The Agile Super Coach
Of all the abused words in the Agile domain, none seems to be more abused than the simple word “coaching”. There are numerous people out there professing to be “agile coaches”, and while I don’t mean to denigrate what any of these people do, there is a very broad latitude in the types of things that they do. This can further confound our ability to work with organizations as there may be a disconnect between coaches and clients about what exactly they are doing.
Unfortunately, in the absence of a clear understanding, I have seen people begin to expect that the “Agile Coach” is nothing short of a super human being. The can swoop into any project, turn around the results, and simultaneously coach that group into effectively preventing all those problems from ever occurring again. Or they may have an unnecessarily narrow view of the role and try to put an Agile Coach in a box by insisting they only do training, for example. To be fair, when I encounter these missed expectations, they are usually my own fault. I did not do a good enough job of articulating what the role is I, or anyone else, would potentially be playing in that organization as an Agile Coach.
I can’t profess to be the keeper of truth on this topic, but here’s a model I’ve used to help organize my own activities and to make sure I’m articulating clearly what role I see myself playing.
