Question 1 – When coaching teams when should you have one on ones with the individuals and when could having one on ones impact self organizing teams and creating silos?

Team coaching is about coaching performance in the room: How they interact, operate, flow. Can you make that flow more efficient?

Individual coaching – Should always do it for executives and individual agile leaders because:

Some conversations might need to be private

Great coaching sometimes brushes up against the root of interpersonal or performance issues, fears, etc

Coaching sessions should be brief and based on individual coaching plans or outcomes. Coaching everyone all at once will disable that.

Whether you do individual coaching for team members is up to you. I stick to business and agile leaders (anyone who can help an individual initiative or Agile spread in general) and to anyone else who requests it. Some individuals just don’t want coaching and some won’t do the homework necessary to benefit from the recommendations and improve

Question 2 – Why can’t I use a Gantt chart to track the many dependencies in hardware design, prototype development?

You can do whatever you want

Gantt charts are great for plotting sequences and dependent chains

You DON’T want to use a Gantt chart to plot things that change very frequently because it is nearly impossible to plan chaos and its a lot of work to replan it when it changes

the argument then is whether or not the things you’re describing are chaotic. The rule is if you have a mostly dependable, repeatable process, informed by years of refinement and experience, you have a mature process and it can be mapped out easily

There’s a reason why Gantt’s are so popular – for the early stages of industry, especially manufacturing, repeatable processes needed to be documented well so they could be trained and repeated (the earliest form of automation)

However, now, where creativity and autonomy are part of the process, things become unpredictable, for which Gantt charges are not as effective