There seems to be a large misunderstanding around what it means to be an agile coach. Coaching is well understood, and the largest providers of agile coaching certifications have converged and agreed on the definition. Still the agile coach is constantly being deflated into something like a multi-team Scrum Master, and agile coaching companies have difficulties explaining the value they will bring to their customers. What’s going on?
With this blog post, we’re going to take a hard and in-depth look at the agile coaching profession and straighten out some of the misconceptions. You will hopefully find a clear and understandable explanation of what an agile coach is and isn’t, what an agile coach does (and doesn’t do), what value an agile coach will bring to the organization, as well as some tips and tricks on how to become an agile coach.
What makes coaching so magical is that it is an intensely personal experience for the coach. For a personal insight into one of the most rewarding professions available, watch the recording of our Webinar: A Personal View on Professional Coaching.
Why you should trust me
I’ve worked as a professional agile coach since 2008, and have well over 12,000 hours of agile coaching and 1,500 hours of agile training under my belt. Every year I’m racking up between 600 and 1,000 hours of actual honest hands-on agile coaching, in addition to training, writing, speaking and mentoring.
I’m the proud owner of a Certified Enterprise Coach® (CEC) certification since 2015, and an active member of the team that reviews and accepts Certified Team Coach® (CTC) applications at the Scrum Alliance. In other words, other highly skilled agile coaches are of the opinion that I know agile coaching, and they trust me in guiding and assessing candidate coaches.
Further reading: Martin is one of the authors of The Hitchhikers Guide to Agile Coaching which you can download for free.
What is an agile coach?
An agile coach is a servant leader who helps organizations transform towards higher levels of agility. Agile coaches use coaching and facilitation techniques plus complex management methods to help the client organization see and understand what’s going on, find their own solutions to their problems, and enact those solutions.
According to Wikipedia, coaching has its roots in the word “coach”, meaning “…to transport people from where they are to where they want to be”. The coach is merely helping the client on a journey of self-discovery and improvement, and all solutions must come from the client.
In contrast, an agile coach is expected to bring both expertise and experience in the subject matter. This takes careful balancing between coaching, teaching and mentoring on one hand, and consulting, advising and contracting on the other. We could perhaps talk about “transforming” rather than “transporting”, as it implies that the coaching subject needs to actively change into something new and different.
Complex management methods are necessary because organizations are complex. I won’t go into the topic very deeply here, but the key point is that you can’t design a complex system up front. Instead you need to let it grow, observing what emerges and either strengthening or dampening what you see. An agile coach tries to “nudge” the organization towards a better way of operating (which presumably involves lean and agile methods), and the direction of change is more important than the goal. By doing interventions of various kinds, an agile coach can generate small but permanent changes in how the organization behaves. Often the results are different from what you imagined initially.
Agile coaches work at varying levels in the organization, but always in settings where there’s at least a handful of teams that need to organize themselves effectively. The field of work is large, including products and services, skills and roles, the organizational structure, IT infrastructure and workplace services, agile/lean management processes, the facilitation of strategy creation and implementation, and much more.
In a traditional organization, agile coaches are often positioned directly above the Scrum Masters in the hierarchy, or sometimes in a separate unit that provides e.g. process development services to other units. In flat or teal organizations the lines are more blurred, but agile coaches generally have the capability to take on larger responsibilities than Scrum Masters do.
What does an agile coach do?
An agile coach will coach, obviously, but also teach and mentor people. They help visualize what is going on, and act as mirrors to the organization, helping people see things as they are. Agile coaches facilitate work, lead workshops and meetings, and help people make good decisions. They also grow new Scrum Masters and new agile coaches, by teaching and mentoring potential candidates in the organization, by showing them the ropes (a.k.a. role-modeling), and by living the agile values.
Why is coaching so valuable for the target organization?
Fundamentally, companies need to make more complex decisions at a faster pace than before, which can only be achieved using distributed cognition and decision-making. Scrum and Kanban, with their short feedback loops and focus on quality, will take you in the right direction. Without self-organization the teams just won’t fly: self-organizing teams are more motivated and more proactive, and they can make better decisions. This is exactly what companies need today, and agile coaches help them achieve it.
In order to become more self-organizing, teams need the right kind of leadership. We’ve found coaching, envisioning, conducting and catalyzing leadership styles work better than styles that are controlling, commanding, demanding or pace-setting. The latter styles are more effective in the short term, but pull decision power away from the team and to the manager. In the long term they will reduce the level of self-organization.
As most mid-level managers are under pressure to deliver, they do whatever they can to get stuff done. Coaches are needed to teach team members how to collaborate and make decisions, and to teach managers how to lead self-organizing teams and drive continuous organizational improvement.
Agile Coaching Skills
Being a successful agile coach requires a large number of different skills. Most people find it comparatively easy to learn e.g. agile and lean thinking and related practicalities. There’s plenty of books around, and you can find correct answers for many questions, and good trade-offs and guidelines for many others. In Cynefin terms, this is the ordered (simple or complicated) domain.
Learning the soft skills — how to become a good coach — is more difficult. Coaching is often complex and sometimes chaotic: you are listening and driving the situation forward by asking questions and choosing topics that serve the needs of your audience. You may need to challenge them or open new areas of thought. To do this effectively, you will need to act and react in ways that don’t necessarily come naturally to you.
Below, I’ve listed a number of skills that I think a good agile coach should have. Luckily these skills are widely applicable, and most people will find them useful regardless of where their careers take them. Every team leader will benefit from coaching skills, every product manager should understand the ideas behind Lean and Agile, and so on.
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Coaching skills — The International Coaching Federation defines coaching as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential”. This requires a number of soft skills that enable you to engage in intelligent and structured conversations that help the client organization change for the better. This is difficult, and new agile coaches often lack the requisite coaching skills. (We’ll dig into this problem later in the blog post.)
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Agile and Lean knowledge — The theories, thinking models and practises you need in order to become (more) agile. Because agile coaches should be able to teach others, their own understanding must be very good. Luckily, Lean and Agile knowledge is not too difficult to pick up, and most people get it straight sooner or later. If you are working with a big agile model, keep in mind that the underlying assumptions may not be valid for all organizations.
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Technical, business and leadership skills — As an agile coach, you will find yourself in situations where you need to help a group of people with agile practices specific to their role. This could include deploying continuous integration, setting up a project portfolio board, or helping managers to understand servant leadership. You don’t need to be expert in all these areas, but the more you know, the larger your impact can be.
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Facilitation skills — How to make it easy for people to do what they need to do. As a good facilitator, you provide a clear process and guide people towards their goal without injecting your own opinions or content.
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Teaching skills — An agile coach often needs to transfer a lot of new knowledge effectively, while respecting the fact that the audience consists of grown-ups. You also need to understand when some teaching is necessary, and how to assess the results afterwards.
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Self-awareness, self-reflection and self-improvement — A good coach is constantly looking for weak spots and is resourceful in finding ways to improve. For example, if you feel uncertain about your ability to deliver training (self-awareness), you might instead organize courses with a professional trainer. At the same time, you can ask for permission to observe them, or perhaps co-train and get some feedback (self-improvement).
The list is not whipped up from thin air. It’s based on the Agile Coach Competency Framework by Lyssa Adkins and Michael Spayd, with clarifications from Jon Spruce and Ben Maynard.
The difference between a new agile coach and an experienced one
The difference between a new agile coach and a more experienced agile coach is that the latter has more techniques they can call on, is able to see deeper patterns, and is able to assemble and create new techniques on the spot. Based on my own experience from reviewing dozens and dozens of CTC applications, I’ve tried to conceptualize this into three dimensions:
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Width: How wide is your toolbox of methods and thinking models? This dimension is related to the Law of the Implement: if you only have a hammer, all problems look like nails. The more tools you have at your disposal, the better you can handle each situation. A newbie coach may have only a few techniques available, while an expert agile coach has a large library of methods they can refer to.
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Length: For how long have you collected experience? A newbie might need printed instructions, while a more experienced coach can run several meetings and workshops from memory. A true master is able to meld different methods and synthesize new approaches on the fly. This is also known as shu-ha-ri.
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Depth: How deep can you see? An agile coach should have the ability to see below the surface and identify holistic organizational patterns beyond the single-team context. If the team is not delivering running tested software reliably, they are often prevented by the constraints and expectations set by the surrounding organisation.
People tend to improve in all of these dimensions over time. Experience and learning comes through doing, but progress can be uneven and proceed in fits and starts. You can speed this up considerably by working in environments with an existing embedded agile mindset, where you will be able to observe good examples and pick up good ideas on a daily basis. Co-coaching especially can be very educational. Conversely, if you find yourself in an agile-in-name-only organization, you’ll find yourself picking up narrow thinking models and suboptimal methods.
As a CTC application reviewer, I should also mention that most problems tend to occur in two areas. Most of the rejected or deferred applications lack depth across the board: the capability to see larger organizational patterns is not there. The second most common reason is insufficient coaching skills.
Recommended online course: Agile Coaching Foundations
What kind of jobs can an agile coach find?
The vast majority of agile coaches work either as internal employees or as consultants, although there’s a lot of variation.
As an internal agile coach, your job is often to work with a specific department or a specific business unit, or sometimes a whole company, to help them become more agile. The line of business can range all over the map, but is often related to software development, IT or R&D. You can sometimes be a member of a specific department or business unit, or belong to a coaching department that provides services to other business units. The job is fairly stable, and during layoffs coaches are either the first or the last to go (which incidentally tells you a lot about the company). You also have an opportunity to follow the same company for several years to see the long-term impact of your work.
Consultants have more options, and I’ll list some of them below:
- You can work for one of the many software subcontracting companies that deliver “agile projects.” The work often revolves around helping your software development teams become more efficient, or teaching and coaching clients on how to work with an agile team. Sometimes you’ll also provide management coaching or agile transformation services for clients, e.g. in parallel with a digitisation project carried out by your software development colleagues.
- Being a freelancer might be an interesting option if you’re conscientious and business-minded and have a good personal reputation. It’s difficult for one-person companies to get large transition engagements, so freelancers often accept subcontracting assignments or join a cluster of like-minded people who can feed work to each other. The downside is that it can be difficult to find time for self-improvement (i.e. reading books and taking courses), and there may be limited opportunities for co-coaching with others.
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There are “boutique” consulting companies such as agile42 specializing in, for example, agile transformations or strategic agility. With increased mass (say, more than half a dozen coaches) comes increased stability: you can afford to invest in self-development and take time out between gigs. You will also generally see larger and more interesting client cases than a freelancer would, and have colleagues who you can mentor or get mentored by. (I personally think this is the sweet spot, but I’m probably biased.)
- Virtually all big consulting companies employ some agile coaches. Customer engagements depend on what the account managers sell. These companies are often working with one of the big agile frameworks (DAD, SAFe, LeSS, Spotify model, what have you), or have created their own methods and approaches. On the upside, there is often a step-by-step deployment process that brings clarity to everyone, and there are other coaches to work with and learn from. On the downside, the pre-defined engagement processes may be strict and leave little room for coaches to experiment and learn.
Be aware that some companies advertise for an agile coach, but then provide a role description that is closer to that of a Scrum Master, Agile Project Manager, Jira/TFS expert, or some kind of Agile-Do-It-All. This always indicates that the company doesn’t understand what an agile coach actually is. Many good coaches tend to refuse to accept such constraints. On the other hand, others can see it as an interesting challenge. It’s your choice.
There’s another common anti-pattern where an agile coach is expected to handle the operative duties for three or four teams in an organization, without Scrum Masters. By limiting the scope of the role and ensuring that the coach is busy running Scrum mechanics, the organization loses out on virtually all the benefits that an agile coach can bring in the first place. Again many good coaches refuse to take on this kind of assignment.
Beyond the opportunities listed above, you may occasionally find more specialized work. Agile training outfits sometimes have an agile coach on the roster, offering in-depth coaching courses or post-training support to the students. Venture capitalists have been known to hire agile coaches to e.g. roll out lean startup techniques. Management consulting companies sometimes need coaches with agile experience, to coach senior executives. And you might occasionally find a job ad from the Scrum Alliance or another non-profit in this domain.
How much does an agile coach earn?
The salary for an agile coach varies quite a bit. As a rule of thumb, an agile coach should look for wages similar to those of a Senior Project Manager or development manager, while an experienced lead agile coach or head coach should have a position similar to a Head of Department, with the appropriate compensation.
In flat or teal organizations, agile coaches can draw on their facilitation and coaching skills to show the value they are contributing to the company, which helps negotiate a good wage. As a freelancer, you should take what the market will bear. You bring a huge amount of value to your clients, so price your work accordingly.
That said, some of the main factors for the salary include:
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The cost structure of your country: For example, a coach in South Africa or India gets paid less than half compared to a coach in Northern Europe, but the costs of living are correspondingly lower.
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Whether you are an internal coach or a consultant: Internal coaches have compensation schemes similar to that of the other employees: a base wage plus perhaps a small (10%) annual bonus. A coach working for a consulting company can have a lower fixed wage, but a higher provision-based component. A freelancer is of course fully dependent on what they can invoice.
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Your level of experience, capabilities and credibility: As a junior agile coach or Scrum Master replacement, you will get bottom money. An established and well-reputed executive management coach can command fees that are substantially higher.
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The agile certifications you hold: Certifications are important, not only for the learning journey but also for the signals they send. By proving that you have the requisite knowledge and experience, you can land more interesting and better-paying engagements. On the other hand, you may also be seen as overqualified for simpler jobs. We’ll cover the topic of certifications in depth later.
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Whether you are also a (certified) trainer: Having two lines of business is better than having just one speciality and many agile coaches also work as successful agile trainers. Training and coaching are two separate skill sets, but they complement each other nicely and can open opportunities for theory-informed practice.
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The company culture: Regardless of whether you are an internal coach or a consultant, you will find that some companies have a better understanding the value and the benefits that an agile coach can bring. This will have an impact on the salary.
How to become an agile coach
Becoming a good agile coach is a long journey. There are no shortcuts, although you can speed it up by keeping in touch with the best people you can find. Below, you will find some ideas and suggestions.
Cultivate self-awareness and self-improvement
This is the basis of becoming good at anything, in fact. At all times, reflect on your own performance in the small and the large. Note the choices you are making, as well as the situations where someone else saw a choice that you didn’t. What went well, and what should you do differently next time? These are things you can reflect on immediately, while you grab a coffee after your meeting, or later in the gym, or on your commute.
Whenever possible, get direct feedback from your clients, teams and stakeholders. Consider using something like the return-on-time-invested (ROTI) method to get immediate feedback at the end of every meeting or workshop that you facilitate. You may want to talk to people you are working with to understand what you’re doing well and what you need to improve. How about collaborating with other agile coaches to get to-the-point feedback and second opinions? At the end of a time-limited assignment, you might want to conduct a formal “exit interview”. It can also be useful to sit down and think back over the last year or two, although it requires a bit more discipline. How are things working out for you? What changes do you need to make?
Coaches thrive in a human-centered team culture with a coaching leadership style. One implication is, unexpectedly, that your boss shouldn’t be your only source of feedback. A good leader of coaches would ask you to get your feedback mainly from the people you serve or work with. They would also task the whole team with figuring out their strengths and weaknesses together, and to come up with a strategy for improving their skills. Insofar as they throw in their own feedback and opinions, it’s just one data point among many others.
Enroll in ongoing education
Education comes in many different forms. This includes reading articles and books, talking with experts in the field, participating in conferences, observing masters at work, taking formal training, enrolling in post-graduate studies, or generally trying to achieve a self-assigned goal. You can also work towards a relevant coaching certificate, as that gives you a more focused checklist or curriculum.
Learning happens automatically to most people, but you can speed it up by applying focus. Take a moment to identify your current areas of interest, and then work to get an index of what is available. Who are the authorities in the field? What books have they written, what models and theories have they created? Whose work are they building on, and who is now extending their work further?
Get yourself a basic (agile) coaching certification
Even a basic certification will be beneficial, if it’s of the right kind and backed by a credible organization such as the International Coaching Federation, the Scrum Alliance, ICAgile, or any of the other associations mentioned in this blog post. agile42 offers the following agile coaching certifications:
Remember that not all ideas and concepts are equally reliable. Some work is well researched and backed up by logic and empirical results. To mention a few, I have high trust in the Lean product development concepts presented by Donald G. Reinertsen, and in Karl E. Weick and his work on organizational psychology. The same goes for the Cynefin sense-making model and related concepts by Dave Snowden.
Other ideas rest on shaky or non-existent foundations. For example, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) have both been debunked as pseudoscience. I can’t recommend making them the basis of your career.
There’s a number of coaching schools that fulfill these criteria and are generally accepted in the agile coaching industry, including:
When it comes to Scrum, Kanban, Lean, various scaled processes etc. there’s a large number of trainings on offer, with and without certifications. When choosing an agile training, keep the following in mind:
- The best trainers are also practicing coaches. The combination of practical experience and theoretical knowledge is hard to beat.
- The Scrum Alliance sets the highest bar for their trainers: it’s notoriously difficult to become a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST). For this reason their Scrum courses are generally better than the competitors.
- If you want or need certification, be sure that you pick a good certification authority. A good certification is an asset; a bad certification is a liability.
Get coaching experience
It’s been said that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. Some people say that the effort must be thoughtfully and diligently applied, while others think it’s more of a general guideline, and yet another group contends that all of this is just a gross oversimplification. Regardless, we can all agree that you must invest time, effort, practice and reflection to become an expert. So start early — preferably yesterday — and remember that it’s never too late to turn failures into learning experiences!
Try to maximize diversity in your work. This means working with all kinds of industries and technologies, small companies and multinational enterprises, startups and NGOs, in your home country and on the other side of the world. Each additional environment and business domain you get acquainted with will give you new challenges and new experiences.
In most industries, for example, you will find constraints and regulations that force people to work in certain ways. For example, banks and insurance companies must cope with heavy regulation and the desire to be perceived as reliable by their clients. Mobile games are less regulated and people will accept some level of defects. The embedded software in a pump at the bottom of a well may never be updated, while updates to a web app can be automatically tested and deployed as soon as the developer hits Ctrl-S.
Gaining experience requires self-reflection and improvement, as mentioned above, but also a certain amount of audacity and serendipity — a willingness to get out of your comfort zone and try new things, even though you might not succeed at first. As agilists we should be well prepared to work in small batches, inspect the results and adapt for next time. Einstein has a number of great quotes on this topic, including “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new” as well as “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
As you are collecting experience, make sure that you get to do actual agile coaching. This is not the same as being a Scrum Master for a team, or driving the Product Owner community. Coaching Scrum Masters and leaders in multi-team settings requires deeper and wider knowledge, including the ability to teach and mentor people.
What certifications are relevant?
There’s a lot of certifications that sound like they could be useful for an agile coach. But how do you know which ones are worthwhile and which are not? Why spend a lot of money and time on some specific certificate, when you can get another certificate quicker and for a fraction of the price?
The answer is in signaling, a concept originally introduced by Nobel-prize economist Gary Becker. He argued that it’s very difficult to understand the talents or skills of any person, so prospective employers would use university degrees as a proxy. Your B.Sc. or M.A. or Ph.D. sends a signal about you — and so does just being accepted into an Ivy League university, even if you drop out later.
Having a good agile coaching certification signals that you know your stuff. It tells people that you have invested significant time and resources in learning the right skills. It shows that a review panel, consisting of expert agile coaches, have inspected your credentials, assessed your skills, and found you worthy.
Recommended for you: View agile42’s agile certifications
Becker’s distinction between elite and non-elite universities is also useful. In this case the “Ivy League” of agile coaching institutions consists of only three organizations: the International Coaching Federation, the Scrum Alliance and the International Consortium for Agile.
Other agile coaching certificates can certainly be found, ranging from the questionable to the outright embarrassing.
What coaching certifications should I avoid?
Certifications related to a specific process framework are considered mildly suspicious. Coming in with a pre-defined solution is in conflict with the principles of coaching, meaning that those certifications are weak or confusing signals. People who don’t know better may be impressed, but those in the know will look for further signals.
Avoid all coaching certifications that can be had immediately through a multiple-choice online exam. First, coaching is a complex skill that is extremely context-dependent, and there is no automated way of assessing your skill level. Multiple-choice questions are totally inappropriate for the job: the questions are either leading or the difference comes down to nitpicking semantics. Free-form answers and essays work better, but can’t be graded by computers. They must be assessed and graded by human experts, which increases the cost and the lead time.
Second, people can and will cheat on these tests. If you get stuck on a particularly difficult question and ping a friend about it, who will ever know? If you buy the answer sheet online, or pay someone to do the exam for you, who will ever know? And if you did the exam honestly and properly, who will ever know?
Such certifications are not only worthless, they are a liability because they send the wrong signals. People will think that you are either ignorant or gullible, or trying to fool them.
Pure coaching certifications
The International Coaching Federation is the gold standard for systemic coaching globally. There are a number of regional organizations that apply the same level of rigor, including the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC) and the Association for Coaching (AC). If you can present even an entry-level certification from any of these, then people will take it as given that your skills are sufficient for agile coaching.
Certifications specific to agile coaching
There are two reliable sources of agile coaching certificates: Scrum Alliance and International Consortium for Agile.
The Scrum Alliance provides two certifications directly applicable to agile coaching: Certified Team Coach® (CTC) and Certified Enterprise Coach® (CEC). They are both pure competence assessments with a self-guided learning journey, and there is a lot of overlap in the requirements as well as the application process. You will need to structure the learning process yourself, working on your own to ensure that you meet the requirements — sufficient coaching skills, hands-on experience, training and outreach, and so on — and stay in contact with mentors who can give guidance and advice. When I applied for the CEC, it took me two years.
Together with the Certified Scrum Trainer® (CST), the CTC and the CEC are considered “guide level” certifications by the Scrum Alliance. This comes with certain rights and obligations: CTCs and CECs are for example allowed to confer CSM certifications through coaching, just like the CSTs can do through training. This also means that the Scrum Alliance applies stricter criteria than others.
It’s worth mentioning that Scrum Alliance is a non-profit organization that doesn’t have the goal of making money. They can afford to take a serious approach to certifications, and this is clearly visible especially at the guide level.
The International Consortium for Agile, also known as ICAgile, is backed by several good names in the agile coaching industry. They are generally considered a reliable and reputable provider of certifications. Similar to Scrum Alliance, they provide two relevant certification tracks, Team coaching and Enterprise coaching. In contrast with the Scrum Alliance certifications, ICAgile is more structured: you need to take three specific courses, and then pass a competence assessment. There is little overlap between the team and enterprise track though, the courses are for example totally different.
Do you want to become an agile coach?
Great! Regardless of where you are, making the decision to start is the first step of the journey. Dig up the Agile Coach Competency Framework and do a self-assessment. Where are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? Browse our training, pick a skill, and keep moving on your journey.
Servant leadership
/by Giuseppe De SimoneThe future of work has arrived faster than we could have imagined in our post-pandemic world. One of the defining characteristics of this modern workplace is a shift away from traditional decision-making hierarchies. In today’s workplace, it makes more sense for decisions to be made by those individuals closest to the problem at hand. Teams are self-managed, meaning they decide what to work on, when to work on it, and how to best achieve the requested outcome. This shift comes with new demands on leadership, and effective leaders cultivate the values of servant leadership.
Expectations on leaders have shifted alongside these changes. The very best leaders are not telling anyone what to do. Instead, they are removing impediments, aligning stakeholders, building trusting relationships, coaching, providing feedback, developing people’s skills and building the capabilities of the organization. They basically create the conditions for individuals and teams to perform at their best.
Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán on Pexels
What is servant leadership?
Servant leadership is a leadership philosophy and set of practices in which the leader puts the needs of the employees first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible. Robert K. Greenleaf first popularized the term “servant leadership” in The Servant as Leader, an essay published in 1970.
The term might sound like an oxymoron the first time you hear it. You may think that the teams are there to serve the leaders, but in fact, organizations can benefit more when things are the other way around. A Servant Leader should be asking themselves, “Do my actions help those I lead grow as persons? Do they, because of my actions, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become leaders?”
Recommended reading: A Complete Guide to Agile Leadership
The principles of servant leaders
According to Greenleaf, servant leaders cultivate 11 key virtues. These virtues are maybe even more essential now than they were in 1970. In the current world, leaders can’t be effective without trust from people they are supposed to lead, and these virtues ultimately build trust.
Awareness
They have a keen sense for what is happening around them. They know what’s going on and will rarely be fooled by appearances.
Calling
They are willing to sacrifice egocentric interests for the benefit of others. They have a natural calling to serve, which cannot be taught.
Community
They believe that an organization needs to function as a community. They instill a sense of community spirit in the workplace.
Conceptualization
They have the ability to conceptualize the world, events and possibilities. They encourage others to dream great dreams and avoid getting bogged down by day-to-day realities and operations.
Empathy
They understand and empathize with others’ circumstances and problems and have well-developed emotional intelligence.
Foresight
They are able to anticipate future events. They are adept at picking up patterns in the environment and seeing what the future will bring. They can anticipate consequences of decisions with great accuracy.
Growth
They believe that all people have something to offer beyond their tangible contributions. They work hard to help people in a number of ways..
Healing
They have appreciation for the emotional health and spirit of others. They are good at facilitating a healing process of relationships, when necessary..
Listening
They are receptive and genuinely interested in the views and input of others.
Persuasiveness
They are able to convince others to do things, rather than relying on formal authority. They never force others to do things.
Stewardship
They show a desire to prepare the organization to contribute to the greater good of society, making a positive difference in the future.
Recommended for you: Learn how to be a servant leader in our online course on Agile Leadership Foundations
How to build trust as a servant leader
I learned that one of the most effective ways to build trust is to demonstrate that you truly care about people and you are committed to their growth. Most people want to feel they are valued as individuals; that they are heard and not judged. Ultimately, it is about making the workplace more humane and fit for human beings. Servant leadership is necessary to build leadership as a diffused organizational capability, or in other words, to make everyone a potential leader.
The challenges of servant leadership
It is really difficult for managers who have learnt all they know in a traditional environment to change their fundamental leadership beliefs. They might be scared to let things go, or insecure because they don’t yet know how to contribute in a new and different way. They might be afraid to become useless or redundant, and they might feel lost since they might never have seen a real example of servant leadership before. A lot of the feedback they receive is what not to do, but there aren’t always great resources to help them find what to do. Finally, managers might be so used to pushing their ideas and instructions on their teams, that they end up pushing and forcing these new ideas too fast, with the unintended consequence of frustration and dissatisfaction of the people involved.
How to practice a servant leadership approach
By coaching dozens of leaders, I learned that the following behaviors can help leaders understand and practice a servant leadership approach:
Want to learn more about leadership?
Companies are investing more than ever in leadership development, and highly trained, skilled leaders are indispensable to the modern workforce. Agile42 offers a number of training, coaching, mentoring and other services. You could start with the Golden Standar d for Agile leaders, namely Certified Agile Leadership Essentials for Team and Organization Leaders (CAL-E+T+O) training, which we do in-person and remotely, or contact us for information about our other services.
How to Facilitate a Sprint Review
/by agile42The Sprint Review is an opportunity for the whole Scrum Team to stand in front of their users, stakeholders and customers and inspect and adapt the Product. It takes place at the end of the Sprint. The meeting should include an overview of the state of the product in terms of progress, budget and next steps. Usually, there is also a hands-on demonstration of the actual product. The users and stakeholders provide feedback, and then the developers incorporate relevant feedback into the Product Backlog.
What is a Sprint Review?
The Sprint Review is the third one of the Scrum Events that takes place within a Sprint. The purpose of a Sprint Review is to inspect the outcome of the Sprint and determine future adaptations. It takes place on the last day of a Sprint, and is timeboxed to a maximum of four hours for a one-month Sprint.
What does the Scrum Guide say about the Sprint Review?
The Scrum Guide defines the purpose of the Sprint Review as a chance to “inspect the outcome of the Sprint and determine future adaptations”.
Who should attend the Sprint Review?
The Sprint Review should be attended by the whole Scrum Team (Product Owner, Developers, and Scrum Master) as well as the customers, stakeholders and users.
What is the purpose of sprint review?
According to the Scrum Guide, “the purpose of the Sprint Review is to inspect the outcome of the Sprint and determine future adaptations”. This is the key purpose of the event, and should be the focus. There are, however, a few other purposes and benefits to the event. Firstly, it enables you to improve your responsiveness to customers or users. Secondly, it helps with quality assurance, since your whole team and various other stakeholders will be present to inspect the product. Finally, it can help with team cohesion, as it’s a chance to get together and run through the various successes and challenges of the Sprint.
Sprint Review vs Retrospective
Since both events involve inspecting the completed Sprint and adapting for the future, some people get the two events confused. However, there are some key differences:
Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash
Tips to improve your Sprint Review
Sprint Review agenda
Below is a sample agenda or structure, which we use at agile42.
Introduction
The SM, who acts as a facilitator, introduces the event by welcoming the participants. They explain the purpose of the meeting to the participants which can include users, stakeholders and customers. Then they show the agenda for the meeting. (5-10 min)
Inspection phase
The PO takes the lead and provides an overview of the state of the product in terms of progress, budget and next steps. They remind everyone of the Product Goal and describe the Sprint Goal the Developers were trying to achieve. (10 min)
The PO leaves the stage to the Developers to demonstrate the Increment. This is not a PowerPoint presentation of what the team has done, but a hands-on demonstration of the actual product. Usually Developers will go through the scenarios described in the acceptance criteria of each PBI. Some teams even let users or customers try the product themselves, while the Developers and the Product Owner observe how they interact with the Increment. (30 min)
The Scrum Team collects feedback on the Increment from all invited participants. (15-30 min)
Adaptation phase
Users, stakeholders and customers might leave the meeting at this point, while the Scrum Team continues with a working session to incorporate relevant feedback into the Product Backlog. Should the feedback be related to something which does not impact the upcoming Sprint, they can simply take notes to address the feedback in one of the upcoming Product Backlog Refinement sessions. However, if the feedback potentially affects the next Sprint Goal, the Scrum Team will perform a quick Product Backlog Refinement session during the Sprint Review to get ready for the upcoming Sprint Planning. (30 min)
Closing
The Scrum Master thanks the participants for their contribution and officially closes the event. (5 min)
Webinar | The Sprint Review
/by agile42In this webinar, we discuss the Sprint Review which is the most challenging Scrum Event according to our community. The symptoms are subtle and the causes deep: teams often fail to invite real customers, or they don’t know how to solicit and manage feedback. Our hosts, Dennis Büscher and Martin von Weissenberg, have facilitated, hosted and coached hundreds of Sprint Reviews, and in this webinar they share their insights, tips, and tricks with you. They begin with the basics and go over what the Scrum Guide says about the Sprint Review. Then they go a step further and share some of the most common pitfalls they’ve seen, as well as discuss best practices for getting the most out of this event. The webinar ends with a Q&A with our live audience.
Watch Now | Sprint Review Webinar
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Meet your webinar hosts
Martin von Weissenberg is an experienced enterprise-level agile coach who believes that with the right leadership approach and change management tools, organisations can learn to change themselves in a structured and sustainable way. He has worked across the software industry for over 20 years, in startups as well as multinationals. Since joining agile42 in 2012, he has helped a large and diverse number of clients. These include organizations such as Siemens, ABB, Swedbank, Helsinki University, as well as countless shorter training and coaching engagements with companies in the banking, media, educational, telecom and marketing industries.
Martin is always interested in learning new things. So much so that he is currently completing his PhD on how to organize and lead for agility. This coupled with his empathetic and engaging nature, makes him well suited to drive transformations for both teams and larger organizations.
Dennis Büscher comes from a legal, agile project management, and human-centred design background. For more than three years, he has been coaching various companies and institutions in the fields of design thinking and legal design. Dennis worked at the HPI Academy as a project manager and coach for digital transformation and innovation training. Since 2021, Dennis has been a coach at agile42, supporting companies and organisations in the field of agility. He aims to drive innovation and empower teams through his user-centric approach and with the meaningful application of technology.
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agile42 offers Scrum courses, as well as:
6 Agile Decision-Making Models to Foster Collaboration
/by Regina MartinsEffective decision-making is the lifeblood of any business, and is important in any context. Being able to make the best decisions as quickly as possible can make the entire enterprise run more smoothly. Agile decision-making in particular encourages leadership at all levels of organizations, which is highly motivating for your teams. Here are six Agile decision-making models to try out in your organization.
Recommended for you: Help your team’s processes run more smoothly with the Agile Facilitation Foundations online course
Why is decision-making so important in an agile organization?
In Agile teams, or those striving for agility, decision-making is not based on the command and control of management. It is a collaborative and consensus-based process. When you are trying to manage self-organized, responsible, accountable teams, decision-making is the domain of groups of people.
Decisions need to be coherent in the organization, which is an exciting and complex puzzle. Think of it like a rowing team: each person is rowing, making different decisions about each stroke, but ultimately moving in the same direction. It’s about forward momentum and coherence. Decision-making frameworks or models help people understand the scope of their decision-making power so that they are able to make decisions without barriers.
Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash
How is decision-making in agile organizations different from traditional hierarchical workplaces?
In traditional organizations, it’s about the manager making the decision, while others follow. In more agile organizations, everyone has a voice and opinions are encouraged. Because of the collaborative nature. The Agile manifesto’s principles imply that teams are making their own decisions about their work. These are visible to the stakeholders around them, rather than waiting for team leaders. It wastes time.
What is the effect of slow, poor, or disorganized decision-making?
In an agile organization, a core focus is to avoid waste. Poor, slow decision-making creates a lot of wasted time and effort, and this is what we hope to avoid. Empowering teams to make their own decisions also has the effect of a faster time to market.
Six decision-making models to help you move forward
Cynefin Framework
At agile42 we have a favorite framework for sense-making, which we consider the first, essential step of any effective decision-making. The Cynefin Framework is all about making sense of the domain and situations. “Cynefin” is a Welsh word without a real English equivalent, but it translates roughly to “a place of your multiple belongings”. The framework has five decision-making contexts, or domains: clear, complicated, complex, chaotic, and confusion. Cynefin is most useful when you need to make sense of a problem before making a decision about it.
Recommended for you: Learn the Cynefin Framework in our CAL training
How to use it: Depending on which domain we’re in, there are different appropriate actions. The clear and complicated domains are considered “ordered”; while the chaotic and complex domains are “unordered”. The aim is to place the situation in the correct domain, which allows you to make sense of it and be better-equipped to make the right kind of decision to move forward. For more detail on using this method, read our blog on the Cynefin Framework.
SWOT analysis
SWOT analysis is possibly the most-used, most traditional decision-making framework, but it is still highly relevant. It is centered on a desired end state, which needs to be clear for the framework to be effective. This method works very well when used hand-in-hand with Cynefin, especially in the Complicated domain. It is a great way to decide what needs to be done next, after making sense of the situation.
How to use it: The team comes together to analyze the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of a given situation. This process ideally involves a big miro board, or lots of sticky notes, with silent brainstorming. The facilitator then decides what to do to move forward. They may use dot voting to identify what is important in each quadrant, then we discuss, analyze, and add clarity to help teams make their decisions.
Decider protocol
The Decider Protocol is a way to make unanimous decisions. A decision is proposed, and there is an iterative voting process which continues until consensus is reached. It can be time-consuming, but is a useful, structured way to get the whole team in agreement.
How to use it: There is a proposer, who proposes a decision to the group. The proposal needs to be short, clear, to the point and actionable. It focuses on one single issue. Once the proposal is made, people can think about it for a few minutes. Then the team votes, on the count of three. They either hold up a thumbs-up (100% behind this), a thumbs-down (cannot support this) or a flat hand (support with reservations). On the count of three, they hold up their thumbs at the same time. The no’s and maybe’s then have the opportunity to share their doubts and concerns, which are discussed with the group. They are asked, “what will it take for you to get behind this?”. The proposal is modified to accommodate this input, and then the process begins again, repeating until there is full consensus.
Fist of five
Fist of Five is another agile decision-making model to use when you need consensus. It is most popular in Scrum teams for making fairly informal daily decisions.
How to use it: The facilitator presents a decision that needs to be made. Each person in the team votes by holding up a number of fingers at the count of three. Five fingers indicates full agreement; four fingers means the team member is happy with the decision; three fingers indicates support with no major concerns; two fingers expresses reservations that need further discussion; and one finger means the team member is opposed.
Next, the team must discuss everyone’s reasonings and reservations, which fosters important discussion around the pros and cons. After everybody has a chance to share views, the proposal is adapted and a new vote takes place, repeating until there is a consensus about whether to move forward or scrap the idea.
Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash
Forced ranking
Forced ranking helps to make difficult decisions when prioritizing a list of items.
How to use it: The team starts with a list of no more than 10 items. Each person assigns a numeric value to each of the items (only one value per item). This must be made visible on a flipchart or board. The facilitator collects the numeric of the “votes,” and adds the numbers up. Items with the most votes go to the top, while others down in order.
Relative estimation
Relative estimation is used when teams need to estimate tasks and user stories.
How to use it: Items are placed on a board or wall. Each individual goes to the list of items and places it according to what they think is most important, taking into account the effort required. Each person will shuffle things up or down according to their own ideas. This is done in silence first, but then people need to discuss their thoughts and reasoning. It can be difficult to reach a final consensus, and if so, Fist of Five can be used once you’ve narrowed it down.
How do you know when you’re using the right decision-making model?
Teams should be taught as many decision-making models as possible. The more resources and tools they have at their disposal, the easier it is to determine which tools are most useful in any given scenario. Cynefin is always a great starting point for sense-making, and these models can be used alone or in combination with one another. A key aspect of efficient decision-making is ensuring that the team has all the information they need, and if you’re struggling to reach decisions, that could be the cause. A neutral party to facilitate the decision-making process is also valuable.
3 Signs Your Daily Scrum Sucks (And How to Fix It)
/by Giuseppe De SimoneThere is an abundance of articles telling people how to do the Daily Scrum right, but a real scarcity of articles pointing out how to realize when things go wrong. Knowing the common pitfalls of the Daily Scrum and how to spot them can be a real game-changer in your teams. Here are three small, easy-to-observe signs that you need to fix your Daily Scrum.
Recommended online course: Facilitating Scrum
1. People are only interested in their own tasks
In many, many Daily Scrums you find that the team takes turns to each share their own tasks, progress, and impediments, rather than contributing to the discussion as a team. People normally follow with attention until it is their turn to speak, and they simply disconnect after that. This behavior is often amplified by the common way of running the Daily Scrum, i.e. the famous three questions. These questions are no longer in the Scrum Guide, because they can contribute to this problem.
Further reading: Our comprehensive guide to the Scrum Events
How to fix it
There are two great ways to avoid this common pitfall and get the team to align towards the goal.
One way that works is to keep the same three questions, but change things up a bit by having three rounds instead of one, with each person answering only one question at a time.
This usually gives two benefits. The first is to keep people actively engaged until the end, since they know they will have to speak again. But there’s a more important benefit. It better serves the real purpose of the Daily Scrum: collectively assessing where the team is compared to the Sprint goal and collaboratively deciding what the next most important task is for each person to complete, in order to move closer to the Sprint goal.
Another way (which brings even more benefits in my experience) is to run the Daily Scrum by focusing on the stories in the Sprint Backlog, instead of focusing on people’s tasks. The idea is that the team selects one story at a time, going from the top, and discusses how to make it “done done” as soon as possible. Then you take the next story down and move on, either until you covered all the opened stories or until the 15-minutes time is up. In this way Developers will not focus just on the individual tasks, but will be nudged to look at the Sprint goal as a collective goal to achieve.
When using this second method, sometimes you do not manage to talk about lower priority stories, so people who are working on those might feel a bit excluded. This isn’t always a bad thing: it can provide some social pressure to contribute to completing the highest priority stories first, instead of picking what they like most and spreading the team effort all over the Sprint Backlog.
Recommended online course: Facilitating Scrum
2. Everybody is looking at the Scrum Master instead of at each other
This is the biggest sign that your Daily Scrum has turned into a status report. Remember that this is not the point of this Scrum Event: the team should be updating and discussing the high-priority tasks with one another.
How to fix it
Before the pandemic forced us to rethink the way we work and made remote work the standard, I used the trick to encourage the team to stay in a semicircle, closer to the task board, and I took (or asked the Scrum Master to take) a step back, pretending to take notes. If someone was stubborn enough to turn and try to speak to me, I removed eye contact, so that they felt a bit uncomfortable and were forced to find other eyes to look into: their teammate’s eyes. It worked immediately most times.
I used the same trick also when the team tended to look at the PO or their manager attending the Daily Scrum: I encouraged the team to stay in a semicircle, leaving all other attendees outside. If you want to replicate the same approach in a remote setting, just ask anyone else attending the Daily Scrum, except the Developers, to switch off their camera and mute themselves.
3. People have long discussions, trying to fix problems during the standup
I know that many Scrum Masters tend to interrupt discussions or ask people to continue conversations outside the meeting. This works to a certain extent, but usually, people find it a bit irritating.
How to fix it
I use and teach a different approach to this problem. First, I explain very clearly to the team that the Daily Scrum is intended for the Daily Planning, so that everybody understands and buys into this. Then, when I see that a discussion is taking off, I leave some space for 1-2 minutes. If it is not concluded yet, I ask the following question: How do you think this conversation can affect today’s planning? Most times people admit that it is not strictly relevant and propose to park it.
Do your Daily Scrums need more work?
Of course, the three above and other dysfunctions might be just a symptom of something deeper. If the quick-fix techniques illustrated above do not work, it can be a hint of something more important that must be addressed. Consider taking an online course in facilitating Scrum to help you and your team have functional, useful Daily Scrums and other Scrum Events.
Webinar | The Daily Scrum
/by agile42The Daily Scrum is found almost everywhere, even outside of Agile frameworks, but many organizations aren’t getting the most out of them. When run well, the Daily Scrum can be highly engaging, quick, proactive, and focused. Our coaches, Regina Martins and Lothar Fischmann, have facilitated, participated, and coached their way through thousands of these meetings, and share some of their insights with you. In this webinar, they start with the basics, cover what the Scrum Guide says about the Daily Scrum and share some tried and tested formats and methods that they have used. Finally, they answer your questions and share their greatest tips and tricks for getting the most out of this Event.
Watch Now | Daily Scrum Webinar
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Meet your webinar hosts
Regina Martins is an experienced business professional with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology, financial services and telecoms industries. As a facilitator and coach at agile42, she spends time getting teams from across the organisational hierarchies to communicate effectively. As a Radical Collaborator, she also helps people to collaborate better with each other and with other teams.
She also has been involved in the Africa Innovation Summit and the Agile Africa conference, as she is passionate about the Agile community in South Africa and continually strives to help keep it fresh. She also regularly speaks at conferences both locally and internationally.
Lothar Fischmann has a background in marketing and corporate communications. These experiences help him to turn agility into something more concrete and tangible. He is a team player who is passionate about creating supportive environments that foster creativity and learning. He also has a systematic approach that allows him to understand situations and develop scalable solutions that fit customers’ needs when helping teams and organisations go through agile transitions. Plus, Lothar always aims to add energy and humour when coaching or facilitating to keep teams engaged.
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How to Become an Agile Coach
/by Martin von WeissenbergThere seems to be a large misunderstanding around what it means to be an agile coach. Coaching is well understood, and the largest providers of agile coaching certifications have converged and agreed on the definition. Still the agile coach is constantly being deflated into something like a multi-team Scrum Master, and agile coaching companies have difficulties explaining the value they will bring to their customers. What’s going on?
With this blog post, we’re going to take a hard and in-depth look at the agile coaching profession and straighten out some of the misconceptions. You will hopefully find a clear and understandable explanation of what an agile coach is and isn’t, what an agile coach does (and doesn’t do), what value an agile coach will bring to the organization, as well as some tips and tricks on how to become an agile coach.
What makes coaching so magical is that it is an intensely personal experience for the coach. For a personal insight into one of the most rewarding professions available, watch the recording of our Webinar: A Personal View on Professional Coaching.
Why you should trust me
I’ve worked as a professional agile coach since 2008, and have well over 12,000 hours of agile coaching and 1,500 hours of agile training under my belt. Every year I’m racking up between 600 and 1,000 hours of actual honest hands-on agile coaching, in addition to training, writing, speaking and mentoring.
I’m the proud owner of a Certified Enterprise Coach® (CEC) certification since 2015, and an active member of the team that reviews and accepts Certified Team Coach® (CTC) applications at the Scrum Alliance. In other words, other highly skilled agile coaches are of the opinion that I know agile coaching, and they trust me in guiding and assessing candidate coaches.
Further reading: Martin is one of the authors of The Hitchhikers Guide to Agile Coaching which you can download for free.
What is an agile coach?
An agile coach is a servant leader who helps organizations transform towards higher levels of agility. Agile coaches use coaching and facilitation techniques plus complex management methods to help the client organization see and understand what’s going on, find their own solutions to their problems, and enact those solutions.
Photo by Allan Mas from Pexels
According to Wikipedia, coaching has its roots in the word “coach”, meaning “…to transport people from where they are to where they want to be”. The coach is merely helping the client on a journey of self-discovery and improvement, and all solutions must come from the client.
In contrast, an agile coach is expected to bring both expertise and experience in the subject matter. This takes careful balancing between coaching, teaching and mentoring on one hand, and consulting, advising and contracting on the other. We could perhaps talk about “transforming” rather than “transporting”, as it implies that the coaching subject needs to actively change into something new and different.
Complex management methods are necessary because organizations are complex. I won’t go into the topic very deeply here, but the key point is that you can’t design a complex system up front. Instead you need to let it grow, observing what emerges and either strengthening or dampening what you see. An agile coach tries to “nudge” the organization towards a better way of operating (which presumably involves lean and agile methods), and the direction of change is more important than the goal. By doing interventions of various kinds, an agile coach can generate small but permanent changes in how the organization behaves. Often the results are different from what you imagined initially.
Agile coaches work at varying levels in the organization, but always in settings where there’s at least a handful of teams that need to organize themselves effectively. The field of work is large, including products and services, skills and roles, the organizational structure, IT infrastructure and workplace services, agile/lean management processes, the facilitation of strategy creation and implementation, and much more.
In a traditional organization, agile coaches are often positioned directly above the Scrum Masters in the hierarchy, or sometimes in a separate unit that provides e.g. process development services to other units. In flat or teal organizations the lines are more blurred, but agile coaches generally have the capability to take on larger responsibilities than Scrum Masters do.
What does an agile coach do?
An agile coach will coach, obviously, but also teach and mentor people. They help visualize what is going on, and act as mirrors to the organization, helping people see things as they are. Agile coaches facilitate work, lead workshops and meetings, and help people make good decisions. They also grow new Scrum Masters and new agile coaches, by teaching and mentoring potential candidates in the organization, by showing them the ropes (a.k.a. role-modeling), and by living the agile values.
Why is coaching so valuable for the target organization?
Fundamentally, companies need to make more complex decisions at a faster pace than before, which can only be achieved using distributed cognition and decision-making. Scrum and Kanban, with their short feedback loops and focus on quality, will take you in the right direction. Without self-organization the teams just won’t fly: self-organizing teams are more motivated and more proactive, and they can make better decisions. This is exactly what companies need today, and agile coaches help them achieve it.
By bilaleldaou from Pixabay
In order to become more self-organizing, teams need the right kind of leadership. We’ve found coaching, envisioning, conducting and catalyzing leadership styles work better than styles that are controlling, commanding, demanding or pace-setting. The latter styles are more effective in the short term, but pull decision power away from the team and to the manager. In the long term they will reduce the level of self-organization.
As most mid-level managers are under pressure to deliver, they do whatever they can to get stuff done. Coaches are needed to teach team members how to collaborate and make decisions, and to teach managers how to lead self-organizing teams and drive continuous organizational improvement.
Agile Coaching Skills
Being a successful agile coach requires a large number of different skills. Most people find it comparatively easy to learn e.g. agile and lean thinking and related practicalities. There’s plenty of books around, and you can find correct answers for many questions, and good trade-offs and guidelines for many others. In Cynefin terms, this is the ordered (simple or complicated) domain.
Learning the soft skills — how to become a good coach — is more difficult. Coaching is often complex and sometimes chaotic: you are listening and driving the situation forward by asking questions and choosing topics that serve the needs of your audience. You may need to challenge them or open new areas of thought. To do this effectively, you will need to act and react in ways that don’t necessarily come naturally to you.
Below, I’ve listed a number of skills that I think a good agile coach should have. Luckily these skills are widely applicable, and most people will find them useful regardless of where their careers take them. Every team leader will benefit from coaching skills, every product manager should understand the ideas behind Lean and Agile, and so on.
The list is not whipped up from thin air. It’s based on the Agile Coach Competency Framework by Lyssa Adkins and Michael Spayd, with clarifications from Jon Spruce and Ben Maynard.
The difference between a new agile coach and an experienced one
The difference between a new agile coach and a more experienced agile coach is that the latter has more techniques they can call on, is able to see deeper patterns, and is able to assemble and create new techniques on the spot. Based on my own experience from reviewing dozens and dozens of CTC applications, I’ve tried to conceptualize this into three dimensions:
People tend to improve in all of these dimensions over time. Experience and learning comes through doing, but progress can be uneven and proceed in fits and starts. You can speed this up considerably by working in environments with an existing embedded agile mindset, where you will be able to observe good examples and pick up good ideas on a daily basis. Co-coaching especially can be very educational. Conversely, if you find yourself in an agile-in-name-only organization, you’ll find yourself picking up narrow thinking models and suboptimal methods.
As a CTC application reviewer, I should also mention that most problems tend to occur in two areas. Most of the rejected or deferred applications lack depth across the board: the capability to see larger organizational patterns is not there. The second most common reason is insufficient coaching skills.
Recommended online course: Agile Coaching Foundations
What kind of jobs can an agile coach find?
The vast majority of agile coaches work either as internal employees or as consultants, although there’s a lot of variation.
As an internal agile coach, your job is often to work with a specific department or a specific business unit, or sometimes a whole company, to help them become more agile. The line of business can range all over the map, but is often related to software development, IT or R&D. You can sometimes be a member of a specific department or business unit, or belong to a coaching department that provides services to other business units. The job is fairly stable, and during layoffs coaches are either the first or the last to go (which incidentally tells you a lot about the company). You also have an opportunity to follow the same company for several years to see the long-term impact of your work.
Consultants have more options, and I’ll list some of them below:
Be aware that some companies advertise for an agile coach, but then provide a role description that is closer to that of a Scrum Master, Agile Project Manager, Jira/TFS expert, or some kind of Agile-Do-It-All. This always indicates that the company doesn’t understand what an agile coach actually is. Many good coaches tend to refuse to accept such constraints. On the other hand, others can see it as an interesting challenge. It’s your choice.
There’s another common anti-pattern where an agile coach is expected to handle the operative duties for three or four teams in an organization, without Scrum Masters. By limiting the scope of the role and ensuring that the coach is busy running Scrum mechanics, the organization loses out on virtually all the benefits that an agile coach can bring in the first place. Again many good coaches refuse to take on this kind of assignment.
Beyond the opportunities listed above, you may occasionally find more specialized work. Agile training outfits sometimes have an agile coach on the roster, offering in-depth coaching courses or post-training support to the students. Venture capitalists have been known to hire agile coaches to e.g. roll out lean startup techniques. Management consulting companies sometimes need coaches with agile experience, to coach senior executives. And you might occasionally find a job ad from the Scrum Alliance or another non-profit in this domain.
How much does an agile coach earn?
The salary for an agile coach varies quite a bit. As a rule of thumb, an agile coach should look for wages similar to those of a Senior Project Manager or development manager, while an experienced lead agile coach or head coach should have a position similar to a Head of Department, with the appropriate compensation.
In flat or teal organizations, agile coaches can draw on their facilitation and coaching skills to show the value they are contributing to the company, which helps negotiate a good wage. As a freelancer, you should take what the market will bear. You bring a huge amount of value to your clients, so price your work accordingly.
That said, some of the main factors for the salary include:
How to become an agile coach
Becoming a good agile coach is a long journey. There are no shortcuts, although you can speed it up by keeping in touch with the best people you can find. Below, you will find some ideas and suggestions.
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Cultivate self-awareness and self-improvement
This is the basis of becoming good at anything, in fact. At all times, reflect on your own performance in the small and the large. Note the choices you are making, as well as the situations where someone else saw a choice that you didn’t. What went well, and what should you do differently next time? These are things you can reflect on immediately, while you grab a coffee after your meeting, or later in the gym, or on your commute.
Whenever possible, get direct feedback from your clients, teams and stakeholders. Consider using something like the return-on-time-invested (ROTI) method to get immediate feedback at the end of every meeting or workshop that you facilitate. You may want to talk to people you are working with to understand what you’re doing well and what you need to improve. How about collaborating with other agile coaches to get to-the-point feedback and second opinions? At the end of a time-limited assignment, you might want to conduct a formal “exit interview”. It can also be useful to sit down and think back over the last year or two, although it requires a bit more discipline. How are things working out for you? What changes do you need to make?
Coaches thrive in a human-centered team culture with a coaching leadership style. One implication is, unexpectedly, that your boss shouldn’t be your only source of feedback. A good leader of coaches would ask you to get your feedback mainly from the people you serve or work with. They would also task the whole team with figuring out their strengths and weaknesses together, and to come up with a strategy for improving their skills. Insofar as they throw in their own feedback and opinions, it’s just one data point among many others.
Enroll in ongoing education
Education comes in many different forms. This includes reading articles and books, talking with experts in the field, participating in conferences, observing masters at work, taking formal training, enrolling in post-graduate studies, or generally trying to achieve a self-assigned goal. You can also work towards a relevant coaching certificate, as that gives you a more focused checklist or curriculum.
Learning happens automatically to most people, but you can speed it up by applying focus. Take a moment to identify your current areas of interest, and then work to get an index of what is available. Who are the authorities in the field? What books have they written, what models and theories have they created? Whose work are they building on, and who is now extending their work further?
Get yourself a basic (agile) coaching certification
Even a basic certification will be beneficial, if it’s of the right kind and backed by a credible organization such as the International Coaching Federation, the Scrum Alliance, ICAgile, or any of the other associations mentioned in this blog post. agile42 offers the following agile coaching certifications:
Remember that not all ideas and concepts are equally reliable. Some work is well researched and backed up by logic and empirical results. To mention a few, I have high trust in the Lean product development concepts presented by Donald G. Reinertsen, and in Karl E. Weick and his work on organizational psychology. The same goes for the Cynefin sense-making model and related concepts by Dave Snowden.
Other ideas rest on shaky or non-existent foundations. For example, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) have both been debunked as pseudoscience. I can’t recommend making them the basis of your career.
There’s a number of coaching schools that fulfill these criteria and are generally accepted in the agile coaching industry, including:
When it comes to Scrum, Kanban, Lean, various scaled processes etc. there’s a large number of trainings on offer, with and without certifications. When choosing an agile training, keep the following in mind:
Get coaching experience
It’s been said that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. Some people say that the effort must be thoughtfully and diligently applied, while others think it’s more of a general guideline, and yet another group contends that all of this is just a gross oversimplification. Regardless, we can all agree that you must invest time, effort, practice and reflection to become an expert. So start early — preferably yesterday — and remember that it’s never too late to turn failures into learning experiences!
Try to maximize diversity in your work. This means working with all kinds of industries and technologies, small companies and multinational enterprises, startups and NGOs, in your home country and on the other side of the world. Each additional environment and business domain you get acquainted with will give you new challenges and new experiences.
In most industries, for example, you will find constraints and regulations that force people to work in certain ways. For example, banks and insurance companies must cope with heavy regulation and the desire to be perceived as reliable by their clients. Mobile games are less regulated and people will accept some level of defects. The embedded software in a pump at the bottom of a well may never be updated, while updates to a web app can be automatically tested and deployed as soon as the developer hits Ctrl-S.
Gaining experience requires self-reflection and improvement, as mentioned above, but also a certain amount of audacity and serendipity — a willingness to get out of your comfort zone and try new things, even though you might not succeed at first. As agilists we should be well prepared to work in small batches, inspect the results and adapt for next time. Einstein has a number of great quotes on this topic, including “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new” as well as “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
As you are collecting experience, make sure that you get to do actual agile coaching. This is not the same as being a Scrum Master for a team, or driving the Product Owner community. Coaching Scrum Masters and leaders in multi-team settings requires deeper and wider knowledge, including the ability to teach and mentor people.
What certifications are relevant?
There’s a lot of certifications that sound like they could be useful for an agile coach. But how do you know which ones are worthwhile and which are not? Why spend a lot of money and time on some specific certificate, when you can get another certificate quicker and for a fraction of the price?
The answer is in signaling, a concept originally introduced by Nobel-prize economist Gary Becker. He argued that it’s very difficult to understand the talents or skills of any person, so prospective employers would use university degrees as a proxy. Your B.Sc. or M.A. or Ph.D. sends a signal about you — and so does just being accepted into an Ivy League university, even if you drop out later.
Having a good agile coaching certification signals that you know your stuff. It tells people that you have invested significant time and resources in learning the right skills. It shows that a review panel, consisting of expert agile coaches, have inspected your credentials, assessed your skills, and found you worthy.
Recommended for you: View agile42’s agile certifications
Becker’s distinction between elite and non-elite universities is also useful. In this case the “Ivy League” of agile coaching institutions consists of only three organizations: the International Coaching Federation, the Scrum Alliance and the International Consortium for Agile.
Other agile coaching certificates can certainly be found, ranging from the questionable to the outright embarrassing.
What coaching certifications should I avoid?
Certifications related to a specific process framework are considered mildly suspicious. Coming in with a pre-defined solution is in conflict with the principles of coaching, meaning that those certifications are weak or confusing signals. People who don’t know better may be impressed, but those in the know will look for further signals.
Avoid all coaching certifications that can be had immediately through a multiple-choice online exam. First, coaching is a complex skill that is extremely context-dependent, and there is no automated way of assessing your skill level. Multiple-choice questions are totally inappropriate for the job: the questions are either leading or the difference comes down to nitpicking semantics. Free-form answers and essays work better, but can’t be graded by computers. They must be assessed and graded by human experts, which increases the cost and the lead time.
Second, people can and will cheat on these tests. If you get stuck on a particularly difficult question and ping a friend about it, who will ever know? If you buy the answer sheet online, or pay someone to do the exam for you, who will ever know? And if you did the exam honestly and properly, who will ever know?
Such certifications are not only worthless, they are a liability because they send the wrong signals. People will think that you are either ignorant or gullible, or trying to fool them.
Pure coaching certifications
The International Coaching Federation is the gold standard for systemic coaching globally. There are a number of regional organizations that apply the same level of rigor, including the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC) and the Association for Coaching (AC). If you can present even an entry-level certification from any of these, then people will take it as given that your skills are sufficient for agile coaching.
Certifications specific to agile coaching
There are two reliable sources of agile coaching certificates: Scrum Alliance and International Consortium for Agile.
The Scrum Alliance provides two certifications directly applicable to agile coaching: Certified Team Coach® (CTC) and Certified Enterprise Coach® (CEC). They are both pure competence assessments with a self-guided learning journey, and there is a lot of overlap in the requirements as well as the application process. You will need to structure the learning process yourself, working on your own to ensure that you meet the requirements — sufficient coaching skills, hands-on experience, training and outreach, and so on — and stay in contact with mentors who can give guidance and advice. When I applied for the CEC, it took me two years.
Together with the Certified Scrum Trainer® (CST), the CTC and the CEC are considered “guide level” certifications by the Scrum Alliance. This comes with certain rights and obligations: CTCs and CECs are for example allowed to confer CSM certifications through coaching, just like the CSTs can do through training. This also means that the Scrum Alliance applies stricter criteria than others.
It’s worth mentioning that Scrum Alliance is a non-profit organization that doesn’t have the goal of making money. They can afford to take a serious approach to certifications, and this is clearly visible especially at the guide level.
The International Consortium for Agile, also known as ICAgile, is backed by several good names in the agile coaching industry. They are generally considered a reliable and reputable provider of certifications. Similar to Scrum Alliance, they provide two relevant certification tracks, Team coaching and Enterprise coaching. In contrast with the Scrum Alliance certifications, ICAgile is more structured: you need to take three specific courses, and then pass a competence assessment. There is little overlap between the team and enterprise track though, the courses are for example totally different.
Do you want to become an agile coach?
Great! Regardless of where you are, making the decision to start is the first step of the journey. Dig up the Agile Coach Competency Framework and do a self-assessment. Where are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? Browse our training, pick a skill, and keep moving on your journey.
How to Use Agile Metrics for Team Improvement
/by Ninja GranzowIn a dynamic competitive environment, it is important to deliver value to customers quickly and regularly, to react quickly to changes in the market, and to become more resilient. But how do you know you are on the right track or have already reached your goal? As there are so many options available, you can spend days measuring something, on different levels, in different ways. Digital tools such as Trello or JIRA offer metrics for Scrum and Kanban teams, presented in nice-looking dashboards. But which metrics are most important to drive team improvement? Learn where to start and how to make great use of agile metrics as a tool for team improvement in four simple steps.
For some practical strategies to assess your team’s agility, watch the recording of our Webinar: How to Assess the Performance of Agile Teams.
What are Agile metrics?
Metrics in general are qualitative or quantitative standards that you choose and use in order to continuously improve your product, service, organization and team. You do this based on data from previous work cycles. For that reason you continuously measure specific aspects that guide you towards your goal.
Agile metrics typically relate to agile working practices and can cover many different aspects. You can measure productivity, quality and customer satisfaction, among many other things. You might also hear terms such as “agile productivity metrics”, “agile quality metrics” or “agile KPIs”.
Recommended reading: Combine your OKRs with Agile Strategy Map™ for Success
However, they are not about measuring the amount of work done – the output – but rather how much you were able to make a positive impact on the end user – the outcome. As there are so many options available, you can spend days measuring something, on different levels and in different ways. So where do you start and how do you find metrics that are useful in your context? Generally, a good starting point is to understand why and how you want to start measuring data.
Why metrics matter: Inspect and adapt
You have a current state of a product or service for which you collect data. What does this data tell you – what can you learn from it? What changes can you derive from it that could bring you closer to your goal? Will the actions taken have the desired effect?
As Simon Sinek famously says: “It all starts with why”. In this context: Measure for a purpose. You need to understand why you want to measure something and what you will do with the results. The data itself is not the goal. Instead, it is about continuously tracking your journey, testing hypotheses, and providing feedback as you head towards your goal.It also nurtures self-management within teams as communication around metrics can promote openness, transparency, and creativity.
Three agile metrics to start with
Lead time and cycle time to improve service delivery
Lead time describes the time required to complete tasks from the time of commitment. Let’s assume that a coffee delivery service receives a new order. Three minutes pass before the order arrives and is processed at the coffee machine. It takes another seven minutes from the time the coffee is processed to the time it is delivered. The processing time at the coffee machine represents the cycle time.
Lead time and cycle time provide important details for meeting customer expectations and give indications of possible optimization approaches. For example, it can be determined whether an excessively long processing time can be remedied by optimizing order acceptance or the coffee making process. Lead time and cycle time also improve predictability because they trigger valuable conversations about planning and customer value delivery.
Recommended reading: Simon Sablowski and Lothar Fischmann describe how they helped a team improve their service delivery by factor 30 using Kanban
Features nobody uses to focus on customer value
Identifying features nobody uses can help to trigger conversations about customer outcome value. Who is the target user and what challenge should the feature solve from the user’s perspective? If the intended outcome is still relevant, you can dig deeper and figure out what needs to be improved to create value. This could also be a starting point for additional research or doing A/B tests.
To measure features nobody uses, you could use digital analytics tools that gather data like click rates or heat maps. In case you are not able to use analytics tools, you could conduct surveys, customer interviews or observe the customer using your product.
Net Promoter Score® as an indicator of customer satisfaction
The Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) is a metric that indicates customer satisfaction and loyalty. It is based on a customer survey which consists of only one question: How likely are you to recommend our product/service to a friend or colleague?
Customers can usually rate on a scale from zero to ten and optionally provide some written comments on why they have chosen a particular number. Customers who rate below 7 are considered detractors who are not satisfied with your product or service and might spread negative word of mouth. Passive customers rate with 7 or 8 and might be receptive to offers from competitors. Customers who rate 9 or 10 out of 10 are considered promoters who are loyal and committed to the product. They might spread positive word of mouth.
The NPS® focuses on customers’ satisfaction with existing products or services and focuses on an outcome. Detailed responses or comments can be used to identify concrete improvements. As the NPS® is a widely adopted metric, there are many options available to organize and run a survey. It is also possible to compare your product’s or service’s results with an industry average.
Common pitfalls with using metrics
In modern knowledge work, no two tasks are exactly alike, no two teams work together in exactly the same way, and no two project contexts are similar. Numbers might appear to be a solid, reliable standard of judgment and create a feeling of safety, when dealing with complexity. However, when you abstract complex situations into numbers for metrics, they inherit the same complexity.
Perhaps you have experienced that metrics are used because it’s simply expected from a team. Unfortunately, unfocused measurement and comparison undermine the foundations of agile approaches: They create a climate in which teams try to optimize for metrics rather than delivering the best product or service possible. This usually happens when an organization focuses on measuring output instead of outcome. Metrics that are supposed to promote orientation then cause undesirable behavior and thus poor results.
An example of this is the comparison of story points different teams have “delivered”. These are not comparable because each team uses their own sizing. The number of story points can easily be manipulated by splitting or estimating items differently and has nothing to do with the actual value delivered to the customer. Eric Ries, author of Lean Startup, calls these metrics vanity metrics because they look good and make you feel good but represent no real value.
It is not surprising that some people react negatively to metrics. People will be more committed to metrics if they meet the following criteria:
Metrics are only useful if they drive continuous improvement. Being able to select the right metrics is crucial.
Four steps to use metrics as a tool for team improvement
Step 1: Determine your goal
To ensure that you collect appropriate data, you should first know your goal of measuring something:
Often the goals relate to the following six areas:
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Step 2: Define metrics based on principles
Choosing the right metrics requires an understanding of the target and its influencing variables. All relevant people must be involved so that the connections are clear.
Some of the principles worth following in setting the agile metrics for your team include:
Additionally, ensure that metrics address not only negatively associated symptoms, but a positively associated change in root causes. This can be done with the help of leading and lagging indicators. A leading indicator is a predictive measurement that can be used to influence change, whereas a lagging indicator is an outcome measurement that can only record what has happened.
Here’s an example: Based on its ongoing measurements, an e-commerce team has noticed a decrease in recent sales numbers. The hypothesis is that there are defects in their checkout process that prevents some customers from placing an order. For this purpose, the bug rate is to be measured. The bug rate shows as an actual state that something should be improved.
Assuming that the team measures the occurring bugs in a certain period of time, it can also see a positive development. However, it cannot prevent the occurring bugs by this – This is why the bug rate is a lagging indicator. It would be better to additionally measure the test coverage, so that bugs do not occur in the first place, e.g. through the use of automated tests. These “target” states are referred to as leading indicators – They show the extent to which the target state has been achieved.
Step 3: Use metrics as a trigger for conversations
After defining what you want to measure, why, and how you measure, the real work begins: What does the data tell you? What can you learn from it? To use metrics as a tool for positive change, it is critical how you incorporate them into your communications and actions.
To make this kind of communication a habit, positive experiences are particularly good as a starting point for further improvement: What did we change to improve? What have we learned that we may apply in another context?
Step 4: Create a good habit
By being honest and transparent about what and why you measure, you can support your teams by thinking long-term about values, intentions, and purpose. The measurement then is followed by value-oriented discussions and focused on actual steps towards continuous improvement. Incorporating these conversations about metrics into your already existing meetings ensures continuous improvement. Usually, retrospectives are a great environment to do this.
Recommended online course: Facilitating Retrospectives
Conclusion
To make great use of metrics as a tool for team improvement, there is no “one size fits all” solution available to identify the most important metrics. Cultivating a good conversation about metrics, testing hypotheses and focusing on continuous improvement is a journey and you can start this with any simple measurement. It’s not about numbers, it’s all about impact.
How Agile Transformation Makes the Workplace Better
/by Lauren EdwardsRowan Bunning, in an interview with Yves Hanoulle, said, “…the agile movement in software is part of a larger movement towards more humane and dynamic workplaces in the 21st century.” Agile organizations allows for more flexibility, freedom, and employee satisfaction. In this blog, we’ll explore what an Agile work environment is, and how it contributes to this global trend of more “humane and dynamic workplaces.”
What is Agile?
There are many methodologies, frameworks, and tools that are used in an Agile work environment, such as Scrum and Kanban. These tools and methodologies all form part of Agile, but ultimately Agile is a mindset. What encapsulates the Agile mindset is the Agile Manifesto, a document that sets out the key principles and values behind agile. It aims to help development teams work more efficiently.
What are the four core principles of agile?
The four values stated in the Agile Manifesto include:
These values set the scene for more agile, humane, and dynamic work environments. Moreover, it is these values that are transforming the workplace.
How does Agile make the workplace better?
Agile helps teams take responsibility
One of the principles of the Agile Manifesto says, “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” Self-organizing teams choose how they will execute the work, so team members feel passionate and confident about their work. Simultaneously, teams have more responsibility. The ability to self-organize allows for shared responsibility and ownership across the team.
It helps teams learn and grow
Agile is iterative, and this approach extends to how teams operate. Within this mindset, teams have the opportunity to continuously evolve based on their decision-making capabilities. This gives people the license to think and feel the way they want, knowing that they have the opportunity to fail safely. In Agile environments, there is always room to inspect, adapt and grow.
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It improves communication and collaboration
The Agile Manifesto talks about individuals over interactions, and this places great importance on teamwork. Agile teams focus on frequent communication and understand that they can accomplish more when they rely on each other. The smaller, cross-functional, and multi-disciplinary nature of Agile teams ensures that everyone is engaged when working towards a goal. These tight-knit structures allow for more innovative and quicker solutions while making the team feel more connected.
It fosters freedom to experiment and be creative
Agile teams are focused, flexible, iterative, and support one another. This combination creates the ideal environment for individuals to be creative and explore their ideas. Every experience is an experiment towards learning which consequently allows people to grow. The freedom, ability to self-organize, and flexibility encourage innovation to happen in a faster way.
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The leadership style focuses on removing roadblocks
According to Wikipedia, Agile leaders help self-organized development teams by “boosting adaptiveness in dynamic and complex business environments”. Agile leaders help people and teams to meet performance expectations and customer demands. This involves enabling self-organization, explorative solutions to problem-solving, and giving decision making discretion. Ultimately, these leaders need to remove any roadblocks that may obstruct a team’s path to success. Middle managers are removed which gives the team more freedom to make their own decisions and to self-organize according to their capabilities. This decentralized power focuses on the team’s ability to make effective decisions quickly, and as a result, they feel more productive and empowered.
Photo by Ian DeLashmutt on Unsplash
It reduces stress
In Agile, items are prioritized according to a well-defined product backlog which gives your team a clear direction on what to work on next. In more traditional workplaces, people stick to a strict plan and change can be stressful. Yet in Agile environments, changes in plans can be accommodated and taken in your stride, without throwing the team off course. This builds resilience and these factors contribute to the team’s optimism, effectiveness, and perceived control.
It makes teams more adaptable
According to an article by Forbes, organizations that were able to adapt the quickest had self-organizing teams that were autonomous, transparent, cross-functional, and decisive. Agile teams can prepare for the future – no matter how uncertain it may be – by being robust and ready for change. This makes teams more able to move with the times, especially when faced with unpredictable factors such as a pandemic or the great resignation.
Photo by Pixabay from Pexels
It fosters transparency in the workplace
Transparency and openness are fundamental to Agile organizations. For teams to reach their goals, they must have a clear and shared understanding of the task at hand. Transparency can be fostered through tools, communication, channels and techniques so that every aspect of the work being done is available to the whole team at any given time.
It makes teams feel trusted
Agile work environments are built upon trust, and this can be revolutionary for workplaces, especially when working remotely. There is a deep-seated level of trust that is reinforced through self-organizing teams, non-intrusive leadership styles, and transparency. These practices leave teams feeling empowered and give them a greater sense of responsibility. There’s no feeling of being micromanaged and this is highly motivating for both teams and individuals. It also means that people take more responsibility for and pride in their work.
How to introduce Agile Transformation at your organization
Many companies have started to adopt a more Agile mindset and see the benefits extend beyond delivering faster and more innovative solutions. agile42 offers a complete suite of solutions, from online professional development short courses to live Scrum training. Our coaches can also work with you to co-create bespoke enterprise learning solutions, or you can get in touch to find out about our agile coaching services.
Webinar | Sprint Planning
/by Lauren EdwardsSprint Planning sets the tone for the entire Sprint. It is absolutely crucial to ensure that this is done properly, because any issues you run into at this stage will have a knock-on effect throughout the entire Sprint. Birge Kahraman and Paul Bultmann have helped many organizations and teams establish Scrum Events and run them with great success. During the webinar, they outline what an effective Sprint Planning Event should entail, and guide you through the practical steps involved in facilitating one. They also share what works well in Sprint Planning, as well as a few traps to avoid, before opening the floor to some listener questions.
Watch now | Sprint Planning Webinar
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Meet your webinar hosts
Birge Elif Kahraman started her career in 2009 and worked as a project manager, Scrum Master, and Agile Coach. Before joining agile42, she coached various teams and companies in Telecommunication, Finance, Ecommerce, and Service domains. Birge supports teams in analyzing their impediments and reflecting on the next steps, creating a trustful environment where they can communicate and collaborate. She has a data-driven and pragmatic approach, which helps her tailor her coaching unique to the company culture and the reality of the teams.
As an Agile coach, Paul Bultmann wants to make the world a better place to work. He believes collaboration should be easy, fun and structured to be successful. For the past 10 years he has worked as Leader, Agile Coach, Scrum Master, Trainer and Project Manger. His passions and skills include Organisational Change, Agile Transformation and Team building.
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