Pradeep is an experienced manager in the financial sector. He’s considered an expert in onboarding team members and being a buddy for several team members.
His organization has set itself on a business agility transformation path. Pradeep wanted to apply for the agile coach role. He has been working as a team member in scrum model for the past 5 years. He’s also done a few certifications in agile. His heightened when he started interacting with agile coaches within his teams
What are the few first steps that Pradeep can take to enable himself to be successful in the agile coach role?
Possible Solution
First step Pradeep needs to answer is from readiness perspective – Is he ready to move away from the playing field and moving to the enabling role. Coach is a role who is always behind the scenes and make the transformation happen. It’s not an easy transition to make. As moving away from limelight isn’t easy for everyone. Some of the tools that can be used to do this self-discovery could be to creating awareness by listing the last 5 accomplishments. In each of the accomplishment, analyse the type of role that one has played. Is it one of player in the field or coach as an enabler?
Second step, Pradeep can do is understand the role of a coach. There are several books that are great to start – Lyssa Adkins – Coaching Agile Teams; John Whitmore – Growing high potential teams; Kent Beck – Extreme Programming Explained; And the organization’s transformation blueprint.
Third and possibly the most important step is to initiate conversations with teams as a group and team members separately using GROW model. During the initial days, it would be useful to document every observation without any conclusion, analyse the observation with empirical data prior to sharing recommendation as well as having coaching conversations.
With these three steps, Pradeep can step into a great coaching experience.
2 Responses
Velocity of each individual iteration will be a different figure. There are many ways velocity gets impacted. Apart from planned absence (planned leave, training etc.) and holidays, there could be unplanned absences caused by illness, personal emergency etc. which impact velocity. User stories that do not get completed in an iteration get moved to next iteration. This brings down the velocity of the iteration where the story was started and bumps up the velocity of the iteration where it got completed. This being the situation, good practice is to take an average of last five or six iterations as the velocity of the team. Team stability is another factor that impacts velocity. Teams that have higher churn will see higher volatility in velocity. Other factors such as change in technology, adoption of new tools, increase in automation, will also impact velocity either positively or negatively! However, if team is stable and has reached “performing stage” steady rise in average velocity will be seen over a period of time till any of the factors mentioned above comes into play and impacts it.
Thanks Milind, fully agree with your comment.
Finally, irrespective of the increasing trend in velocity, there is improvement for sure. This cannot be missed, if observed. One of the intent of my blog is to encourage this observation, by taking a mildly provocative stand.