BECOME AN AGILE COACH

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