Agile Coaches' Corner

In this episode of Trainer Talk, Professional Scrum Trainer Sam Falco answers the questions: "How do you that in the first Sprint? Don’t you have to build out all your infrastructure first?”

So you want to be an Agile Coach, huh? This week on the podcast, return guest, Christy Erbeck, is going to tell you everything you need to know if you’re looking to be a coach!

 

In case you haven’t caught Christy on a previous episode, she is a Principal Transformation Consultant at AgileThought and a Certified Dare to Lead™ Facilitator. She has over 25 years of experience in domestic and international consulting, training and coaching, and working in both software development and non-product-focused environments, including manufacturing (discrete and process), distribution, and sales and marketing.

 

Christy and Dan discuss what a coach is, what it takes to be a coach, how to become a coach, how to know when you are a coach, the differences between a coach and a trainer, as well as some coaching anti-patterns!

 

Key Takeaways

What is a coach?

It is a passion and mindset

As a coach, it is your duty to bring out the best in your team — you’re there to see what others cannot see

Someone who delivers value to your clients by creating and improving Agile processes within a team

What does it take to be a coach?

The ability to hold space for others to discuss tough subjects

A strong combination of hard and soft skills are required

Hard skills would be your ability to think strategically and tactically; clearly communicate up, down, and across the organization; your ability to tell the truth (even when it’s the last thing people want to hear); and to have real-world experience where you were not the coach

Soft skills would be a healthy sense of self, strong personal boundaries, the ability to empathize with others, a playful spirit, and natural curiosity

You should have had the proper training (for example: through CoachU or Lyssa Atkin’s SolutionsIQ)

Another important soft skill for a coach is to be the ‘wind behind their wings’ by releasing your ego and allowing the person you are coaching to be front stage

How to become a coach:

A new Scrum Master can experiment with coaching their team and should be there long enough to build a depth of experience — both good and bad to build a library of experience from

A coach should see multiple success and failure patterns

It’s important to have a strong foundation of your strengths and weaknesses, know how you’re going to respond to different situations, know what might trigger you in a setting, and to do ‘your work’ before coaching others to do ‘their work’

It’s important to not assume everyone else has the same success and failure patterns and experiences as you

When you’re walking into a new team as a coach you should always have a beginner’s mind (i.e. the perspective of being fully present in the moment and not projecting on historical experiences)

Anti-patterns of coaching:

Sending in a coach only when a team needs the help

When a manager is considered a coach of an employee (which sets both parties up for failure and is a conflict of interest)

Coaches that do not see their coachees as equals

Difference between a coach and a trainer:

A training stance would be that you are the expert in the given topic and those you are teaching are novices

Trainers impart knowledge to the trainees in a way that they can apply and grow from it

A trainer’s primary skill is to teach

In a coaching stance, you are there to help coachees uncover what they need to learn in order to become their best selves

A coach’s stance is not to be an expert in the person they teach; the person they teach should be the expert of themselves (a coach is just helping a person create space to allow them to follow and blossom)

How do you know when you are a coach? What should you continue to do?

As a coach, you should seek continuous improvement and adopt a lifelong learning mindset

You should continue to improve upon your hard and soft skills

If you want to be a coach, get a coach!

Understand that this is a journey

Ultimately, you will know when you’re ready to become a coach

 

Mentioned in this Episode:

Christy Erbeck

Agile Coaches’ Corner Ep. 68: “Fixing Your Scrum with Ryan Ripley”

Fixing Your Scrum: Practical Solutions to Common Scrum Problems, by Ryan Ripley and Todd Miller

Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition, by Lyssa Atkins

Flawless Consulting: A Guide to Getting Your Expertise Used, by Peter Block

Becky Hartman #BecauseHumanCoachU

SolutionsIQ

Agile 2020

Brené Brown

 

Want to Learn More or Get in Touch?

Visit the website and catch up with all the episodes on AgileThought.com!

Email your thoughts or suggestions to [email protected] or Tweet @AgileThought using #AgileThoughtPodcast!

So you want to be an Agile Coach, huh? This week on the podcast, return guest, Christy Erbeck, is going to tell you everything you need to know if you’re looking to be a coach!

In this bonus episode Christy Erbeck and Dan Neumann discuss some of the work impact from COVID19 and share some of their coping mechanisms. 

 

Want to Learn More or Get in Touch?

If we can help coach you or your organization, contact us at [email protected] and we'll connect you to the right folks at AgileThought. 

Visit the website and catch up with all the episodes at AgileThought.com!

Email your thoughts or suggestions to [email protected] or Tweet @AgileThought using #AgileThoughtPodcast!

In this bonus episode Christy Erbeck and Dan Neumann discuss some of the work impact from COVID19 and share some of their coping mechanisms.

In this episode of the Trainer Talk supplemental series to the Agile Coaches' Corner Podcast, Professional Scrum Trainer Eric Landes answers the question "Can Scrum work with remote teams?"

 

Want to Learn More or Get in Touch?

See available training courses at agilethought.com/training.

Visit the website and catch up with all the episodes at AgileThought.com!

Email your thoughts or suggestions to [email protected] or Tweet @AgileThought using #AgileThoughtPodcast!

In this episode of the Trainers Talk supplemental series to the Agile Coaches' Corner Podcast, Professional Scrum Trainer Eric Landes answers the question "Can Scrum work with remote teams?"

This week on the show, Dan Neumann is joined by Jorgen Hesselberg! Jorgen is the author of the new book, Unlocking Agility: An Insider’s Guide to Agile Enterprise Transformation, as well as the co-founder of Comparative Agility — a leading Agile assessment and continuous improvement program.

 

This episode will be focused on data-driven continuous improvement. Jorgen shares the main reasons to use data to drive continuous improvement, some of the main ways to gather data (and why these methods are used), and important pieces to keep in mind when implementing changes to your team and organization through the data you collect.

 

Jorgen has a lot to say about this topic as a co-founder of a leading Agile assessment and continuous improvement program so you definitely don’t want to miss his insights and key takeaways!

 

Key Takeaways

Why use data for continuous improvement?

Data can help guide you and your teams by asking better questions as well as shining a light where there otherwise would be darkness

Helps you reflect on what you’re doing and what you can do better; data helps guide these conversations

Optimizes workflow by making the feedback loop faster so you can take action more quickly and therefore see results faster

As a change leader, data can help you find out where you can be of most use to help your teams

What are some ways to gather data for continuous improvement? And why are these methods used?

Objective data (defects in production, trends, etc.)

Surveys, even though very subjective, can also be very useful because they can hit some important patterns of ways of working (i.e. psychological safety was discovered through a survey) and highlight other points that wouldn’t naturally come up in conversations because they create anonymity and give everyone an equal voice

Structured interviews

Gathering data — whether it’s through structured interviews, subjective data, or collecting data electronically — helps to shorten feedback loops

What is important to keep in mind when using data for continuous improvement?

Subjective, objective, and quantitative data are all great — as long as the data helps you and your team ask better questions, that is the main goal

As a coach or change leader, it is important to ask meaningful questions that highlight the issues and challenges your teams are facing and to give them a voice

Don’t implement changes all at once that you have gathered from the data because you and your teams will become overwhelmed and end up making no changes (i.e. because you are diluting the focus and creating confusion; people don’t have time to adjust too many different things at once)

An important facet to making change based off data is to change at a rate where you can see it ripple through the organization

Combine subjective data with objective data

Measure technical debt simply by asking your developers

Listen to data early on and refresh it periodically to stay ahead of the curve

Don’t continually ask your developers how they’re doing — they’ll get annoyed!

Understand what ‘normal’ benchmarks are for your niche

Data isn’t going to give you answers but it is going to help you ask better questions

Use data for information, not evaluation

 

Mentioned in this Episode:

Jorgen Hesselberg

Unlocking Agility: An Insider's Guide to Agile Enterprise Transformation, by Jorgen Hesselberg

Comparative Agility

The Agile Manifesto

“Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams,” by Amy Edmonson

Mood Marbles

Daniel H. Pink Books Strava

Agile Coaches’ Corner Ep. 58: “How to Get Past the Two-Week Shelf Life of Your New Year’s Resolution”

 

Jorgen Hesselberg’s Book Pick:

Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, by Nicholas A. Christakis

 

Want to Learn More or Get in Touch?

Visit the website and catch up with all the episodes on AgileThought.com!

Email your thoughts or suggestions to [email protected] or Tweet @AgileThought using #AgileThoughtPodcast!

This week on the show, Dan Neumann is joined by Jorgen Hesselberg! Jorgen is the author of the new book, Unlocking Agility: An Insider’s Guide to Agile Enterprise Transformation, as well as the co-founder of Comparative Agility — a leading Agile assessment and continuous improvement program

This week on the podcast, Dan Neumann is joined by Ryan Ripley! Ryan is a Professional Scrum Trainer, the host of the Agile for Humans podcast, and the co-author of the new book, Fixing Your Scrum: Practical Solutions to Common Scrum Problems.

 

Together, Dan and Ryan dig into his new book to uncover some of these common Scrum problems that hold back teams and what a Scrum Master can do to find them and help their teams get back on the path to delivery. Fixing Your Scrum is all about the steps you can take as a Scrum Master to transform your Scrum practices, bring life back to your Scrum events, and use Scrum as a competitive advantage for your organization.

 

Tune into this episode to hear all of Ryan’s insights and highly practical (and actionable) tips regarding the Scrum framework!

 

Key Takeaways

What does Fixing Your Scrum set out to accomplish? What does it cover?

Helps Scrum teams inspect and adapt the way they’re working and to discover ways that they can improve

Aims to help Scrum teams solve common problems

Focuses on practicality and actionable steps; it’s not another theoretical tome

It’s not about defining agility but rather how to use the Scrum framework to position your teams to have a shot at agility

The book provides ideas and structures; it’s not super prescriptive (i.e. Ryan and Todd take a consulting approach rather than a “thou shalt do this…” approach)

Aims to provoke discovery with suggestions

It is aimed at the Scrum Master to hone their craft

What is the 15% solution approach?

The approach emphasizes not getting overwhelmed with the big things but rather to move the needle a little bit in the direction you want to go

It’s about discovering what your next step is (that could lead to something impactful) instead of trying to plan out the next thousand steps which are going to change as you get feedback, anyway

Anti-patterns:

Diminishing the Scrum Master to an administrative role (they’re supposed to have an impact on the way that the teams are using Scrum and how the organization is using agility)

A commitment to deliver on a specific set of product backlog items in a sprint (there should be a sprint goal that you hold sacred rather than a commitment to a bunch of backlog items)

Change, change, change all at once (changes need time to bake in to ensure that they’re effective)

Teams that are a group of loosely associated people rather than a truly collaborative group working together

Important notes about the Product Owner role and the product backlog:

There’s a misconception about the product backlog that it just needs to be posted somewhere to be transparent, but transparency means whole-team understanding (which requires refinement, continual collaboration, and whole-team discussions)

Go beyond visibility by making sure the product backlog is fully understood by the whole team (by continually refining, enhancing, and sharing your understanding of the product)

The product backlog should represent the future vision of the product

Ruthlessly delete old/unnecessary product backlog items (product backlog items shouldn’t be treated like inventory so don’t be afraid to delete [if it’s a good idea it will come back])

Shift the language around the product backlog — it’s more of a forecast; not a commitment

The importance of implementing Scrum values:

Scrum values change behavior

Without them, every practice that Fixing Your Scrum recommends becomes rote

By bringing Scrum values in, you’re honoring the human side of the work

If you bring them forward correctly, it brings life to the framework

When the values are present, agility becomes possible

 

Mentioned in this Episode:

Ryan Ripley’s Website

Ryan Ripley’s LinkedIn

Ryan Ripley’s Twitter

Fixing Your Scrum: Practical Solutions to Common Scrum Problems, by Ryan Ripley and Todd Miller

The Pragmatic Bookshelf

Woody Zuill Quote

 

Ryan Ripley’s Book Pick:

Only Joking: What’s So Funny About Making People Laugh? by Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves

 

Want to Learn More or Get in Touch?

Visit the website and catch up with all the episodes on AgileThought.com!

Email your thoughts or suggestions to [email protected] or Tweet @AgileThought using #AgileThoughtPodcast!