Are you ready to apply new technologies to all areas of your business? Digital Transformation (DX) can help you create a new business model able to efficiently exploit the latest digital technologies and radically change how you operate and deliver value to your customers.
And DX is also a radical cultural change for your business, requiring executives and staff to continually interrogate the status quo, to identify aspects of the existing business strategy that need to change — and even to risk failure in the process of achieving that change. The framework for this radical change must be supported and implemented through constant collaboration of the Board and CEO, business leaders, middle management, and DX implementation teams.
Sustainability and scalability may be included in your list of first concerns. Among the many digital transformation consulting firms, four frameworks (BCG, Capgemini-2018, EY, and The Digital Capability Model) accentuate sustainability, and four frameworks (DXC, McKinsey, MIT, PWC) stress scalability.
Digital transformation strategy
You may have heard DX described as digital transformation strategy, digital business transformation, digital industrial transformation framework, digital maturity model, customer experience transformation, or digital transformation strategy roadmap. These terms and others are largely interchangeable, and all are rooted in the Digital Transformation Framework, the roadmap to a successful digital transformation of your business.
The aim of DX is to create or hone a new business model by moving your company from analog to digital data collection, organization, and transaction processing. New and continually improving technologies in data science, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence enable a business to improve insights gleaned from data and lead to more sound decisions and forecasts, as well as a better real-time customer experience with effective digital marketing.
But know, too, that DX comes with a high degree of failure. Less than 30% of companies succeed when digital change meets workplace resistance. DX may have the executive team’s support, but the rest of the organization may require attentive coaching in order to embrace digital change. As part of evaluation and coaching, any inadequate or missing skills within your teams should be assessed and repaired.
Because digital change effects every aspect of a business the Board, CEO, and leadership team set the tone and provide tools for the digital journey to all levels of the organization. Know that everything will constantly and digitally change. This may sound as though the digital aspect is the most important transformation goal, but keep in mind that any organization’s digital transformation is really about transforming the capacities and perceptions of the people who make up your organization. Your employees will use the technology to accomplish your business goals.
Both adaptable and precise, a sound digital transformation framework is an essential strategic tool. Support that strategy and pay attention to the response of your teams.
Operating models
Digital initiatives usually focus on the ways a company delivers products and services to its customers, and the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed many organizations to accelerate their digital transformation plans. Digital innovation and business disruption have increased as the office space has expanded to include managers and employees at home. Making full use of digital technology, the adaptive strength of the DX model is ready for this newest iteration of business-as-usual, integrating social media, meeting platforms, and cloud computing tools.
Effective DX models include several must-haves:
Digital-centric leadership which sets out board, investor, and stakeholder expectations
Digital strategy that includes shared vision, adequate budget and funds, and a DX roadmap
Digital design and a business model
Customer-centric management, including engagement, interaction, and customer experience
Digital capabilities for People: enhance skills, talents, and team agility with rewards, coaches, and mentors
Digital capabilities for Business: enhance agility, analytics and insights as you achieve operational excellence
Digital optimization capacity: intelligent automation, core processes, and an operating model
Transformation management: agile change strategy, methodology, prioritization, assessment and tracking tools, OKR (objective and key results), and gaps management
Digital tech capabilities: Social media, mobile apps, and IoT (Internet of Things)
More digital tech capabilities: Big Data and analytics, artificial intelligence, robotics and RPA (robotic process automation), machine learning, blockchain, and 5G.
You’ll want a digitized business model and a workplace culture with the capacity to empower the talent within your business. Collaborative leadership will foster an innovative culture able to focus upon producing customer-centric products and enhance both value and customer experience. There are many DX models and frameworks available, but most are digital maturity models that assess an organization’s digital sophistication, right now. If you’re not sure you have any — digital sophistication, that is — your stakeholders and decision-making entities should identify goals for and demonstrate the value delivered by the company’s selected transformation projects. Pick the right first digital transformation project and it will be the quick-win catalyst for the next.
With a strategy for the digital transformation journey and a clearly understood transformation process your business can make changes efficiently, maintain or improve profitability, and deliver increased value. With a targeted plan for your digital transformation efforts the short-term initiatives will help fund subsequent long-term initiatives. From the start, digital technology will be able to monitor key performance indicators on customer insights into new products and business process effectiveness. These improved analytic tools will provide better insight into your business and improve decision-making and direct workflows. To increase customer interaction and collaboration, you’ll have at hand information and analytics to reshape customer value propositions and, using digital technologies, transform operating models, the user experience, and customer expectations.
Whether guiding stakeholders, mentoring or training, from Kanban to Scrum and more, the Role of an Agile Coach lies in helping teams or individuals with their outcomes and therefore needs to be mastered and inculcated as a working habit beyond just basic project management. Being a function of human psychology, the Agile mindset is best imbibed when they are discovered, Agile processes tried and tested rather than just understood, learned and conceptualised (The latter being what most of us do with new-age learning; relegating them as a matter of academic interest with no outcome orientation). This is why the fundamental objective of agile practices is to ‘first do and then know’ then ‘only know and do nothing’. This vital and subtle distinction can be only be realised when a potential Agile proponent is open to shed what he ‘knows’ to ‘what he still doesn’t know’. To transit from the zone of ‘what you know you know’ to ‘what you know you don’t know’. Initiating and facilitating this exploratory journey is the main agenda for the Agile Coach.
WHAT THE AGILE COACH ACHIEVES FOR YOU
Post Course Orientation
Once the agile training course is completed and you find yourself at work once again? What happens? Does reality smack in like a rambling fire truck? A course or programme can only create awareness and plant an inquiry into its participants across various team levels, the onus of translating the learning into practical reality lies outside its scope. This is natural because for most courses the effects last a maximum of 48 hours post conduct, tops!!
So what can an agile coach do? Indeed, without a proper structure to sustain the methodology, ‘intellectual vaporisation’ sets in and things seem to settle back into status quo mode with the agile methods and agile ways long forgotten. If this is how it is, how do you address the issue? Simple, either install a structure that ensures the Agile manifesto is sustained and developed, or have a post-course orientation where the new learning is fixed into context and aligned with the realities at work. Do you think you can get about doing this on your own? Who do you think best fits into this level of problem solving know how and helping you achieve this? Not rocket science to guess the answer, is it?
Setting the Act
“Problems cannot be solved with the same mindset that created them.” Albert Einstein’s now famous quote amply highlights why a Coach has a significant role to play in an Agile transformation. If just ‘knowing’ was the key to success, then 100% of the people who read a self-help book would find the solace they seek from it. A coach performs the vital function of setting the ‘action’ plan for organizational change. Getting things in motion to create a roadmap that can cater to unforeseen possibilities and assisting you in dealing with the impact of the outcomes is what he is meant for. If there is no action, there exists no movement and no movement results in entropy.
Professional Coaching leads to an agent of Change
The coach is an agent who enables the planned change to take place and facilitates the resultant transformation. Without him, since there exists no feedback channel or a facility to reflect upon, change gets transitional and not transformative, neither visible nor perceptible and irrelevant in time, distance and space.
WHAT KIND OF AN AGILE COACH WILL DO?
Best Fit for a scaled agile framework
Roles and Task sets the modalities for conduct and the competencies of each individual in an organisation to collaborate. Hence, the Coach profile also needs to be calibrated to fulfil the need. There is no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to types of agile coaches in the coaching world. The requirements for coaching and facilitation could vary from fulfilling a purely technical need to that which is process and management dependent. Senior levels of the hierarchy would seek executive solutions, while front-line managers would seek more knowledge-centric advice. Agile Coaches, therefore need to be selected based on their core competencies and hands-on experience.
Directive and Indirective Approach to an Agile Project
As an expert authority or as a consultant, the Coach is providing direct advice and recommendations whether to a development team or an internal group; he is visible and defined by his presence. A directive style is preferred where the visibility of a Coach has a desired psychological manifestation on the coachees. However, there also exists a non-directive mode wherein the Coach may – or may not – be an expert in the field but assumes the coachee is the expert and therein helps facilitate the learning. He has a more passive role to play and often may not be visible. This arrangement may be required when the coachee does not want it to be known that he or she is being coached.
Internal and External
Largely dependent on the human resource policy governing the training, internal coaches have the inherent advantage of knowing the team and domain. External coaches on the other hand benefit from eliciting original ideas and new perspectives. Since external coaches have limited influence over the appraisal chain and are themselves unaffected by authority, they have access to challenging assumptions more easily and suggest unbiased and alternative approaches with a greater degree of objectivity.
Is a Scrum Master a Coach?
A prevailing perception rests on the belief that Scrum Masters are veiled Project Managers with the sole purpose of facilitating the process flow mechanism. In such cases, the Scrum Master remains within the domain of specialisation and expertise. His coaching abilities are largely personalised and limited to adhering to processes and rules. As per the Scrum Alliance methodology, the influence of a Scrum Master is subject to the team he is assigned with, thereby limiting his capacity to influence other teams or members within his environment. Due to the limitations imposed by the role and task, Scrum Masters unless specifically assigned, have a limited coaching role to exhibit. However, with an Agile education and an intimate involvement with each team through the Agile ceremonies – planning, daily meetings, retrospectives, etc, the Scrum Master can reduce his active participation and provide avenues for team members to take over.
What an Agile Coach can bring to your team: Conclusion
A coach needs to be coachable first and then go about coaching others. His domain lies in that realm of knowledge and competence building where the coachee is completely unaware and ignorant of. Creating a space and an understanding for the coachee to fully comprehend the issues being addressed and enabling him with the skill sets to deal with them effectively is the hallmark of coaching. Agile coaching sets the stage for mind change and personality transformation. It is about resetting neurological pathways to achieve goals that otherwise have not been thought of. Agile is to remain in an eternal loop of unlearning and relearning so that one is relevant and alive to the realities of the world. Hence, an Agile Coach is constantly in a state of alertness, fully in aware and is persistent with designing outcomes and achieving them.
Agile facilitation is the art of managing groups and providing the fundamentals so they can work collaboratively and identify a path forward that most stakeholders can buy into. It also builds the foundation for team self organization.
How do you facilitate in agile?
As a facilitator in agile, you need to use techniques and team coaching to ensure the goals of a meeting are realised. Ideally, all stakeholders will feel they have been listened to and that they can buy into the conclusions of the meeting.
What is the role of a team facilitator?
The role of an agile team facilitator is to promote a facilitation mindset as well as guide and manage the agile team to be successful by using agile principles. This includes identifying and helping remove blockers to make sure a team can meet their objective. This is different from a scrum master role as the agile facilitator is framework agnostic.
What are the benefits of agile facilitation?
The benefits of agile facilitation are that meetings are properly managed and make all stakeholders feel heard, reduce confrontation and enable a team to come up with objectives everyone can agree on. This applies if the meeting is in-person or online.
5 Agile Facilitation Techniques: You Need to Make Your Meetings Go with a Bang
In the sphere of agile transformation and development, agile facilitation is a discipline in its category and the role of an agile team facilitator is making sure the conditions exist for a meeting’s objectives to be realised. This goes far beyond standard agile practices and it can be a tricky task to play little part in the meeting, but still guide it in the right direction.
If you’ve either been designated as the agile team facilitator or chosen the role, you might have had trouble fulfilling it, so with this in mind, here we look at some effective agile coaching and agile meeting techniques so that your meetings achieve everything they set out to do and reach the desired outcome for all.
TECHNIQUE #1 – DOT VOTING
Whether the team members are business analysts, marketing executives or software development experts, the first technique for designing meetings with your team is one that offers a voice to everyone in the room. A consensus is formed by going to each person individually and getting their opinion. After you’ve gone around the room, the ideas are ranked by popularity and either acted upon or discarded. This allows people to go further than their core competencies and explore other potential ideas.
TECHNIQUE #2 – BRAINSTORMING
Whilst brainstorming is not a new concept, by any means, it’s still an effective way to kick-start your meeting. Also known as ‘affinity mapping’, it’s a great way to get ideas out there that otherwise might not see the light of day. From agile coaches to agile project managers, there are ways to map out ideas that balance the team overall.
TECHNIQUE #3 – SPIDER WEBBING
Another fun way to innovate is a game-based technique known as spider-webbing, which is essentially a type of context diagramming with your own set of rules woven into proceedings. It’s a fun way to gain insight into the flows between departments, systems and having team leaders mentoring people within a team and it’s something that only involves using pictures i.e. no words. It’s also something that will break the ice and get the creative juices flowing. It makes for an interesting learning experience.
TECHNIQUE #4 – PRE-MORTEM
A fantastic way to address risk management is pre-mortem, which relates to death-planning and it involves considering things like your bucket list, as well as things you can do to remain safe and healthy. It might sound morbid, but it helps get the discussions started and it can yield really meaningful results as well as set up learning objectives overall for the team, getting them thinking about retrospectives rather than just pre-requisites for instance.
TECHNIQUE #5 – BUY A FEATURE
If you’ve ever felt frustrated by the inability of stakeholders to make decisions relating to prioritisation, Buy a Feature is a great technique for getting people talking about it. It will likely not result in agreement all around the table, but during the process, you will typically gain useful insight into what’s important, review core facilitation tools and needs, while looking at several potential iterations and the areas in which negotiation might be possible.
IN SUMMARY: What is good facilitation for an agile mindset?
The role of an agile team facilitator is diverse and these are just some of the innumerable techniques that you can use to be an effective agile facilitator and you can believe us when we say that there are many more. You can develop your style, of course, but if you get stuck and you don’t feel like the meetings that you’re facilitating aren’t meeting their objectives, injecting a little structured fun into proceedings can help all teams focus, whether project managers or product owners or any representatives across the entire organization.
People think better and are better at decision making when they’re stimulated and that’s exactly what these kinds of techniques are designed to achieve. Get creative in your meetings and you might be surprised about what you can achieve with your team members.
Learn more on how to develop your facilitation skills and how to adopt a facilitation mindset. Contact Leadership Tribe today.
Agile is undoubtedly the need of the hour when conventional methods of project development are not good enough. In the IT industry, the demand for agile professionals has expanded drastically in many management areas. The extreme demand for agile project management triggers the agile certifications need globally. Also, the fancy jargons like lean-agile, PMI-ACP make those overwhelmed interested in adopting agile principles and agile practices from the start.
In other words, agile certification is on every project manager’s wish list. The benefits of holding this certificate are countless. Whether you want to be a certified scrum master or interested in flexible project management methodologies, adopting the agile approach makes you a favourite choice for employers and potential clients. If you want to survive in today’s market, understanding how to implement the agile methods and understanding how it works helps you respond to the ever-changing corporate environment.
We have gathered all the information regarding prerequisites required for becoming agile certified, but before that, let’s understand what precisely agile certification is.
What is Agile Certification?
Those days are gone when Agile was just a part of employee training. Now, if you want to be a project management professional, you surely need certification in the domain of agile. Agile is now matured just like other domains, including service management and project management. Organizations, on the other hand, search for agile certification in the resume of candidates.
Many aspirants and agile professionals take this certification to get the various benefits when they switch their careers or job. Agile training offers the following benefits:
Better exposure
Lucrative salary
You are up to date with the current market trend
Better credibility
You’ll become an agile certified practitioner
Agile Certification Benefits
You’ve seen somebody becoming an agile coach, and now he/she is earning well. Is this what you are looking for from the agile certification course? If yes, you might not be thinking big. Apart from filling your pockets, this training course can help you in any area of your life with tons of benefits. Here’s how!
You are Increasing the Career Options
This training course is leading you towards continuous improvement, and you are widening your career options. We’ve discussed above; agile project professionals are in demand due to agile’s popularity. You can create new opportunities through this competitive international certification training along with the benefits for your management career.
Small Projects
Agile manifesto and agile framework both work on the intelligent approach. That’s why when you start a career in agile, you get the streamlined approach to tenable project management. What’s better than you are getting the real-world experience? You are focused on keeping things simple; you collaborate with the team members, regulate value delivery, and a high level of stakeholder engagement.
Grow your Capabilities
An agile project manager has the small project lifecycles with ease and can quickly respond to the shifting priorities. The reason is that agile offers you the tools that let you do more innovative tasks. Even project managers working for years shift from traditional approaches to agile project management to expand their qualities.
Eligibility Criteria
The eligibility criteria for the agile certification:
You must have a secondary degree.
Eight months in agile project management in the last three years before the application.
Training in agile practices for the period of 21 contact hours.
General project experience of 12 months within the last five years. (Note: Present PgMP or PMP also satisfies the requirement but not necessary for the PMI-ACP).
Steps of Agile Certification
The agile certification process varies between certifications and training providers. Here we are listing the most popular method adopted by various project management institutes.
The first step is to equip you with a strong understanding of the agile methodology and prepare to sit in the exam. Because of virtual classes nowadays, the agile certified course is available in the virtual courses or even in a self-led E-learning course.
Just like other project management certifications, the study period differs from person to person. Still, with the precise focus, you can be a part of the scrum alliance by sitting in the SCRUM study Agile Master Certified (SAMCTM) exam in a shorter time.
This certification exam is 120 minutes extensive, and on passing the exam, you will achieve the international Agile master Certified Qualification.
Top 4 Agile Certifications
PMI-ACP (Agile Certified Professional)
The PMI-ACP training course is the finest project management certification if you want to become an agile certified Practitioner. The Project Management Institute provides this training course. This PMI-ACP certification training is ideal for those project teams and professionals who want to or are using the agile methodologies. This certification authenticates and validates the people who have real-world experience executing agile projects.
The scrum alliance officially offers this agile scrum professional-level certification. This certificate demonstrates and recognizes the candidate’s ability in the advanced roles, antiques, advanced practices, and the Scrum framework procedures.
If you are working in a scrum and want to be called a certified scrum trainer, You can take this official course by Scrum.org. This training validates the candidates’ knowledge in the scrum and applies the Scrum framework and practices in real-world situations. This course is valuable for all scrum masters, scrum product owners, and scrum developers. You need to pass the exam of this training, and training course completion is upon you.
4. SAFe Scaled Agilists
Scaled Agilist or SAFe Agilists is a training course of official two days offered by the different training providers. The participants working in software development, business analysis, scrum, testing, and project management with five years of experience are the target audience of this course. The candidates will learn principles of lean-agile leadership from this course and learn how to launch SAFe agile in an organization.
Conclusion
As Rowan Bunning once said:
“The Agile movement in software is part of a larger movement towards more humane and dynamic workplaces in the 21st century”.
Over time, agile practices are getting encouragement from the IT sector and other sectors, and now recruiters are looking for agile principles in management positions. The decision is entirely up to you whether you want to upgrade yourself or stay there where you are sitting for the past two years. The good thing about agile certification is it’s offered officially by the Project Management Institute, inc globally, and you can take it anywhere.
We often see the terms of Project Manager and Scrum Master used interchangeably in agile practices. Their roles tend to get blurred in the current work environment. But what are the main differences between a scrum master and project management professional? Should you work towards scrum master certification (PSM) or become a certified associate in project management (CAPM)? Here we look into the particular competencies in each job description and their project responsibilities.
A Project Manager is responsible for risk management. The ultimate success or failure of a project depends largely on the project manager’s competency and tasks such as sprint planning and retrospectives.
The Scrum Master is the guiding light of the project team, functioning as coach and facilitator assisting project progress based on the customer’s requirements. Both roles sometimes overlap in the agile process as both contribute to the planning, execution, and closing of projects.
In an IT stakeholder context, agile enjoys established fame where the requirements are not clear and keep changing during the product development cycle. This is where an incremental and iterative approach is more suitable, and the Scrum Master follows the adaptive model and endorses the Scrum process, applying Scrum principles. In an Agile environment, the Project Manager works indirectly with the team, having the Scrum Master manage good communication with the team and teamwork overall. A project management professional works with the traditional waterfall methodology as well as the iterative development of agile methodologies.
What are the benefits of a Scrum Master vs Project Manager?
Certified Scrum Masters are said to be “the magic glue” keeping the team together. They’re always looking out for ways to increase team efficiency in the agile framework from various team members and project/product owners. Project managers, on the other hand, are typically strong leaders invaluable to businesses implementing complex processes such as agile software development.
The emphasis of Scrum Master is on individuals and interactions between people such as cross-functional project teams, over workflow processes and tools. The Scrum Master’s main focus is on the scrum team members, whilst the traditional project manager’s focus tends to lean towards the project scope, its overall functionality within the company, and its outcome.
The Project Manager’s role focuses on ensuring that the project is successful, whereas the Scrum Master’s role focuses more on promoting team dynamics, collaboration, and achievement. Both focus on continuous improvement, but the Scrum Master is more flexible to changing requirements due to their more agile methods employing scrum events.
Concerning Agile project management methodology, the responsibility of the Scrum Master is slimmer than the project manager who has a higher authority to prioritize tasks such as the final decision-making.
The Project Manager keeps the customer’s interests and needs in mind. The Scrum Master focuses on the development team’s process during each time frame, liaising between the Project Manager and the developer team with daily scrum meetings for instance.
A Scrum Master helps the project team to build trust, task ownership, and job accountability with greater creativity and innovation to attain the business value. Whereas a Project Manager’s responsibility is around managing project plans with scope, budget, risks, timelines, and job delegation.
A Scrum Master is in charge of the self-organizing teams, small with high-quality and user-focused work outcomes. On the other hand, a Project Manager’s role involves upholding overall responsibility for the performance of all development project teams.
The Scrum Master is a servant leader of the Scrum Team (a term coined in the pre-2020 Scrum Guide), moderating and facilitating interactions as a team coach. Whereas the Project Manager handles the entire framework for the project’s activities (not just the scrum framework), from identifying resources, setting project milestones and deliverables, to final delivery.
What are the responsibilities of Scrum Masters and Project Managers?
An interesting point to note is a Scrum Master is not required to don the mantle of a Project Manager. Scrum methodology notes that their skillset is first and foremost as facilitator, coach, or referee who runs the process and administers the delivery, but not necessarily in charge of the project. A Scrum Master can become a Project Manager, for example, as a Technical Project Manager or a Product Manager/ Program Manager. The professional Scrum Master’s job description would be to efficiently manage the development sprints from planning to execution and be accountable for on-time, on-budget, high-quality software project deliveries.
A Project Manager also has scope to become a Scrum Master, but first and foremost needs to change the mindset of having command and control. They need to understand what a servant leader is and how to empower a self-organizing team. The transition gets easier for the Project Managers who enjoy solving challenging problems, building team rapport and consensus, and investing in understanding both the small and big pictures to ensure smooth project progress.
What is Kanban vs Scrum?
While we won’t focus too much on Kanban in this post, comparing Scrum and Kanban is often asked. Both strategies can work for agile development or project management iterations. Scrum projects are more focused on short sprints and/or reducing sprint product backlogs in the development lifecycle, while Kanban is more long-term based, with fluidity across various projects. Both can help with continuous improvement for the company overall and use flexible approaches such as the Kanban board vs Scrum Board – which we’ll save for another post.
Conclusion: Agile vs Scrum
The role of a Scrum Master and a Project Manager both require particular skill sets and the right mentality to make things happen effectively across agile teams. The responsibilities, deliverables, and duties of both may vary from one organization to another. It is important to point out that both roles are vital to guide the development team and to warrant project success.
Transitioning from Scrum Master to Project Manager and vice versa is possible, but can’t be achieved overnight. It involves study and tutorials to gain scrum master certification (CSM) or to become a certified associate in project management.
It can be challenging, but it is a rewarding journey. Both roles require an in-depth understanding of different aspects of the business with short and long-term goals, and one needs to have laser-focus and determination to deliver the required objectives.
