Lissa Adkins - Coaching Agile Teams. A Guide for Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches and Project Managers in Transition

Methods of flexible management Agile (Agile) where to start implementing

The idea of ​​the flexible development methodology Agile (agile) is that employees and managers are able to very quickly find new solutions and, if necessary, create new products to increase the company’s profits and its overall competitiveness in the market.

But it is impossible to say that the Agile business methodology will work in 100% of cases; there are a number of reasons for this: your employees, their level of education on issues of flexible management and many external factors, ignoring which will lead to hidden risks that are possible when using Agile.

Leaders of many Russian companies are interested in new methods of flexible management and this interest is not without reason, since it is Agile that allows one to find new ideas and solutions in conditions of crisis and high uncertainty in which managers of many companies have to work.

Creating Agile

Created in February 2001, the “Agile Manifesto” was signed by leading IT companies, and in almost 15 years agile has spread to all business processes and areas of business, which actually emphasizes the flexibility and adaptability of the methodology itself.

Agile creates an atmosphere of effective interaction between employees, which contributes to the rapid search for solutions, the creation of new products and the generation of new ideas. Agile teams are cross-functional teams, reminiscent of players in football or hockey:

On the one hand, the game is general, and on the other there is a defender, a half-back, a forward and a goalkeeper - this is a good analogy that allows you to understand what Agile is in business.

After all, it immediately becomes clear how responsibility is distributed and who can lead the team to success, but on the other hand, each player is an individual and this should be remembered.

Agile teams unite

Agile teams can combine the head of the sales department, a programmer, a marketer, and a service engineer, it all depends on the goals and objectives that you set for your company in terms of the use of flexible management methods.

Sprints: Agile time management

Of course, I would like to say that short sprints, assigned as needed or according to a set schedule, can compensate for planning meetings and approvals, but this is not true, especially at the initial stage. The implementation of Agile is quite a long process and is mainly associated with changes in the thinking of employees, as well as the formation of a different attitude towards responsibility, remember this.

Agile methods allow you to quickly make adjustments to a product or service, from the point of view of a concept or idea, but it is one thing to introduce it and a completely different thing to implement it in practice, because in most cases, adjusting production is a rather lengthy process.

One of the common misconceptions is that Agile is created to adjust a product or business process to the needs of consumers, but this is far from true.

And it is very important to take this into account, and not blindly follow the wishes of your clients. Remember that any change does not require a quick reaction and adjustment of products, but an analysis of the need to make these changes.

Which companies use Agile?

Agile methods are very popular in IT companies: Google, PayPal, Facebook, which is quite logical, since agile came from IT, in Russia the first projects in the field of Agile began to be implemented by Sberbank, there are my articles on this issue:

But now almost any company is interested in Agile management methods, which, in conditions of high uncertainty, one might say crisis, strives to find new ideas and solutions, and agile management methods are literally created to solve such problems.

Agile coach who is this?

Just recently I wrote an article about how to choose an Agile coach, you can read it:

It describes in some detail the issues of choosing an Agile coach, which allows you to see the process of implementing Agile from the outside.

Agile team in Russian business

Small companies have a very big advantage when implementing Agile, since Agile is created for small teams: 7-10 people are the ideal composition for an Agile team.

Of course, most Russian companies that use Agile are related to IT, but according to many experts, and I agree with this, in the near future the situation will change and Agile will be used by almost all companies focused on growth and development. Agile management methods allow you to divide cumbersome project teams into small groups and, in a short time of 4-6 months, transfer the current project from chaos to a manageable stage.

Result: you have many teams, but the number of employees does not increase, while non-material motivation of staff begins to work and a completely different attitude towards responsibility when doing work.

The use of Agile practices allows you to find new ideas, develop new and adjust existing products in a short time, and for the successful implementation of Agile, a new flexible management style is required, which is reflected in the general management style of the company.

Agile changes thinking and worldview by focusing on achieving goals using communication rather than a command-and-control structure.

But in my opinion, this is a rather strong illusion: getting rid of hierarchy is quite difficult, one might say it’s impossible, so the best solution would be to combine agile and your personal management style.

It is also a mistake to believe that Agile can increase the productivity of your company instantly, it all depends on two factors:

1. from your employees
2. and your business processes,

and they are unique in each company!

But at the same time, I would like to emphasize that for small companies Agile is perfect solution to achieve results, but in large companies you need to think about how to properly integrate Agile, since hierarchy and bureaucracy play their role quite strongly.

4 prerequisites for implementing Agile

Prerequisite 1. If you are looking to change the way you approach manufacturing by focusing on time-sensitive strategy and producing complex solutions.

Premise 2. You strive to release and develop minimum viable products to patch up the holes, so-called MVP products, then we begin to improve as necessary based on the analysis of customer feedback.

By the way, light industry developed in China according to this principle.

Premise 3. Increasing the speed of developing new ideas and implementing new solutions; if you have problems with deadlines, then Agile will provide you with the opportunity to organize corporate time management in a different format.

Of course, to identify problems, you need to conduct an audit, during which you will most likely identify the following typical problems:

• low attitude towards the need to satisfy the client, employees work according to the “quickly do it and forget it” model.
• lengthy approval process and excessive bureaucratization through correspondence and meetings.

Premise 4. Changing attitude towards work. As you know, attitude determines the result, and therefore, by changing your attitude, you can organize your work differently and implement your planned projects, using the strategy: “quickly make a pilot project, launch and test”, by receiving feedback you can improve your product in the process of work, precisely according to This principle is used to organize the release of information solutions by Microsoft.

Agile center

The typical structure of Agile centers, whose tasks usually include the development of new solutions, as well as the search and adaptation of new ideas, is as follows:

• several teams 3-4.
• Each team has from 7 to 12 employees.
• We separately allocate a coordination department of 3-4 people.
• reporting directly to the owner or general director.

Features of an Agile team

One of the distinctive features of an Agile team is responsibility becomes the main key performance indicator.

It should be understood that Agile participants work in the same room and actually observe each other's work, creating the atmosphere of an effective work environment or???

It should be understood that Agile rooms are not only the walls of an ordinary office, they are a unique source of ideas, knowledge, projects, and therefore all elements of interior design should predispose to creativity.

The advantage of Agile centers

The undoubted advantage of Agile centers is simplification of the financing procedure, since there is an understanding not only of what the money will be spent on, but also who is responsible for it.

Of course, you should remember that you cannot transfer all employees of the company to Agile; on the contrary, you should focus on pilot projects and gradually extend successful approaches to the entire organization, adapting them to each business process. And here a simple rule applies:

Work on projects associated with high risks and large financial costs should follow the “waterfall” principle.

Agile as a tool in competition

Very often we are faced with an insidious situation:

We cannot compete in the market in the current economic conditions, and therefore we need to act differently, so Agile methods of flexible management make it possible to find the answer to the question how to act?

Being a humanist to the core, could I ever have thought that I would be seriously interested in studying practical developments in the IT field?
But life is changing so rapidly that there is nothing left to do but accept its challenge and try new approaches not only in optimizing production, inventing new technologies, products and services, but also in effectively managing people.
Increasingly, managers have to admit that classical methods of working with employees are failing. Of course, there are a huge number of factors influencing management efficiency.

However, modern realities of life, such as multitasking, requirements for speed of execution, work in conditions of uncertainty, creation of innovative projects and products, require clear, coordinated and effective work from the manager and project team, which is often only possible using new approaches to managing such a project. group.

And despite the fact that the agile approach originated and is actively used in the IT industry, its principles can be perfectly integrated into the work of any project teams that are working on solving new problems. typical tasks. But first things first.

How did the agile approach appear and what is it?

It is often not easy for software developers, especially if the product is not standard. This means that development requirements can change throughout the product creation process. And if they are not taken into account, then the result may not be the result that the Customer will like.

A few years ago the development period software product could have been 3 years, while now it is 3 months! The task of modern business is to implement projects quickly and efficiently! How can this be achieved? Development teams had to rethink the way they worked. The fact is that development was previously carried out in certain stages according to the principle of cascade implementation of the project. Until one stage was completed, it was impossible to move on to the next.
It was not possible to constantly test and improve the product during the project development process, because everything depended on the original technical specifications. This approach was not at all flexible and was associated with bureaucracy and a lot of developed documentation, which often became irrelevant by the time the project was completed. That is why, instead of the classical ones, flexible approaches to project management were invented, which do not require lengthy approvals regarding the slightest changes in the project.
This is how the concept appeared agile - as a philosophy, which combines the principles of all flexible methodologies for software development. These include Scrum, Kanban, etc.

In 2001, thanks to a team of developers who realized that living and creating as before was becoming ineffective, the Agile Manifesto was born, containing the basic principles of working in the Agile approach.

The key ones were:
1. People and their interactions are more important than technology. And the most effective method interaction and exchange of information is a personal conversation.
2. The finished product is more important than the written documentation for it. It is important to deliver fully working software to the Customer every few weeks
3. Constant dialogue with the Customer during the product development process is more important than strict restrictions specified in the contract
4. Responsiveness to change is more important than sticking to the original plan of action

As we can see, these principles reflect a willingness to change, the value of people and a focus on results.
Moreover, the highest priority is the satisfaction of the customer/user through frequent and continuous deliveries of a product that is valuable to him, so that feedback can be received for subsequent improvements to the project.

Isn’t this what every team working on a project strives for?
Thank you, dear IT specialists, now we can safely adopt your experience!

Let's see what this approach looks like in practice? And what does coaching have to do with it?

As we know, coaching is always working to build the desired future and always working for results. In the coaching process, as a rule, questioning techniques are used that allow a person to better understand the task facing him, see resources and ways to achieve it. And if in the classic version coaching is the individual work of a coach with a client, then in the context of project developments team coaching is used, which is very similar to facilitation. Additionally, agile coaching typically requires the coach's expertise in the area where they are helping the team achieve results, so sometimes an agile coach can also step in as a mentor and coach.
The agile coaching process makes the team's work transparent, coherent and at the same time focused on specific goals.

Example 1.

Imagine a workday morning that starts every day with a 15-minute Daily stand-up sessions. This is a mini-meeting of all team members, where everyone stands. Yes, it's inconvenient. But the risk of delaying the event is reduced Therefore, only the most important things that will move the project implementation process forward are discussed.

Namely, each team member answers each other 3 questions:
1. What did I do for the project?
2. What do I plan to do?
3. What is stopping me from moving forward?

Such a short meeting helps to detect parallel processes, understand the stage of project implementation, the difficulties that need to be solved, and also increase the responsibility of each employee to other team members.
It is important that the solution to the voiced problematic issues will occur later, not at the stand-up session itself.
The purpose of such a meeting is to maintain focus on the current stage and at the same time look to the future. That is, to see how what the team is doing now affects the implementation of the project in the future, and, if necessary, adjust the action plan in time.

Example 2.

To visualize the process of executing tasks, you can use a tool such as Kanban board.
It can be in the form of a real board with stickers on which tasks are written, or in a virtual form, if the team works remotely.
In case it is a physical task board, employees write their tasks on sticky notes and paste them in the appropriate columns, depending on the stage of task completion. Thus, a general picture of the work on the project in the current period emerges, and an understanding also arises at which stages of the project “bottlenecks” are observed, where, for example, the largest accumulation of tasks arises.

In its simplest form, project stages can be designated as:
1. Need to do
2. In progress
3. Done

You can also break down the processes a little into their component parts, then the task board might look like this:

If necessary, you can visualize on the board other stages of the project that are characteristic of the activities of a particular team.

During the morning Daily stand-up sessions Employees, talking about the work done and upcoming work, re-stick stickers from one stage to another and can more clearly see those moments that complicate their work.

Based on such a visual analysis, “urgent tasks” may emerge that slow down the project as a whole. Such tasks are listed in a separate column on the vision board.
This activity allows you to understand whether a given project can be implemented within the given time frame or whether additional resources, including temporary ones, are needed. In this case, you can warn the customer in advance about the upcoming adjustment of deadlines, rather than informing about it at the last moment.

Example 3.

Matrix for prioritizing customer requirements

As stated earlier, it is very important for the project team to maintain constant contact with the client. Customers, in turn, can quite actively propose many ideas for implementation, not all of which are practical or can be implemented immediately. In addition, the implementation of some ideas may require additional costs.
Therefore, it is necessary to clarify together with the customer the value of each task for his business.

Working with values ​​and priorities is also a coaching approach that can be easily implemented using a special priority matrix of customer requirements. Tasks are distributed across all quadrants of the matrix depending on their value to the customer and expected costs. After that, we analyze which tasks we leave in the work (these are tasks that fall into the quadrant of high value at minimal cost), and which ones need to be thought about in terms of increasing the value or reducing the required resources.

So, if suddenly any of you, reading this article, resisted the idea of ​​constant interaction with the next Felix Sigismundovich from the ranks of your customers in order to make new adjustments to the project, then don’t worry! These meetings will not fray your nerves, because, using this tool, you will not need to blindly rush to implement any new crazy idea out of 1000 similar ones... Working with this matrix at meetings with the customer will help make your communication as productive and truly engaging as possible .

What do our customers want? High-quality and timely implementation of the project, as well as attention to your wishes.
What do project team leaders want? So that all team members, in addition to professionalism, have a high degree of responsibility for the result and are involved in the project implementation process. This will ultimately lead to coordinated work and the creation of a product that can satisfy the customer’s wishes, and possibly exceed them.
The Agile approach allows us to achieve both the first and second.

However, it is important to understand that in this case Agile becomes your management and communication style. And just as traditional management styles have their benefits and risks, agile management has its bottlenecks.

When we talk about coaching-style management, we mean that the team we are dealing with is quite mature. These are creative people who initially have an interest in the business, a desire to realize themselves, and a certain sense of responsibility and involvement.

We say that coaching is always work with awareness and a 100% sense of responsibility. And if these qualities of your employees are not yet at the required level, then it will be quite difficult for you to apply Agile coaching in its pure form. Therefore, you can use mixed management styles, gradually “growing” your team to a level at which you can safely use the Agile approach to management.
And this will undoubtedly lead you and your team to new heights! And your satisfied and grateful clients will never want to exchange you for anyone else!

Ekaterina Kudryavtseva, business trainer, coach

• Understanding the Role of an Agile Coach
• Interaction with teams, managers and stakeholders within the company
• Launch of agile directions
• Understanding the business
• Working with top management and shareholders: metrics and facts
• Best cultural, process practices and choice of agile organizational structure
• An Agile Coach is still a coach. Upgrade your coach's skills (almost the whole day)
• Transformation tracking

After completing the training you:

• Understand who an Agile coach is and get an Agile Coach certificate :)
• Get the Value Streams launch format
• Get an algorithm for creating and working a transformation team
• Get better at selling problems to businesses.
• Learn how to create a culture of responsibility and focus on results
• Understand how to use agile values ​​throughout the organization to solve organizational problems and grow the company
• Learn to ask powerful coaching questions and recognize people's metaprograms like a professional coach.

Group discounts:

• From 2 to 4 participants - 5% discount
• 5 or more participants - 10% discount

The training price includes:

• Coffee breaks
• Obtaining a certificate from the ICAgile consortium - Agile Coaching
• Handout

Payment for the training is possible:

• According to the account from legal entity(a service provision certificate is issued)
• By bank card (an electronic cash receipt is issued)

Trainer

Activist for Agile thinking and processes. Has extensive experience in creating a trusting culture and atmosphere in teams.

He began his professional journey in 2009 in a small investment company as a developer. Responsible for the implementation of 5 projects and automation of the entire company, leading a team of up to 7 people. In 2012, he was invited to one of the largest Russian IT companies, SKB Kontur, to help create the company’s internal billing. Worked his way up from Team Lead and Architect to Development Manager, helped manage a team from 5 people at the start to 50 and distributed to 3 offices (Ekaterinburg, Izhevsk, St. Petersburg).

Since 2014, he has devoted himself to corporate Agile coaching: scaling his own team; Scrum Master roles; conducting retrospectives, trainings and audits within the company, as well as making presentations at internal and external conferences.

In 2016, I decided to make the world a better place: I went beyond the boundaries of one corporation and joined the friendly ScrumTrek team. Since then, he has been spending about 1000 hours a year with trainings/workshops and strategic sessions. Participated in the transformation of more than 20 companies, more than 50 pilots, as well as 4 transformations of entire companies. Raised over 50 agile coaches by the end of 2018.

Since 2018, he has taken on the role of CEO of ScrumTrek: focused on business, finance, branding, back office, management and business growth. Still working with people :)

Lissa Adkins

Coaching agile teams. A Guide for Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches and Project Managers in Transition

Published with permission from Pearson Education (Addison-Wesley Professional)

We would like to thank ScrumTrek, represented by Alexey Pimenov and Anatoly Korotkov, for their assistance in preparing the publication.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the copyright holders.

Authorized translation from the English language edition, entitled Coaching Agile teams: a companion for scrummasters, Agile coaches, and project managers in transition, 1st edition, ISBN 978-0-321-63770-4; by Adkins, Lyssa; published by Pearson Education Inc., publishing as Addison-Wesley Professional.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage retrieval system, without permission from Pearson Education, Inc.

© Pearson Education Inc., 2010

© Translation into Russian, publication in Russian, design. Mann, Ivanov and Ferber LLC, 2017

Introduction by Mike Cohn

The buzz at the 2008 Scrum Forum in Chicago revolved around a speaker who was new to the event. On Monday afternoon she led a session called “The Journey from Project Manager to Agile Coach.” And already on Tuesday it was actively discussed.

The reason is that the speaker, Lissa Adkins, whose book you're holding in your hands right now, created this stir by giving her talk on agile coaching with passion, skill, and remarkable erudition. A classically trained project manager and corporate executive when introduced to Agile, Lissa is the ideal mentor for those wanting to become a qualified Agile Coach.

A highly skilled agile coach is as interesting to watch as a magician. And no matter how careful you are, you still won’t be able to understand how he does it. In this book, Lissa takes us behind the scenes and reveals the secrets of her magic. But the most surprising thing is that it’s not a matter of sleight of hand or a card up your sleeve. Instead, you'll discover great techniques that will help your team grow in success. Lissa divides the magic of coaching into specific concepts. She not only explains the difference between teaching, coaching and consulting, but also shows when and how to move from one to the other. Lissa is ready to help you choose between coaching one person and an entire team, as well as determine the chances of coaching to have a strong impact on the team.

Walking us like a magician past white bunnies and black hats, Lissa demonstrates how to start a difficult conversation, using specially designed questions to get team members talking constructively about an issue. This is one of my favorite parts of the book. The author shares practical advice about cooperation. This is one of its main achievements, because numerous works on this topic only state that cooperation is necessary, but are silent on how to implement it. An equally important toolkit offered by Lissa is the ability of a coach to show conscious passivity, observing the team and allowing it to solve problems on its own.

But sometimes agile coaches also fail, so Lissa describes eight options for difficult situations that we can find ourselves in. At the beginning of my career, being in the role of an expert and a “nodal component of the system,” I was often mistaken.

I can honestly say that these situations haven't caused any damage, but I still struggle with the judgmental style of working.

Perhaps you, too, sometimes find yourself a “spy”, a “seagull” or a “butterfly”, or suffer from other actions leading to failure that Lissa describes. Fortunately, Lissa offers eight successful behavior styles. Read Chapter 11, “Agile Coach Failures, Recovery, and Successful Behaviors,” to learn where you might find yourself.

True Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters help their teams achieve more than they could on their own. Becoming a qualified agile coach is like mastering magic, and you need to start by learning certain techniques. Therefore, the main thing is practice. Of course, it's up to you to decide which practice to choose, but the book will get you started in the right direction by showing how agile coaching masters perfect their craft.

Introduction by Jim Highsmith

First of all, this is a great book! I've read a lot of books about Agile, roadmaps, manuscripts, etc. They had a lot of good ideas, but lacked a solid contribution to the development of this methodology. Lissa Adkins's book is different.

In writing about Agile, I look for answers to four questions. Does the book encourage new ideas? Does it help organize existing ones? Does it expand them? Is it well written? For example, Kent Beck's pioneering work Extreme Programming brought together new ideas and redistributed existing ones.

Some argue that Agile is nothing new, but Kent's combination of specific practices and values ​​is original. When I first came across Mike Cohn's work Agile Estimating and Planning, I thought, “How can I dedicate an entire book to this? Didn’t Beck and Fowler cover the topic in full in Extreme Programming?” I quickly realized, however, that Mike's book expanded on existing ideas and took them in a different direction, as well as adding new ones.

Coaching Agile Teams creates an effective platform that organizes existing ideas and practices. In addition, it stimulates the expansion of the boundaries of knowledge within existing ideas. Finally, it is written in a very compelling manner, with practical ideas and empirically based examples.

One of Lissa's ideas that resonates with mine is that coaching is defined by multiple roles: teacher, mentor, problem solver, conflict navigator, performance coach.

Differentiation of roles gives depth to a coach's work. For example, mentors teach a subject - agile practices, and coaches encourage the team and its individual members to explore their own inner world. Lissa's experience as a personal growth coach brings this richness to her work and book. Many so-called agile coaches turn out to be simply mentors who teach agile practitioners. The book will help them become effective coaches who improve productivity.

For those who consider themselves an agile coach, trainer, mentor or facilitator, the book offers valuable ideas, practices and interesting approaches to help you improve. Let me give you, for example, one of Lissa’s thought-provoking statements: “A Scrum Master who goes beyond the implementation of agile practices, facing the conscious and inspired desire of the team for high performance, is an agile coach.” In Chapter 10, “The Agile Coach as Collaborative Conductor,” Lissa explores collaboration and collaboration, valuable boundaries for improving team performance. Each of these ideas adds depth to the role of an agile coach.

The second category of readers of this book are those who occupy leadership positions in an agile organization - a manager, product owner, scrum master, coach, project manager, or iteration manager. Although coaching is the primary job of a coach, all leaders make time to do it. Much has been written about self-organizing teams, but little has been written about how to actually become one or help one become one. Leaders have a great influence on those around them, so Lissa's book will help them ease the process of becoming a self-organizing team because they themselves are more flexible.

Finally, anyone who strives to become an effective team member will benefit from this read. I'm a fan of Christopher Avery, author of Teamwork Is an Individual Skill. He writes: “To improve teamwork, I must improve myself” and “I am responsible for all relationships within my project community.” This means that improving team performance is not just the responsibility of the leader or coach, but of any team member. Lissa's book will help everyone become their own agile coach - improving the team through self-improvement. Chapter 3, “Be Your Own Teacher,” is relevant for both individual team members and agile coaches.