings, some are hybrid, some are purely online. Some, such as Management 3.0, provide international recognized certifications. Students are not required to attend all quests to receive Experience Points. However, certifications are only issued for completion of Chapters.
Quests
Quests are individual sessions as part of a chapter. The attendance of a quest provides the students with the Experience Points needed to advance to next level and achieve the Coaching Aspirations.

Experience Level 1 - The Foundations of Agile & Coaching

The foundational level addresses the backgrounds of Agile & Coaching.  At the end of level 1, the student is expected to choose a Coaching Focus through the Coaching Aspirations..

The Chapters

As Agile Coaches, we support companies for higher agility to achieve higher business values sooner. Agile is not just a recipe to follow; it is a set of principles, which can help us to make sense of the context at work or on private life. This will create an Agile mindset.

For that, we need to understand, what Agile is, why it exists and check if we, as Agile Coaches, have an Agile mindset ourselves.

The Quests:

  • Why Agile Exists
  • Introduction to Resilience
  • The Agile Mindset I
  • The Agile Mindset II

The role we play in organization (and often also the function and position) is called Agile Coach. By today, Coach is a pretty well-known term for both sports and business. Agile Coaching, however, is a very particular role in the organization. Within this chapter, we dig a bit deeper, what that actually means in an organization and how it may support the organizations.

The Quests:

  • Definition of Coaching
  • Agile vs Professional Coaching
  • Agile Coach in an organization

The Role of a Coach might be a sensitive one. If we want to be able to help our mentees, then we need to ensure, that we follow certain standards and ethics towards individuals and our clients. In this chapter, we address the ethics when it comes to coaching conversations, but also to external consulting or coaching support.

The Quests:

  • The Risks of Coaching & Consulting
  • Coaching Ethics & Standards

Contrary to common belief, Agile is based on scientific foundations. To understand Agile and when and how Agile can help, we need to understand those foundations.

The Quests:

  • What is System Theory?
  • Complexity and how to approach it?
  • Complex Adaptive Systems

This chapter provides ongoing support for all students through all Experience Levels. Enroll here, if you are interested in getting ongoing support through Individual Coaching, Lean Coffee or other Open Spaces to increase social learning and experiences.

In this chapter, you will also find access to the optional exams for each of the levels.

The Quests:

  • Lean Canvas - EP 01
  • Individual Coaching & Advisory
  • Agile Coaching Scenarios - EL01

Experience Level 2 - Agile Coaching for team-level

Level 02 focuses on skills for a Coach: The soft skills, such as negotiation, conflict resolution; but also the hard skills on how to manage a project, support coding teams or learning the team frameworks.

The Chapters

Agile Teams are supposed to be self-organized, cross-functional and competent. To achieve that, we need to endorse diversity in teams. High diversity and high motivation of individuals invite for tension and conflicts. Moderating conflicts and ensuring a productive work environment before a conflict turns into fights and politics is difficult and require certain so-called soft skills.

Therefore, in this chapter, we will address different soft skills, which will help an Agile Coach in their daily work with teams, Managers and stakeholders.

The Quests

  • Cross-Culture Communication
  • Develop Team Agreements
  • Negotiation / Persuasion
  • Manage for Diversity
  • Empowerment & Inspiration
  • Better communication
  • Conflict Resolution

"Eat your own dog food": To be able to support teams in the Agile way of Working, live and breath in an Agile way might be essential. The Personal Agility System is a way to apply Agile to your life.

The Personal Agility System by Peter Stevens and Maria Matarelli was created to support individuals to beat procrastination and get better to get things done. Since then, it ha been applied by hundreds of people all over the world, including Thought Leaders such as Lyssa Adkins. Through the application of Personal Agility System, we will be more productive by ourselves, but also more aligned with the stakeholders in our life (private and business). 

In this chapter, we will learn more about the process, tools and mindset to achieve higher purpose in life.

The Quests

  • Life is the Ocean: What Really Matters
  • Role & the 6 Powerful Questions
  • Events & Tools of Personal Agility 1
  • Events & Tools of Personal Agility 2
  • Personal Agility as Alignment

To make an Agile journey successful, it needs to be visible in the whole organization - not only in Software-, Engineering-, IT- or Product Teams. Agile People is an approach for an organization, which helps HR teams to transform from the C-level executioners to a proactive facilitator of change and productivity in an organization through Agility.

As Agile Coaches, we need to be able to talk to everyone in the organization. Therefore, in this chapter, we will address different ways, practices and tools on how we can approach the HR organization to start and transform into Agility.

The Quests

  • Psychological safety as a foundation for a learning organization
  • Emerging strategies, structures and goals
  • Building conditions for agile culture
  • The learning Organization as Strategy and the future role of HR and managers

Through the rise of Agile frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban or others, Project Management became a hated word as it always was the metaphor on how things were done the old way. In Agile ways of working, we look at the outcome of our work not as a delivered project, but rather as a product, which value we incrementally and iteratively improve.

Traditionally, Project Management was supporting teams in the way of what they deliver and how they do it. In Agile, Product Development is dealing with what we want to deliver. Processes and how we deliver it, is always up to the Teams. As Agile Coaches, we support teams in identifying the way they most effectively deliver value. Understanding the background, context and applications of traditional Project Management supports us to find the best way on creating that process.

The Quests

  • The Project Lifecycle
  • The PM Knowledge Areas 1
  • The PM Knowledge Areas 2
  • Project Management & Agile
  • Why Project Management is still important

To create great products, we need to focus on understanding the customers, but also balance between the needs of Shareholders, Developers and potential other Stakeholders. A Product Owner or Product Manager will always be pulled in many different directions. As Agile Coaches, we are supporting the Product Manager by providing and supporting them in the best practices available and help them to balance the needs of different stakeholders.

In this chapter, we address, how a Product Manager or Product Owner goes about end to end of a feature from idea to delivery.

The Quests

  • Start With Why
  • Understand the Problem
  • Understand the Customer
  • Prioritization
  • Thinking Lean
  • Stakeholder Management
  • Requirement Engineering
  • Roadmap Planning

The purpose of any organization is to make the life easier for a certain group of people through a product or service.  Offering something novel or innovative is what sets organizations apart from others. Apple, for example, offered with the iPhone not only a complete different product, but rather a complete new experience. 

In this chapter, we will learn, how we can support organizations building up innovative products systemically by listening to our clients and turning their desires and problems in solutions without spending too much money in Research & Development. This chapter is based on the works from Steve Blank, Eric Riess, Daniel Osterwalder & Ash Maurya.

The Quests

  • The Lean Startup / Running Lean
  • Build Measure Learn
  • The Lean Canvas
  • Customer Development
  • Experimentation & Learning
  • Lean Accounting Dashboard

The Agile Manifesto was developed by Software Engineers based on the principles from other domains such as Toyota Production System or System and Complexity Thinking. The authors of the Manifesto were already experimenting and introducing tools and practices around more effective and better quality Software. As they came from many different backgrounds such as Scrum eXtreme Programming or The Pragmatic Programmer, Agile itself does not tell you, which practices and tools are better. However over the last 20 years, there has been a set of different practices, which has been proven successful. In this chapter, we therefore will look and explore those practices. We will not go into details and test or program code on this. However, we will look at different tools and frameworks, relate them to the different contexts (if possible also outside of IT) and see how we can coach and mentor development teams into the right mindset for bettre software quality sooner.

The Quests

  • Pair/Mob Programming
  • Continuous Delivery
  • Test-Driven Development
  • Vertical Requirement Slicing
  • Emergent Architectures
  • Test Automation
  • Estimations, Planning, Forecasting
  • Refactoring
  • Shift-Left Testing

Agile should never be the goal, but rather the mindset, which can help you to achieve the goal. This makes it difficult to measure, if we as Agile Coaches are successful or not. This can be used on different levels of organization or purely just as a personal introspective tool.

In this chapter, we will learn potential and well-known metrics people use, when we may be able to use them, how to abstract them from technical to non-technical focus and when they might be more dangerous.

The Quests

  • Why & What we Measure
  • DORA Metrics
  • Velocity
  • Agile Health-Check
  • Measuring your impact
  • Qualitative Assessments
  • Develop Team Metrics
  • Risks of Measuring

Scrum is the most popular Agile Team Framework and applied by most of the companies working in Vietnam. Often Agile Coaches will be approached by organizations to support them in their Agile journey and Agile will be confused with Scrum.

While being Framework-agnostic, Agile Coaches nevertheless should be able to address and explain the concept and the ideas behind Scrum and how it is applied in organizations.

This chapter is the foundational training, what Scrum is and how to coach teams in Scrum as well as support teams struggling with it.

The Quests

  • The Empirical Process
  • 5 Values of Scrum
  • 5 Events of Scrum
  • 3 Artifacts & Commitments
  • 3 Accountabilities
  • The Myths of Scrum
  • What Scrum is Not
  • Scrum Practices
  • Usage & Risks of Scrum

Kanban is besides Scrum another popular Team Framework used in Vietnam. Whereas Scrum gives teams containers through timeboxes, Kanban optimizes the team productivity through focus on flow. As it puts less power on the framework and more power to the team, it is often harder to make work in organization. It requires a more flow-oriented mindset and aware as well as empowering management. Then, Kanban can increase the productivity, time-to-market and flow of the whole organization.

In this chapter we will learn the basics of Kanban, what it means, and what potential risks and disadvantages Kanban may bring.

The Quests

  • The Kanban Board & Flow
  • Change Management Principles
  • Service Delivery Principles
  • Kanban Principles 1
  • Kanban Principles 2
  • Usage & Risks of Kanban

Experience Level 3 - The different forms of Agile Coaching

As learned in Experience Level 01, there are different activities on how an Agile coach supports the team. Here we dig deeper into each of these activities and learn, when to do what.

The Chapters

The Quests

  • Understanding Coaching Core Competencies (ICF)
  • The Coaching Agreement
  • Trust & Intimacy with the Client
  • Coaching Presence
  • Communicate Effectively
  • Creating Awareness & Defining Actions
  • Planning, Goal Setting & Accountability

The Quests

  • Creating Trust with Mentee
  • Identify Improvements
  • Develop your experiences
  • Story-Telling

The Quests

  • The Product Mentor
  • Starting Products from Scratch
  • The Health of a Product Backlog
  • Role of Product Owners
  • From Product Owner to Product Manager
Each student needs to coach through 5 sessions, in which they receive feedback from others.

The Quests

  • Training from the back of the room - p1
  • Training from the back of the room - p2
  • Training from the back of the room - p3
  • Liberating Structures

The Quests

  • Powerful Questions
  • Acting As a Mirror
  • The Coaching Conversation
  • The Learning Environment
  • Session Management
  • Decision-Making, Disagreements, Conflict Management
  • Best Team & Servant Leader
  • Feedback, Advice, & Teaching
  • Agile From a Coaching Perspective
  • The Coaching Engagement
  • Mindset Shifts
  • ADKAR - Change Management
  • Coaching Modes & Team Startup

The Quests

  • Principles and Values of Agile Meetings
  • Fostering Collaborative Decision-Making
  • Facilitating Agile Meetings
  • Facilitating Retrospectives
  • Leveraging Group Facilitation
  • Agile Team Environments
  • Session Management
  • Mindset Shifts
  • ADKAR - Change Management
min. 1 Day / week coaching at a company

Experience Level 4 - Role of Management & Leadership in Agile

Management & leadership in organizations are playing crucial roles on the Agile journey. In this level, we will learn, with what different practices, tools and mindset, we can approach and support them.

The chapters

The Quests

  • The secrets to Authentic Leadership
  • The Tools to build the pillars
  • Vulnerability
  • Empathy
  • Integrity
  • Adaptability

The Quests

  • Complexity Thinking
  • Management & Leadership
  • Engagement & Motivation
  • Empowerment & Delegation
  • Value Culture
  • Learning & Competences
  • Scaling Agile
  • Continuous Improvement

The Quests

  • Complex Adaptive Systems Revisited
  • Leadership Frameworks
  • Management vs Leadership
  • The Servant Leader
  • The Facilitator
  • Accountability vs Responsibility

The Quests

  • OKRs for Alignment & Focus
  • Teaching OKRs
  • Relative Targets
  • Growth Model
  • The Risks & Dangers of Performance Reviews
  • The Learning organization

The Quests

  • The Need for Business Agility
  • Emergent Strategy and Value Creation
  • Frameworks, Tools and Techniques
  • New Ways of Thinking and Behaving
  • Business Agility as the New Normal

The Quests

  • The Why & What of Leading with Agility
  • Behaviors that Enable Agility
  • Knowing & Connecting with Yourself
  • Developing & Leading Ourselves
  • Skillful Communication

The Quests

  • Traditional Change Management
  • Agile as Change Management
  • Change as a constant
  • Management 3.0 Change Management Model

Experience Level 5 - Agile on an Organizational Level

Initially, Agile was always an approach to support teams. However, most organizations consist of more than 1 team. In this level, we learn, how we approach and support organizations in their business agility.

The Chapters

The Quests

  • Role of Change Agents & Coaches
  • Role of Management
  • Change, leaders & followers
  • The challenges of transformations
Career Path of Agile Coaches

The Quests

  • How HR's role is changing when we need to increase Business Agility.
  • Performance management and examples & cases
  • Compensation and Benefits
  • Talent Acquisition and onboarding
  • Employee Engagement
  • Learning and Development
  • The Agile Workplace

The Quests

  • self-organized, cross-functional & competent teams
  • iterative & incremental delivery
  • continuous improvement
  • customer-driven requirements
  • Transparency
  • The Vision
  • The role of Management

The Quests

  • The Myth of Certainty
  • Un-fix
  • SAFe
  • LESS
  • Scrum@Scale
  • Spotify Engineering Culture
  • FlowTyme

The Quests

  • From Alpha to Beta - Principles of BetaCodex
  • Open Space Beta
  • Cell Structure Design
  • Relative Targets

The Quests

  • Powers of Ten
  • Scaffolding
  • Flight Levels & Principles
  • Organizational Powerful Questions
  • Empowerment & Motivation

The Quests

  • Organizational Performance
  • Role of PMO / Center of Excellence
  • Lean Portfolio Management 1
  • Lean Portfolio Management 2
  • Denkplan 1
  • Denkplan 2

The Quests

  • The Portfolio / Program
  • Roles in Product Management
  • Product Manager Introduction
  • Data-Driven Product Management

The Quests

  • Meddler Game
  • The organizational buy-in
  • Open Space Beta

The Quests

  • Collegial Leadership
  • Market-oriented strategy
  • Agile process
  • Adaptive Structures
  • Common Culture
  • Engaged People
Min. 1 Day / week coaching at a company for 3 months.

Experience Level 6 - Run an Agile Consulting Business

[COMING SOON] - This voluntary level is for freelancers, individuals and potential entrepreneurs, who want to learn about running an Agile organization, which consults other businesses in Agile ways of working. This level is only available for  students on professional subscription.

The Chapters

The Quests

  • The importance of role models
  • Finding your Agile operating system
  • Authenticity as an organization
  • Mission, Vision, Values & Principles
  • Measure your success & impact

The Quests

  • Sales & Marketing Channels
  • Building Trust
  • Crafting a Proposal
  • Develop Experiences & Testimonials

The Quests

  • The Agile Hiring Process
  • Roles & Expectations
  • Competences & Performance
  • Management

The Quests

  • Consulting Ethics & Integrity
  • The role of an external consultant
  • Difference between external and internal consulting
  • The indispensable consultant

MAKE AGILE A REALITY IN YOUR ORGANIZATION