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

Agile Agile Management Methods (Agile) how to start implementing

The idea of ​​an agile development methodology (agile) is that employees and managers can 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’s 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 flexible management issues 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 you to find new ideas and solutions in a crisis and high uncertainty, in which the leaders of many companies have to work.

Building Agile

The Agile Manifesto, created in February 2001, was signed by leading IT companies and agile has spread to all business processes and business areas in almost 15 years, 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 multi-functional teams that resemble players in football or hockey:

On the one hand, the game is general, and on the other hand, there is a defender, semi-defender, forward and 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 a sales manager and 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 applying 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 so, especially at the initial stage. Implementing Agile is quite a lengthy process and is mostly about changing the mindset of the employees as well as shaping a different attitude towards accountability, keep that in mind.

Agile methods allow you to quickly make adjustments to a product or service, in terms of a concept or idea, but it is one thing to introduce and completely another thing to put into practice, because in most cases the adjustment of production is a rather lengthy process.

One of the common misconceptions is that Agile is designed to adjust a product or business process to the needs of consumers, and this is far from the case.

And this is very important to consider, and not blindly follow the wishes of your customers. Remember that any change does not require a quick response and product adjustment, but an analysis of the need to make these changes.

What 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, seeks to find new ideas and solutions, and flexible management methods are literally created to solve such problems.

Who is an Agile Coach?

Just recently I wrote an article about how to choose an Agile trainer, 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 designed for small teams: 7-10 people is 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, the situation will change in the near future and almost all companies focused on growth and development will use Agile. Flexible management methods allow you to divide cumbersome project teams into small groups and, in a short time of 4-6 months, move the current project from chaos to a manageable stage.

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

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

Agile changes mindsets and mindsets to focus on getting things done using communications rather than a command and control structure.

But in my opinion, this is a pretty strong illusion: getting rid of the hierarchy is pretty hard, one might say 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 performance 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 emphasize that for small Agile companies this 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 approach to production, focusing on urgent strategy and the production of complex solutions.

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

By the way, light industry in China developed 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, in order to identify problems, it is necessary to conduct an audit, within which you will most likely identify the following typical problems:

• low attitude to the need to satisfy the client, the work of employees according to the “quickly done and forgot” model.
• lengthy approval process and excessive bureaucratization through correspondence and meetings.

Prerequisite 4. Change in attitude towards work. As you know, the attitude determines the result, and therefore, by changing the attitude, you can organize the work differently and implement the planned projects, using the strategy: “quickly make a pilot project, launch and test”, receiving feedback, you can improve your product in the process of work, precisely by This principle is organized by 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.
• in each team from 7 to 12 employees.
• Separately, we allocate a coordination department in the amount of 3-4 people.
• reporting directly to the owner or CEO.

Agile team feature

One of the hallmarks of an Agile team is responsibility, turns into 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 an atmosphere of an effective working environment or???

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

Advantage of Agile Centers

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

Of course, it should be remembered that you cannot transfer all employees of the company to Agile, on the contrary, you should focus on pilot projects and gradually spread successful approaches to the entire organization, adapting to each business process. And there is a simple rule here:

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

Agile as a competitive tool

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, here Agile methods of flexible management make it possible to find the answer to the question how to act?

Being a humanist to the marrow of my bones, could I ever think that I would be seriously interested in learning practical developments from the IT field?
But life is changing so rapidly that there is nothing left but to 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 the classic methods of working with employees are failing. Of course, there are a lot of factors that affect the effectiveness of management.

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 a clear, well-coordinated and efficient work from the manager and the 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 built into the work of any project teams that are working on solving new, not typical tasks. But first things first.

How did the agile approach appear and what is it?

Often, software developers have a hard time, especially if the product is not standard. This means that development requirements can change throughout the product development 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 be 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 reconsider the approaches in which they worked. The fact is that the development was previously carried out in certain stages according to the principle of cascading project implementation. 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 already in the process of developing the project, because everything rested on the original TK. This approach was not at all flexible and was associated with bureaucracy and a lot of documentation being developed, which often became irrelevant by the time the project was completed. That is why, instead of the classic ones, flexible approaches to project management were invented that do not require long-term coordination regarding the slightest changes in the project.
Thus, the concept was born agile as a philosophy, which combines the principles of all flexible software development methodologies. These include Scrum, Kanban, etc.

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

The key ones were:
1. People and their interaction is more important than technology. Moreover, the most effective method of interaction and information exchange 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 in the process of product development is more important than the strict restrictions prescribed in the contract
4. Being responsive to change is more important than sticking to the original plan of action

As we can see, readiness for change, the value of people and a focus on results can be traced in these principles.
Moreover, the highest priority is the satisfaction of the customer / user with the help of 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 that what any team working on a project is aiming for?
Thank you, dear IT people, now we can safely learn from your experience!

Let's see what this approach looks like in practice. And what about coaching?

As we know, coaching is always work on building the desired future and always work for results. In the process of coaching, as a rule, asking questions are used, which allow a person to better understand the task facing him, see the resources and ways to achieve it. And if in the classical version coaching is an individual work of a coach with a client, then in the context of project development, team coaching is used, which is very similar to facilitation. Also, agile coaching usually requires the coach's expertise in the area where he helps the team achieve results, so sometimes the agile coach can also act as a mentor and mentor.
The agile coaching process allows you to make the work of the team transparent, well-coordinated, and at the same time focused on specific goals.

Example 1

Imagine a work day morning that starts every day with a 15-minute Daily stand-up sessions. This is such a mini-meeting of all team members, where everyone stands. Yes, it's uncomfortable. On the other hand, 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 I did 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 the project, 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 of the voiced problematic points will occur later, not at the stand-up session itself.
The purpose of such a meeting is to keep the focus on the current stage and at the same time look into 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 running 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, in case the team works remotely.
If it is a physical task board, employees write their tasks on sticky notes and stick them in the appropriate columns, depending on the stage of the task. Thus, a general picture of the work on the project in the current period emerges, and an understanding arises at which stages of the project “bottlenecks” are observed, where, for example, the greatest accumulation of tasks occurs.

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

You can also break the processes down a bit, so the task board might look like this:

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

During the morning Daily stand-up sessions employees, talking about the work done and the upcoming work, paste the stickers from one stage to another and can more clearly see those moments that make their work difficult.

Based on such a visual analysis, “urgent tasks” can emerge that slow down the project as a whole. Such tasks are placed in a separate column on the visualization board.
This activity allows you to understand whether this project has time to be implemented within the specified 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 the terms, and not report it at the last moment.

Example 3

Customer Requirements Prioritization Matrix

As mentioned earlier, it is very important for the project team to maintain constant contact with the customer. Customers, in turn, can quite actively offer a lot of ideas for implementation, not all of which are expedient or can be immediately implemented. In addition, the implementation of some ideas may require additional costs.
Therefore, it is necessary, together with the customer, to clarify 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 customer requirements priority matrix. Tasks are spread over all quadrants of the matrix, depending on their value to the customer and the estimated costs. After that, there is an analysis of which tasks we leave to work (these are tasks that fall into the high value quadrant at minimal cost), and which ones need to be thought about in terms of increasing value or reducing the required resources.

So, if suddenly one of you, reading this article, opposed 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 do not worry! These meetings will not exhaust your nerves, because, using this tool, you will not need to blindly rush to execute 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 be involved in the project implementation process. This will ultimately lead to well-coordinated work and the creation of a product that can satisfy the wishes of the customer, and possibly surpass them.
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 like 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 cause, a desire to realize themselves, a certain sense of responsibility and involvement.

We say that coaching is always work with awareness and with a 100% sense of responsibility. And if these qualities of your employees are not yet at the right level, then it will be quite difficult for you to apply Agile coaching in its purest form. Therefore, you can use mixed management styles, gradually "growing" your team to a level where 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 customers will never want to trade you for anyone else!

Ekaterina Kudryavtseva, business coach, coach

• Understanding the Role of an Agile Coach
• Interaction with teams, managers and stakeholders within the company
• Launching agile tracks
• Business Understanding
• Working with top management and shareholders: metrics and facts
• Best cultural, process practices, and agile organizational structure choices
• Agile Coach is still a coach. Upgrading coaching 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 Value Streams Launch Format
• Get the algorithm for creating and operating a transformation team
• Learn how to better sell problems to business
• Learn how to create a culture of responsibility and focus on results
• Understand how to use agile values ​​at the level of the entire organization to solve organizational problems and grow the company
• Learn to ask powerful coaching questions and recognize people's MET programs like a professional coach.

Group discounts:

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

The cost of the training includes:

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

You can pay for the training:

• By invoice from legal entity(an act of service is issued)
• By bank card (an electronic cash receipt is issued)

Trainer

Activist of Agile thinking and processes. He has extensive experience in creating a trusting culture and atmosphere in teams.

He started his professional career in 2009 in a small investment company as a developer. Responsible for the implementation of 5 projects and the 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. He went from Team Lead and Architect to Development Manager, helped manage a team from 5 people at the start to 50 and distribution to 3 offices (Yekaterinburg, Izhevsk, St. Petersburg).

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

In 2016, he decided to make the world a better place: he went beyond the boundaries of one corporation and joined the friendly ScrumTrek team. Since then, he has been taking about 1,000 hours a year in training/workshops and strategy 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: he is focused on business, finance, branding, back office, management and business growth. Still working with people :)

Lissa Adkins

Agile team coaching. A Guide for Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition

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

We thank ScrumTrek represented by Alexey Pimenov and Anatoly Korotkov for their help 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.

Copyright © 2010 Pearson Education Inc.

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

Foreword by Mike Cohn

The hype at the 2008 Scrum Forum in Chicago was associated with a speaker who took part in the event for the first time. On Monday afternoon, she hosted a session titled "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 now hold in your hands, created this stir herself, delivering her talk on agile coaching with passion, skill, and remarkable erudition. A classically trained project manager and manager of a large corporation at the time of her introduction to Agile, Lissa is the perfect mentor for those who want to become a qualified agile coach.

Watching a highly skilled agile coach is as interesting as watching a magician. And no matter how attentive you are, you will still not 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 about sleight of hand or a card up your sleeve. Instead, you'll discover great practices that will increase your team's success. Lissa divides the magic of coaching into certain concepts. It not only explains the difference between training, coaching and counseling, but also shows when and how to move from one to the other. Lissa is ready to help you choose between coaching a single person or a whole team, as well as determine the chances of coaching to have a strong impact on the team.

Leading us like a magician past white rabbits and black hats, Lissa demonstrates how to start a difficult conversation by using specially designed questions to get team members to talk 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 tool offered by Lissa is the ability of the coach to be consciously passive, observing the team and allowing it to solve problems on its own.

But sometimes agile coaches fail too, so Lissa outlines eight difficult situations we can get ourselves into. At the beginning of my career, being in the role of an expert and a "nodal component of the system", I often made mistakes.

I can honestly say that these situations have done no harm, but I still struggle with my evaluative work style.

Perhaps you, too, sometimes turn out to be a "spy", "seagull" or "butterfly" or suffer from other actions that lead to failure, which Lissa describes. Luckily, Lissa offers eight successful behaviors. Read Chapter 11, Agile Coaching Failures, Recovery, and Successful Behaviors, to find out where you might find yourself.

True agile coaches and scrum masters help their teams achieve more than they can on their own. Becoming a qualified agile coach is like mastering the magic, and you need to start by learning certain techniques. Therefore, the main thing is practice. It's up to you to decide which practice to choose, of course, but this book will get you started in the right direction by showing you how master agile coaches perfect their craft.

Foreword by Jim Highsmith

First of all, this is a great book! I have read a lot of books about Agile, plans for future work, manuscripts, etc. They had a lot of good ideas, but there was no solid contribution to the development of this methodology. Lissa Adkins' book is not like that.

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

Some argue that Agile is nothing new, but the combination of specific practices and values ​​in Kent's version looks original. When I first read Mike Cohn's Agile Estimating and Planning, I thought, "How can you write an entire book on this? Didn't Beck and Fowler cover the whole topic in Extreme Programming? I quickly realized, however, that Mike's book expanded on existing ideas and took them down a different path, as well as adding new ones.

Coaching Agile Teams provides 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 persuasive manner, with practical ideas and experiential 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.

Differentiating roles gives depth to the coaching work. For example, mentors teach the 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 rich dimension to her work and book. Many so-called agile coaches turn out to be just mentors teaching agile practitioners. The book will help them become effective performance coaches.

For those who consider themselves an agile coach, trainer, mentor, or facilitator, this book offers valuable insights, practices, and interesting approaches to help you improve. For example, here is one of Lissa’s statements that stimulates the work of thought: “A scrum master who goes beyond the implementation of agile practices, faced with a conscious and inspired desire of the team for high performance, this is the agile coach.” In Chapter 10, "The Agile Coach as Collaboration Conductor," Lissa explores collaboration and collaboration, valuable distinctions for improving team performance. Each of these ideas adds depth to the role of an agile coach.

The second category of readers for this book are those in leadership positions in an agile organization—a manager, product owner, scrum master, coach, project manager, or iteration manager. Although coaching is the main job of a coach, all leaders find time to do it. A lot has been written about self-organizing teams, but there is too little information on how to truly become such a team or help one emerge. Leaders have a great influence on those around them, so Lissa's book will help them ease the process of transforming into a self-organizing team, because they themselves are more flexible.

Finally, anyone who aspires to become an effective team member will benefit from this reading. 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 only the responsibility of the leader or coach, but of any team member. Lissa's book will help everyone become an agile coach for themselves - improving the team through self-improvement. Chapter 3, “Teach Yourself,” is relevant for both individual team members and agile coaches.