Since the pandemic, the digital transformation has proceeded more quickly than ever. The number of people claiming to be agile coaches has exploded, but there isn't always concrete proof that they possess the knowledge and experience required for the position or are "excellent" at it. Is it even possible to measure? Does measuring make sense? What is to be gauged? What exactly does an agile coach do?
Question 1: What is An Agile Coach?
According to the 2021 State of Agile Coaching Report, published in Feb last year by Business Agility Institute:
"An agile coach helps organizations, teams, and individuals adopt agile practices and methods while embedding agile values and mindsets. The goal of an agile coach is to foster more effective, transparent, and cohesive teams, and to enable better outcomes, solutions, and products/services for customers. Agile coaches are no longer just responsible for helping technology teams, they also help the company embrace agile as a culture shift. An agile coach doesn’t advocate for one particular method over others, but instead empowers people to work smarter, faster, and with less risk."
Question 2: What Are Common Challenges and How To Improve Agile Coach Competences?
According to the previous report, here're few common challenges for agile coaches:
- leadership tended to be a barrier to agility: "Agile is for my staff but not for me"
How to resolve lack of buy-in and support, resistance to change, dealing with a mindset that was not conducive to agility, being rooted in older management styles, lack of understanding, and a lack of alignment between agile teams and leadership, this is a fact that agile coach must be upskilled in order to better understand the problem that leaders would like to solve and involve them in the continuous improvement process.
- Resistance to change from legacy structures, culture, and mindsets
These legacy aspects were not seen as conducive to overall agility, and were also often coupled with resistance to change from those who adhered to them — especially when they were in key positions where lack of incentives to break silos
- Lack of understanding about agile
If you gather 10 people in a room and ask them what agile means, perhaps there're 20+ answers, what is agile, how it’s implemented, and their roles as agile coaches. Much of this is misunderstood, partially due to lack of experience but also depending on the quality how agile coaches are able to convey the message that stakeholders understand
The primary purpose of the Agile Competence Framework is to help Agile Coaches develop themselves. Change is hard, scaling agile is even more challenging. Agile coaches must be aware of those common challenges, instead of complaining or becoming depressed, rather focus on how to shapen the saw and improve competences while implementing agile and develop skills holistically to help leaders and managers become successful by actively engaging with them, conduct experiments and generate quick wins, adopt change management approach, practice, practice, practice.
Question 3: Is it Even Possible to Measure Agile Coach Performance? Why Does it Matter?
Yes, and it matters, a lot
First reason is obvious: in business, performance matters, every form of investment, regardless if it is time, people, technology or capital, more value needs to be generated to serve the purpose / mission of this organization better, to stay competitive, agile coach is no exception. In other words:
"Consistently produces more that exceed the sum of its parts"
Especially considering nowadays, employees are the most valuable asset of innovation, and good talents are in high demand, however the measurement is NOT the coaching metrics itself, such as how many hours, people or knowledge they have, but rather indirectly through performance of those they coached.
Question 4: How To Measure Agile Coach Performance?
- crystal clear alignment on objectives
Let's be honest, as agile coach tends to be more-or-less love the others to follow the ideas of our own, well, who doesn't? But coaches must be aware:
it's never about agile coach, outcome matters
Personality is a great strength, if you think about how Jürgen Klopp motivates his team, the passion about enjoying football and work as a team, but personality can also be a liability, such as bias on not following agile values & principles, philosophical discussion agile frameworks, why I am right, instead, agile coach must add value and be result driven, as servant leader in the context of individual, teams or organization that works for them, for example:
- Predictability - with the organizational empowerment how to create trustworthiness?
- Lead Time - are we delivering value faster than before without sacrificing the motivation and engagement of our employees?
- Built-In Quality - are we improving quality of delivery?
- Happiness - are employees excited coming to work everyday, become more creative and joyful at what they do, proud of what they co-create? Are team become more resilient and more adoptive to change?
- separate "results" from "behavior change that drives results"
Despite business always seek financial benefit, but profit is a result created by how much organizations are serving their mission / purpose, how fast can they improving product and services.
For example, actionable, short-term goals:
- Frequency of Sustainable Inspect and Adopt: how often does feedback loops happen and how fast can teams implement the customer feedbacks into next iteration, once every quarter? Or 3 times per day?
- Psychological Safety: how often are teams complaining about "the others"? Our path should always been towards the right behavior which is much tougher and time consuming
- Decision Latency: how long does it take to make a decision? are we creating more ownership to drive efficient decision making?
- Language change: are we using more positive words naturally rather than toxic, complaint when approach a problem to solve?
- Inclusiveness: is everyone aligned on what we want to achieve?
- WIP Limit: are agile coaches support teams to setup WIP limit to stop starting and start finishing?
- Effectiveness of concept: are agile coaches pragmatic and use empirical data to back up concept and improving overtime?
- Regular Assessment on Employee and leader satisfaction: are they happy with what was achieved with agile coaches and move closer to achieve a common goal?
Question 5: How to Self-Reflect on Quality of Agile Coaching?
Jurgen Appelo is one of the world leading experts on scaling agile, he has created a simple but powerful way to "track value" rather than "track time"
He uses a scale of discreet numbers from -3 to +3, which means we have seven options to choose from. Seven numbers would be large enough to use as the basis for statistics and analysis. (We wouldn’t be able to calculate much if we only had two states: valuable and worthless.) Seven is also a small enough number to be useful to people. (It’s just three positive numbers and three negative numbers, plus a neutral one in the middle.)
- +3 = super-important I did this
- +2 = quite good I did this
- +1 = somewhat valuable
- 0 = neither valuable nor worthless
- -1 = somewhat worthless
- -2 = not a good use of time
- -3 = total waste of time
To summarize, what does good agile coach look like?
In simple terms, hold accountability to enable leaders, teams, organization or individuals getting job done, faster, better, easier, sometimes so good that coaches themselves become invisible or unnoticed. One key factor to successful outcomes in coaching is the quality of the relationship between coaches and object they provide coach services to.
Measuring performance of agile coach is not only mission critical in transformation, but also for the long term success of an organization, the cultural change, behavior shift, driving creativity. Are agile coaches make ourselves redundant in the area where you are asked to transform as fast as possible? If so, an interesting side effect emerges - suddenly agile coaches become seeds of spreading agile and expand practice in the entire organization by upskilling people, and building community of practices, during this process, agile coaches themselves become better as lifelong learner, reach a very high level of self-mastery to achieve a better version of self by continuously reinventing and drive value creation.
"Agile coaches are not the source of agility; they are an amplifier of the leaders and employees who build their own agility. Agile coaches are not the heroes of the story, the leaders and teams they coach are the heroes."
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