BigVisible Solutions | Agile Coaching

Agile Coaching Is (All) About People

Posted By Skip Angel on May 10, 2013
2 Comments

“You’ve not only made things better, you have truly changed our lives.”

These are the words that every agile coach yearns to hear from the people they work with. While it’s always a goal of mine to change the mindsets of clients, I have had mixed results over my five years as an agile coach. On one six-month engagement with a client I’ll call Prosperity, though, something transformative took place. I’ve spent some time since then thinking about what made those six months so successful and why Prosperity continues to push the envelope of what it is capable of doing as an organization.

Agile Coaching: What Makes It Better With Some Clients?

At first, I thought it was all around the process. Prosperity, like many other clients, started out wanting to “learn agile.” [Read more...]

Share:

Agile Delivery: From ScrumMaster to Team Coach

Posted By Skip Angel on April 17, 2013
Leave a Comment

Several weeks ago, one of my colleagues at BigVisible brought up an interesting concern around agile delivery and the ScrumMaster. How is, he asked, that there are so many ScrumMasters out there who are unprepared for their role on a team?

Agile Delivery Team Coach ScrumMaster

As I thought about it, I realized that the two-day CSM course basically introduces new ScrumMasters, team members, and other interested parties to how Scrum works and how to move teams through the ceremonies and artifacts associated with Scrum. What it doesn’t do—and likely cannot do in just two days—is also focus on all of the things ScrumMasters have to do to foster truly high-performing teams. The ScrumMaster role, done right, is much more than just scheduling meetings and updating a burndown chart. That leads me to conclude that the name ScrumMaster should (or will) die and be replaced with one that reflects the truly comprehensive nature of the role: team coach. Here’s why: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Agile Coaching, Agile Delivery, Agile Teams, Scrum Roles
Tagged With: Advanced ScrumMaster, Agile Coach, agile delivery coach, scrummaster, team coach

Share:

Agile Transformation: Some of What This Agile Coach Has Learned

Posted By Alan Dayley on April 10, 2013
Leave a Comment

I had the pleasure of “meeting” my online friend Daniel Markham this week. We had an interesting talk about agile transformation and agile coaching. We still need to shake hands someday but recording a conversation is still pretty great!

Agile Transformation, Agile Coaching, and Everything

In an unscripted interview, Daniel hit me with some difficult questions about life as an agile coach. We spent a good bit of time talking about the challenges of an agile transformation.

Agile Transformation & Agile Coach

We discussed some of the reasons agile is not just about teams and delivery. And we spent some time on how transforming a company means transforming everyone, not just the technology people.

Share:

ScrumMasters and Agile Transformation: Are We There Yet?

Posted By Carlos Buxton on March 13, 2013
Leave a Comment

After you finished your first CSM class, you probably felt that the ScrumMaster role was pretty simple. Facilitate a few meetings, keep everyone true to Scrum—how difficult can it be? We’ve found that most people return from introductory Scrum training feeling like they can easily add a few ScrumMaster duties to their current responsibilities with little to no disruption.

What you have likely realized since serving as a ScrumMaster, however, is that the ScrumMaster role is far more complex and rich than you had originally envisioned. Although it can be done alongside other responsibilities, the ScrumMaster role takes a lot more expertise than just scheduling meetings and passing the CSM exam. The reality is that being an effective ScrumMaster is anything but easy. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Agile Coaching, Agile Transformation, Scrum Roles
Tagged With: Agile Transformation, effective ScrumMaster, scrum, scrum coaching, scrummaster

Share:

Agile Accountability

Posted By Skip Angel on March 5, 2013
2 Comments

This was a great week at BVCon, our bi-annual company gathering where we build relationships, show experiences, and learn from each other. These events are core to our values and success, as it brings our virtual company together not only physically but also emotionally. While I have always enjoyed and treasure this time together, in past events I have felt something was missing. While we would have awesome discussions and a fun time, little would happen after the events. We would essentially go back to our real world with our clients and continue with our lives as coaches. Sure, we would come back refreshed and energized, but there were few tangible results that we could take back and use.

Is Agile Accountability an Oxymoron?

This year’s theme was around accountability, a topic that is difficult for leaders to talk about, especially those that have embraced agile principles. Why? Because many leaders believe that accountability resembles command-and-control leadership. A manager tells you to be accountable, instead of allowing you to be empowered and self-organize with the rest of your team. I have heard some say in the agile world that management is not needed for true accountability; instead, the team members should hold each other accountable for their success.

BigVisible & Agile Accountability

For a long time, the only goal our BigVisible leadership team gave us was to “be awesome.” They felt that to be more specific might put structure or constraints in place that would be stifling. As coaches, we felt great to have complete power over our destiny. No rules, no guidelines, just do your best and help our clients. Should be enough, right? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Agile Coaching, Agile Transformation, Enterprise Agile, Leadership, Organizational Agility
Tagged With: agile accountability, agile leaders, Agile Transformation, catalyst leader

Share:

ScrumMasters and Managers

Posted By Brian Bozzuto on January 8, 2013
4 Comments

Recent discussions with my colleagues have got me thinking precisely about the role of ScrumMasters in organizations. When I first started coaching teams to adopt Scrum I would argue that the ScrumMaster was not—and should not be—a functional manager. ScrumMasters were something else, a servant leader, a team coach, even a cat herder, but they were definitely not supposed to be managers who directed the work of team members. I believed, and encouraged companies to try and develop the ScrumMaster as something entirely distinct from project managers or functional managers. It was a third role with a different description and career track.

Today, after having coached many teams, I’m not so sure. I’ve seen that kind of ScrumMaster role work sometimes, but I’ve also seen quite a few attempts that have ended poorly. Organizations that try to shoehorn a special ScrumMaster role into their existing structure, tend to regard the ScrumMaster as nothing more than a “facilitator who runs a couple meetings every sprint.” As such it becomes a very diminished role, one that people consider a “part-time assignment.” Too often ScrumMasters become multitasked to incompetence as they are expected to support too many teams. Or the “title,” such as is it is, is simply given to someone on the team with no real expectation that they should do much more than try to keep the stand up to 15 minutes. In other situations I have seen managers—usually project managers or development managers—assume the role of ScrumMaster, run the basic ceremonies and change very little else about what they do every day.

This is causing me to rethink my assumptions and I find myself coming to a potentially controversial conclusion. ScrumMasters and agile coaches are actually just managers, granted they embody a different set of values and ideals than those espoused by command and control managers, but they are managers nonetheless. Thus, when organizations begin to adopt practices like Scrum and they begin to deputize ScrumMasters, they are effectively changing the leadership and power structures of the organization. The ScrumMaster’s role is in direct conflict with functional managers as they compete for the same niche within an ecosystem.

Business Conflict

As I recall from biology, no two species can occupy the same niche, when two do there will invariably be competition until one is forced from it.

Share:

Agile Coaching Tip: Robust vs. Resilient Plans

Posted By Brian Bozzuto on December 6, 2012
2 Comments

Recent experiences with agile coaching and reading has brought me to a concept of resiliency, which I have found to contain fascinating implications for modern product development and project management, especially as it relates to resilient plans. This idea has been studied in biological, ecological, engineering and psychological fields to name just a few facets of this concept.
Agile Coaching Tip: Resilient Systems and Resilient Plans Can Adapt to Changing Conditions
Simply stated, resiliency is the capability of a system to recover to a stable, functioning state after failure or adverse events. The specifics of this vary widely based on the field of study; in this post I’d like to first talk about some of the common elements of resilient systems and look closer at how this would apply to software development and IT project management. I believe it offers several key insights in how to operate more effectively.