What is Agile Coaching?

Let us divide Agile Coaching into 2 different sections in order to understand it better: “Agile” and
“Coaching”.

What is Agile?

Agile is a philosophy; a study of ideas and beliefs; and a set of rules as how to behave. Agile is the ability
to move quickly and easily. When we take Agile into the context of teams and organizations, we are
touching upon two things, 1) Teams abilities to move quickly and easily with the study and
implementation of ideas, beliefs, and rules as how to behave to explore and supply better product and
solution to customer. 2) Organizational ability to move quickly and easily with the study and
implementation of ideas, beliefs, and rules as how to behave to strive and thrive in competitive
marketplace. For both, we need change in mindset, behavior, ways of working, ways we organize, ways
we decide on tools, processes and practices and more. Each team and organization may have different
dynamics based on requirements, goals and constraints so in order to avoid “One size fit all” mindset,
Agile provides different options of Agile implementations for different scenarios (which many people call
framework or methodology) like Scrum, XP, Kanban, SAFe etc.

What is Coaching?

Coaching is a technique of facilitating people for their development and realizing their better potential
by facilitating discussion around finding problems and make solution decisions. Since people themselves
are closet to problems; coaching beliefs people have abilities to articulate and discover problems in best
possible manner. They are creative and resourceful in figuring out potential solution or solutions for the
given problem. Coaching beliefs that oneself as a coach must figure out how to unleash their skills and
bring that to implementation.

What is Agile coaching?

As it may sound by now, but Agile Coaching is different than just having skills and knowledge to coach
teams and organizations to implement agile practices. Agile coaches are supposed to understand unique
organizational problems and bottlenecks in their Agile transformational journey, should figure out best
ways to help organizations being truly Agile in their ways of working, mind, behavior and practices.
Having said that, although problems are unique to different enterprises and organizations but
underlying principle, values and practices to resolve such problems are the same. Agile coaches need to
understand how to tailor ways as per unique needs of the enterprises and organizations.

Problem well stated and accepted are generally half solutioned. Agile coaches need to unearth actual
problems with unique to the enterprises and organizations. They need to apply system thinking
approach to understand various components and their interactions. It includes study of people, process,
structures, policies, team mental models, individuals’ mental models and organizational mental models.
Agile coaches enable individuals, teams and organizations to achieve their goals and solve their
problems.
Agile Coaching is different than other facilitation techniques like teaching, training, consulting,
counseling, and mentoring in a manner that it prescribes Inquiry as a technique over advocacy to figure
out problem and perspective solution. Being an agile coach, sometimes you may have to use other
facilitations techniques like teaching, training, consulting, counseling, and mentoring to enable and
enhance coaching experience but you use them as vehicle to reach to the level of common goal of finally
utilizing inquiry for both problem identification and perspective solution.

Effective agile coaches don’t show authority during facilitation. They are unbiased towards a specific
problem or solution. While working with teams and organizations, they use collaboration as a mean for
problem identification and finalization of solution(s) and ensure problems and solutions are acceptable
to all.

Agile coaches use something called “Acknowledgement” as a skill to highlight a person’s or team’s good
actions and true nature. By doing so coach provide more access to the client and it keeps the client
happy and motivated.

Effective Agile coaches are great listeners too. To listening they go by intuitions, over and above of
picking up other things like body language, tone, pauses, hesitations and at the same time they ensure
to give undivided attention to the client.

Agile coaches take due care of 5 dysfunctions of a team as described by Patrick Lencioni. Which states
Absence of trust, Fear of conflict, Lack of Commitment, Avoidance of accountability and Inattention to
results as five layers of dysfunctions of a team. He says, for teams, it all starts with having absence of
trust if people are not vulnerable to each other or each other’s opinion. Now since team have absence
of trust, they avoid having conflicts and have desire to preserve artificial harmony that stifles the
occurrence of productive ideological conflicts. This fear of conflicts leads to lack of commitment since
people lack the clarity or buy-in in the absence of productive conflicts and ambiguous thoughts. Intern,
they are unable to make decisions that they can stick to. Further on, lack on commitment leads to
avoidance of accountability as people tend to avoid interpersonal discomfort and it prevents team
members from holding each other accountable for their behavior and performance and finally it leads to
low standards. And finally, avoidance of accountability leads to inattention to results when the pursuits
of individual goals and personal status erodes the focus on collective success. This leads to status and
ego problems.

Agile coaches help cultivate a culture where people are vulnerable to each other, building trust by being
vulnerable to each other, having productive conflicts, having clear understanding of ideas, thoughts,
perspectives etc.

Agile coaches are good conflict resolvers. They apply good conflict resolution models and techniques to
handle conflicts. They use various Conflict Norming, Conflict mining and conflict profiling techniques in
order to do so.

Agile coaches under and respect commitment as highest level of contribution, buy in and alignment over
enrollment and compliance. While in Compliance, being the lowest level of contribution people do their
job just for sake of doing it and avoid any penalty. While in enrollment, people do see value in doing
their job and they contribute. But being committed, which highest level of contribution people behave
intelligently, and they have ability to defy a lack of consensus.

Coaching Conversation

Sandeep: Hi Sarbjit

Coach: Hi Sandeep, how are you doing?

Sandeep: Doing good Sarbjit. Thanks! How are you doing?

Coach: I am doing good too. Thanks! Yes, tell me.

Sandeep: As you know I am working as Scrum Master of Green team. We are facing some problem with
my agile team and was looking for setting up some time with you. Thanks for having your time!

Coach: Sure! Np!

Sandeep: See, I am seeing from last of couple sprints that my team is not able to complete the work
they are planning. We are not able to fix it after trying repeatedly.

Coach: Oh ok…Would you please mind sharing what problems were identified and their respective
solutions?

Sandeep: Yes, sure. As we are supposed to discuss that in sprint retrospective. Team figured out that
acceptance criteria in story is incomplete or ambiguous. We plan to have better stories in place but its
recurring time and again and we are unable to improve on it. Do you have some suggestion for me?

Coach: Yes, sure! So, when you said you guys’ plan to have better stories in place, of course you are
referring to have well written acceptance criteria. What ideas you tried to have well written acceptance
criteria?

Sandeep: We asked Product Owner to be more vigilant, but it is not working.

Coach: I understand. What information do you have regarding your Product owner’s experience working
with Agile team.

Sandeep: I believe Product Owner has good experience working with Agile teams and writing agile
stories. We are not sure what we are missing?

Coach: That’s good. How old is that Product Owner working on this product? And, what do you think
your team’s experience level on the product and domain you are working on?

Sandeep: Product owner is new to our company, but team has 2 years of experience working on this
product.

Coach: How are you finding your backlog refinement and sprint planning meetings used to collaborate
on this knowledge base that team is having beyond the experience Product Owner is having working on
this product? What are the ways team can help during this time?
Sandeep: Oh, I see where the problem is. I think since product owner is new to domain, he is lacking
required domain knowledge. I feel team is better placed to ensure and help Product owner reminding
him on writing good acceptance criteria, in scope/out scope items, pending queries etc.

I think we as a team need to ensure not just the Product Owner that we have good quality stories in
place. Now I think I know what to do next. Thanks, Sarbjit!

Coach: That’s so nice! So, may I know what is your next step?

Sandeep: Yeah, Sure! I am going to more vigilant during refinement sessions and sprint planning
meeting. I will remind my team to think through acceptance criteria and raise if there is any missing
piece of information, well before we commit stories into sprint. During the next retrospective, I will also
remind my team to contribute to acceptance criteria as regular practice. I think I will also reach out to
Product Owner separate in one-to-one conversation to see if he needs some knowledge transfer from
the previous Product Owner who has moved to different team.

Coach: Excellent stuff! Do you think we can synchronize up on the progress of it sometime in couple of
weeks?

Sandeep: Sure! Let me get back to you on 5th of next month at around 4pm. I will stop your calendar.

Coach: Sure! I will be happy to be there in your support.

Sandeep: Thanks, Sarbjit! It was nice talking to you.

Coach: My pleasure Sandeep! See you next time. Bye for now.

Sandeep: Bye!
 Takeaways by Coachee

What: To ensure team is contributing to user story acceptance criteria and team has sense of shared
ownership.

When: Before 5th of next month

How: By using SCRUM events like refinement sessions, sprint planning and sprint retrospective for
reinforcement.
 Feedback from the Coachee

Overall, the interaction was good and fruitful. I have good confidence that decided solutions are going to
help my team.

Having said that, I was expecting more solution coming from Coach than me figuring it out how to fix it.
 Self-introspection of the conversation

Learnings

Open ended powerful questions are better than close ended question. Starting my questions with How
and What really helped me in this conversation.

It works to not direct people to solution rather drive them toward finding right solution based on their
local context.

Action Items/Improvements

I could speak a little more in the beginning to develop more trust from the coachee.

I could have done little better to frame agenda in the beginning.