Agile coaching

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Develop your Agile coaching capability if you are looking to unlock your team’s potential to deliver output of value quickly.

What is Agile coaching?

Similar to the conventional definition of coaching, Agile coaching refers to unlocking a team’s or organisation’s potential to maximise their performance by adopting Agile ways of working. Agile coaching helps teams to learn Agile frameworks and apply them to ensure they are goal focused for their business and their customer.

Who is an Agile coach?

An Agile coach helps organizations, teams, and individuals adopt Agile practices and methods while embedding Agile values and mindsets. The goal of an Agile coach is to foster more effective, transparent, and cohesive teams, and to enable better outcomes for customers.

Agile Coaches play an important role in scaling and sustaining Agile at the enterprise level. Agile Coaches act as change agents  to scale and sustain enterprise-wide Agile implementation. They  help leaders and teams adopt Agile ways of working and embed Agile practices and behaviours across the organisation. They do it through on-the-job coaching, facilitation and mentoring that is tailored to teams  and to different phases of the organisation’s Agile transformation roadmap. 

Key success factors for Agile coaching

The best coaches introduce new ways of working to help teams collaborate and solve difficult problems in varied ways, from the early stages of a project to launch and beyond.   Listed below are 5 key success factors  that define the most successful Agile coaches:

Earn the trust of the team:

The best Agile coaches will listen, observe, and understand what the team is trying to achieve. They speak the team’s language and understand their pain points.

Be on the hook with the team:

An Agile coach helps articulates what success looks like and is accountable with the team in delivering valuable outcomes. It’s not enough for teams to become more Agile; the ultimate goal is to deliver more value for the business. Agile is an enabler, not an end in itself. The coach needs to be rewarded for the same outcomes as the team.

Be patient:

Top coaches develop the team’s capabilities in areas where they can deliver the most value. They give a team a taste of what success looks like and get them to see the value in doing things differently.

Be a doer:

Coaches don’t just sit on the sidelines and give advice. They act as a consultant and get things done: handle the prep for an inception workshop, help the team interview customers to develop a better customer journey workshop, or serve as a great project manager to make the design sprint go smoothly.

Be a connector:

They don’t have all the answers and don’t try to solve all the problems. Instead, they become a trusted advisor by connecting the team with the resources they need to be successful.