Announcing: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Agile Coaching
As agile42 coaches we are proud to announce that our first proper coaching book has been released! This is the book we wish we had had when we started out as agile coaches, and it’s now available for download free of charge.
We take great pride in our tradition of coaching, which is continuously being adapted to the needs of our clients and our own company. Our approach is simple, but not necessarily easy. With this book we wanted to create an introductory reference for new agile coaches as well as experienced ScrumMasters. It contains much of the theory that we teach our new colleagues at agile42, and hopefully lots of insights for new coaches everywhere.
The book is primarily about coaching, but not so much about agility. We are not going to explain e.g. why it makes sense to slice large work items into smaller independent pieces, or how to choose between synchronized and unsynchronized releases. There are plenty of good books around for those purposes. We assume that all readers have adequate working knowledge of all things agile.
Instead we are going to teach you the basics of listening, how to maintain a structured conversation without inserting content, and how to facilitate conversations in teams. We’ll talk about how to help a group of people form an effective team and how you can help create heedfulness and synergy in a team. We’ll present structured means of collaborating on a team with ScrumMasters, development managers and other agile coaches. We’ll cover why change makes people nervous and discuss different ways of overcoming that.
All of this and much more is now available in one book. Becoming an agile coach is a journey that has no end… and that’s why the name of this book is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Agile Coaching.
Since this book was written by a team, we have chosen not to stand out individually. Instead, we have been writing this book as if it were software developed by a team. However, we can disclose that the main culprits include a number of CECs, at least one CTC, and a couple of CSTs. This is the very first public release and it will be improved and expanded with the feedback of the community. We are happy to show it to the world for the first time.
