The February Scrumtisch Berlin featured a talk by Lyssa Adkins, famously known for her publications on Coaching Agile teams. A mixture of fifty developers, scrum masters, coaches and product owner as well as one project manager followed Marion Eickmann’s invitation. Thanks for organising the event, as well as thank you to Hypoport, Berlin for providing the venue.

In her one-hour presentation she mainly focussed on two core topics: On the roles agile coaches have to fullfill as well as on the skill set needed by agile coaches. Being an agile coach (as well as being a scrum master, really), entails four very basic roles:

Being a bulldozer…

…that is getting impediments out of the way. That can be as easy (or hard) as getting appropriate equipment for your developers or teaming up with the product owner to communicate with anyone trying to break the sprint.

Being a servant leader…

…for a coach that means to work for the team, to ask the right questions and enable the team, to listen during dailies – instead of asking for additional reports: Most tools are already within the Scrum toolbox. The hard task is to identify them and use them correctly and efficiently.

Being a shepherd…

…that may be as easy as getting people to attend the dailies, or as complex as communicating common values, a common goal.

Being the guard of quality and performance…

…as a coach that means making degrading quality visible – and letting the Scrum team take the decision on how to deal with it.

However in reality each team is different, each sprint is different. So coaching really is similar to bing the river guide: Each trip is different. It is your task to make the team succeed and adapt to differing situations. To get to team to high performance – over and over again.

When talking about coaching what people need is a very specific skill set:

• To become a successful agile coach it helps to have coaching skills to be able to understand the client, to see their impediments and help the team become better by listening and asking powerful questions.
• Be a facilitator who organises sessions, meetings, conversations and may mediate in meetings.
• Have business domain expertise – that is to know process designs, figure out a companies strategy options.
• Be a great teacher to help people understand the basic concepts. That entails knowledge on course design, most likely design of exercises.
• Have mentoring skills to guide a team in the process.
• Know about lean and agile processes and stay up to date.
• Have the technical skills on what makes development successful, know the extreme programming techniques to help team excel.
• Have transformational skills – that is be familiar with change management, transformation leadership, knowing how to change organisations.

However being a coach remember that people are influenced not only by what you teach – but mostly by what you do. Most of what being a good coach means is invisible to the uninitiated outsider. It’s about living the process you teach, staying true to the principles you want others to implement.

To get there it helps to get inspired, to talk with others in local meetups (just as with any coding practice: Try to find a common forum to exchange ideas and get fresh input). It may help to keep a value journal – not only to track your accomplishments and be able to prove them to higher management, but also to track where to improve yourself.

The talk provided several interesting starting points for exploring further. However with an added exercise sixty minutes covered only the very basic ideas. Especially for the skill sets needed to successfully coach teams it would be very interesting to learn more on what books to read or what courses to attend to learn more on each topic. Ultimately not only agile coaches benefit from being great teachers, mentors or facilitators.

As usual we started collecting topics (timeboxed to five minutes). The list was rather short, however it contained several interesting pieces:

• (6 votes) Management buy-in
• (6+ votes) CSP – Certified Scrum Professional – what changes compared to the practitioner?
• (4 votes) Roles of Management in Scrum – how do they change?
• (13 votes) Coaching self-organising teams – team buy in.

Coaching self-organising teams – Team buy-in

As prioritised by the participants the first topic discussed was on coaching self organising teams – with a heavy focus on team buy-in. The problem described dealt with transforming water fall teams that are used to receiving their work items into self organising teams that voluntarily accept responsibility for the whole project instead of just their own little work package.

The definition of self organising here really is about teams, that have no (and need no) dedicated team leader. On the contrary: leadership is automatically transferred to the person who – based on his skills and experiences – is best suited for the user story that is being implemented at any given time.

The problem the question targets is about teams, that really are not self organising, where developers do not take responsibility for the whole project, but just for their little pieces: They have their gardens – with fences around that protect them from others but also protect themselves from looking into other pieces of the project. Even worse – they tend to take these fences with them as soon as work items change.

Several ways to mitigate the problem were discussed:

• Teams should work in a collaborative environment, should have clear tasks and priorities, whould get some pressure from the outside to get things done.
• Some teams need to learn what working in a team – together – really means. It may sound trivial, but what about solving problems together: Spending one day climbing hills?
• Committments should not happen on tasks (which by definition are well defined and small) but rather on Features/ user stories. Task breakdown should happen after the committment.
• There are patterns to break user stories that are too large into multiple user stories.
• Teams need to be coached – not only the scrum master should get education, but the complete team. There are people interested in management that tend to read up on the topic after working hours – however these are rather rare…
• Teams must be empowered – they must be responsible for the whole project and for the user stories they commit to. In return they must get what the need to get their tasks done.
• Newly formed teams inexperienced with Scrum have to get the chance to make mistakes – to fail – and to learn from that.

A great way to explain Scrum really is as a two-fold process: First half is about getting a product done, reviewing quality by the end of each sprint during the review. Second half is about improving the process to get the product done. Meeting to review the process quality is called retrospective.

Management buy-in

The second topic discussed was on the role of management in scrum – and how to convince management of Scrum. To some extend, Scrum means loosing power and control for management. Instead of micro-manageing people it’s suddenly about communicating your vision and scope. To get there, it helps to view lean management as the result of a long transformation:

• First there is hierarchical management – with the manager at the top and employees underneath.
• Second there is shared management – with the manager sitting between his employees enabling communication.
• Third there is collaborative management – here the manager really is part of the team.
• Fourth comes empowering management – this time the manager is only responsible for defining goals.
• Last but not least there is lean management – where managers are merely coordinating and communicating the vision of a project.

To establish a more agile management form, there are several tasks to keep in mind: First and foremost, do talk to each other. Explain your manager what you are doing and why you are working in pairs, for instance. Being a manager, do not be afraid to ask questions – understanding what your developers do, helps you trust their work. Scrum is established, however there needs to be a clear communication of what managers loose – and what they win instead.

Scaling can only be done via delegation – however people need to learn how to delegate tasks. In technology we are used to learning new stuff every few years. In management this improvement cycle is not yet very common. However especially in IT it should be.

Sellling Scrum to a customer

Being able to sell Scrum to customers is yet another problem: You need good marketing to sell Scrum to your customers. Money for nothing change for free is a nice to read on formulating agile contracts. Keep in mind, that the only way to really win all benefits is by doing all of Scrum – cherry picking may work to some extend, however you won’t get the full benefit from it. In most cases it works worse than traditionally managed projects.

Finally…

After two very interesting and lively discussions moderated by Andrea Tomasini, agile42, we finally had pizza, pasta and drinks – taking some of the topics offline.

Looking forward to seeing you in F-Hain for the next Scrum User Group Berlin Scrumtisch in April.

Last but not least I would like to thank Isabell for providing this nice summary, and if anybody would like to know more about Apache… Isabel’s Blog is the right place to go :-)