Train your teams on agile methodology with insight and tips from Leadership Tribe where we specialize in online courses that can guide your team through the process. From Kanban training to Scrum Training, Agile software development and more, make your teams agile with the latest advice, news and blogs here.
When an organisation adopts agile practices, many things change: Efficiency improves as redundant and unnecessary processes are eliminated, workflows change, and there may be rethinking about selected projects. The agile coach raises awareness and guides product owners and individuals through the process. The coach mentors each agile team or team collaboration as they implement agile methodologies within the agile framework.
The agile process holds in balance two things: dynamic, often out-of-the-box thinking and adherence to a clear set of overarching organising principles. This balance is unlikely to occur spontaneously, no matter a team‘s intention, which is when the agile coach is asked to step in.
The agile coach has the training and experience to ensure a productive balance between the work of the agile teams and the interests of the company. The agile coach knows how best to focus the work on both sides of this relationship. The goal is always to facilitate and produce fast and successful improvement.
An agile team may include a facilitator, scrum master, kanban coach, or Certified Enterprise (agile) Coach (CEC), and all draw upon aspects of agile coaching. But there are differences. While scrum masters and other agile team facilitators focus on a single team or a small group of teams, the agile coach has a much larger mandate:
The agile coach works on and with multiple levels of an organisation, not just with the agile team. Because the purpose of agile is to improve and strengthen a whole enterprise, the agile coach sets the vision and goals; implements the agile mindset and agile principles in re-designing the organisation; forms and informs agile teams; manages communications; builds and supports the distinctive iterative culture; and facilitates meetings and events.
How can I become an agile coach?
Agile coaching certification
First-level certification
First-level certification for the agile coach requires a moderate level of experience. The Scrum Alliance CSP®, ICAgile ICP-ACC, International CoachFederation PCC and ScaledAgile SP certifications will confirm your measurable professional coaching skills.
An agile coach needs the skill, experience, curiosity, and passion to coordinate the roles, responsibilities, and activities of an agile software development team. Solid coaching experience begins at the entry-level, with certified training courses, experience at every team level in order to gain competencies, mastery of scrum and stand-ups, and facility with the fundamentals of agile processes and agile ways.
Become an agile team facilitator and participate in stand-ups. You’ll interact with stakeholders on behalf of the team when there are impediments, you’ll practice relationship skills, and you’ll be building the agile coaching experience you need.
Another good option on the agile coaching career path is to join an agile team as a software engineer. You can become a scrum master, then an agile team coach. A software engineer already has the know how to understand technical development team issues.
Master certification
Master certifications require demonstration of high-level competence and significant professional coaching experience. The Scrum Alliance CTCSM or CECSM, ICAgile ICE-AC, International Coach Federation MCC, and the ScaledAgile SPCT certification will confirm your skills and expertise.
Credentialed Agile coaches have years of experience with different Agile methodologies, such as Scrum, Kanban, and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). They also have knowledge of and experience with various enterprise agile frameworks, including Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Large-scale Scrum (LeSS), and Disciplined Agile Delivery (DaD). A CEC typically coaches at the executive leadership level of an organisation and can facilitate a full agile transformation.
Agile project management with an agile coach
When a company decides to rethink their management style through the lens of the agile mindset, their first step is to engage an agile coach. An agile transformation and agile delivery involves all stakeholders and every aspect of product management throughout an organisation.
Keep in mind that, to fulfil the agile coach role, you have to define the parameters of your own agile coach job. In contrast to the certified scrum master, whose function is clearly defined, the agile coach’s role straddles teams and departments. As has been pointed out elsewhere, if the company knew what to do next, it wouldn’t need an agile coach.
The agile methods skillset of every agile coach includes tactics to help teams and management remove biases, to implement agile processes with an eye to diversity, and to evaluate metrics from a place of invitation, instead of a place of confrontation.
Your agile coaching career begins now
We can’t say this enough: Look for every opportunity to gain experience. Take on roles as scrum master, agile facilitator, and every aspect of project management open to you.
Wherever you start, be sure to connect generously within the extended organisational environment. Find a mentor and learn everything you can from every agile coach. Practice your own coaching skills with anyone who will tolerate you: You’ll learn how to work with anyone and everyone. Read about agile, take the training courses, and learn everything you can about product management and organisational design.
When you know you’re ready, apply for a role as an agile coach — and always stay curious and keep learning. Learn more about agile coaching and planning with our Agile Coaching courses from Leadership Tribe today.
To understand the idea of the scrum team, you must first understand Agile. Agile is a philosophy for software development; agile because the system is designed to iterate quickly and iterate often, in order to respond to stakeholder needs.
Scrum is an Agile framework, a software development approach based on Agile principles and philosophy. The Agile manifesto defines the business value of these methodologies and principles and, of its 12 points, 4 are key to understanding the scrum team:
Privilege “individuals and interactions over processes and tools.” Don’t linger long between ideation and product launch. If process is allowed to direct product development, a development team will always be slow to respond to changes and realtime customer needs.
Early and continuous delivery of working software is a primary measure of progress. To better inform a software developer building a new function, streamline documentation by replacing codified or perhaps untimely data with user stories.
Stakeholder collaboration over contract negotiation: The customer who collaborates throughout the development process, face-to-face, makes it easier for the development team to meet the client’s business needs.
Simplicity and the Definition of Done: Develop the software just enough to get the job done as needed right now. Frequent iterations make room for additional changes and improvements
The Agile coach
The Agile coach trains a corporate Agile team to use Agile methodology. The coach guides and encourages these new teams through the implementation process. Our team at Leadership Tribe are experts in Agile and Scrum training, and can provide online courses for your business or for that matter anyone looking to learn more about Agile & Scrum.
The Scrum
Scrum is a framework that helps teams work together, not unlike a rugby scrum. Often marked as an Agile Scrum project framework, the scrum encompasses a defined set of meetings, tools, professional roles, and professional values. Scrum values and collaborative scrum team roles encourage members to learn through experience, self-organize while working on a problem, and collectively reflect on their wins and losses in order to improve performance and move forward.
An Agile project management framework, scrum is used by coached teams to quickly respond and adapt to any change or impediment to project needs. Face-to-face meetings, an essential part of all scrum team communications, allow team members to actively engage in a professional creative process that doesn’t rely upon stupefying quantities of e-mail and little human contact.
The scrum team develops each feature separately and, as soon as that feature is ready, presents it to the customer. The team then applies feedback from the customer to that product and moves on to other product features. Breaking down a project into small development cycles lets the entire team benefit from this continuous user feedback. Note that the customer is actively involved in this development process, often attending daily scrum meetings, and the final software product is of higher quality because it’s developed with their needs always in mind.
Scrum team
The scrum team includes three entities: development team, scrum master, and product owner. Scrum teams are usually smaller and more experienced than designated Agile teams and they tend to be more self-sufficient. The scrum master acts as coach rather than project manager.
The scrum itself consists of fewer than 9 people. For a large project, the ideal whole team size is 7: the product owner, the scrum master, and 5 developers. The smallest scrum projects usually include 4 team members: the product owner, the scrum master, and 2 developers. Outside professionals are often consulted, but there are no sub-teams.
The scrum framework is based on continuous learning and adjustment to new or changing factors. The scaffolding of the scrum framework includes all the sequential events and meetings that scrum team members regularly perform, and the face-to-face meetings that include the team and stakeholders. Note that sequential events include sprint planning and sprint review meetings, daily scrum meetings, and sprint retrospectives, or reviews.
Scrum Development team
Developers on the scrum team create the plan for every sprint, all increments, and for the sprint backlog. Cross-functional development teams may also engage with skill sets testers, designers, UX specialists, and operating system engineers. Each day, development team members meet to adapt their plan to fit the direction of the sprint goal that marks the current end of the sprint. With broad-based skills and practical experience, developers pace this process by keeping an eye always upon the Definition of Done.
Now, back to the sprint: The sprint has been described as “a container for all other events,” which facilitates the transparency the scrum process requires. Sprint planning for each event is a formal opportunity for the development team to inspect and adapt scrum artifacts, including:
Product backlog: items completed in the current sprint to be integrated with those from the previous sprints.
Sprint backlog: items from the product backlog list selected for an upcoming sprint. It includes a plan to deliver the increment and achieve the sprint goal.
Product increments: the deliverables ready at the end of each sprint.
Failure to operate the sprint planning meeting, the sprint itself, or the sprint review as prescribed in the scrum framework interferes with development team process and creates a need for unplanned meetings. Scrum events like the sprint are a clearly defined and essential part of scrum project management, and the scrum team works most productively within that framework.
Scrum master
The Scrum Master is responsible for establishing the scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide. The first and most powerful benefit from having a scrum master on a team is that they provide ongoing access to someone who has used Agile and scrum in another setting. They act as process leader, helping the new team implement scrum values as they coach members on the parameters and techniques of the scrum process, including self-management and cross-functionality.
The scrum master role requires that they help the product owner to:
define product goals and product backlog management
assist the scrum team in producing concise product backlog items
establish empirical product planning
facilitate stakeholder collaboration as requested or needed
The scrum master, also referred to as the servant leader, focuses the team on creating those essential increments, the deliverables, that rise to the Definition of Done.
Product owner
The product owner is one person, not a group or committee. The product owner may also act as product manager, but not always. The product owner defines the direction and scope of a project, making sure that the product under development delivers maximum value to stakeholders and users. With a clear understanding of what the business and users need from the product, they communicate these needs to the scrum team. In addition, they maintain the product backlog list of work that needs to get done in order to move production along. Anyone wanting to change prioritization in the product backlog must first persuade the product owner, who may represent the needs of many stakeholders.
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 Coach Mindset is an orientation. A chosen path to accomplish definite goals. Mindsets are important to shape intent and generate a commitment to a given task. Mindsets enable clarity of thought and singularity of purpose. A coach should understand the importance of a mindset to govern his practice; this creates the impact and possibility to achieve the maximum from their services and from his/her team members. So what is the Coaching Mindset that a Coach needs to develop? How will that agile methodology facilitate the individual at work over time?
The Agile Approach and the Agile Coaching Mindset is a result of the following:
Building a Robust Relationship
The intent of Coaching and Agile Processes should be to build relationships that are strong and lasting. The endeavour is to be authentic in delivery with a commitment to stand for all that works and will not work, seeking continuous improvement and a robust relationship. Coaching is not a product that is transacted over a contract; it is a continuous relationship, a ‘work in progress’. A leader in a coaching role benefits the most when he/she is delivering value by establishing a support system for his coachee and thereafter stands behind him on a word of promise.
Developing an Attitude & Fixed Mindset
A coach should train him or herself with implementing an attitude of getting the best out of the coachee into the relationship. The onus of extracting the best from the coachee into the relationship is vested with the coach, and this is possible only when the coach reflects the right attitude in him. It is only the attitude one communicates to another which shapes the perception, and this is achieved by displaying empathy. Empathy establishes an intent of understanding, helpfulness and compassion which naturally pulls the other into the relationship. A good attitude shows that the coach has a genuine interest in the relationship and that both are there to gain from it. It also ensures both are investing their best into it.
Self Sustaining Interactions
A leader will not have the time to address the concerns of all his members. He might find it a challenge to coach everyone and anyone who approaches him with an issue. A good leader will develop his agile mindset and overall coaching skills in a manner that with each coaching session, his coaches get self-generated and with a growth mindset that can help them coach themselves out of situations. The skill of an effective leader is to create self-motivated teams. Hence, a coach should enable his coachees to be in a continuous mode of seeking and asking the right questions. This way, there will be fewer instances where the coach will need to intervene with the coachee leading to lesser but sustained and impactful interactions.
Agile Practices & Developing Specific Behavioural Skills
Whether in start ups or large international corporations, coaching skills are evolutionary in nature. They are skills that are not borne from our natural instincts of survival. One needs to have a mastery of listening, questioning, giving feedback, being non-judgmental and unbiased to all levels of staff, even up to department heads and stakeholders. One needs to be restrained and not prompted to give in to the natural psyche of human existence where one has to be competitive, self preserved, judgmental and emotional in order to survive as the fittest. Behaviour coaching is not about teaching the art of survival, it is to do with learning to live a life. Coaching is all about empathy, compassion and selflessness in order to be complete, authentic and informative to the needs of your client/member/coachee. These agile principles are skills that need practice and an immense amount of dedication to master.
Agile transformation and an agile mindset enables a coach to be aware that the focus of coaching is not a solution finding but relationship building. Building an effective and stable rapport is the bedrock of a successful coaching intervention. Agile enables you to realise and see in retrospectives that it is only under conditions of absolute trust that the true world view emerges from people, which are presented sans filters, fears and apprehensions. Agile helps you develop a coaching mindset and brings in occurrences which are more stable, workable and profitable. A few outcomes of an Agile Coach mindset are:
Creation of a relationship of genuine trust and camaraderie within your working environment
Replaces supervision with partnership as a starting point
Turns silos of existence into a culture of sharing core values
Transforms a frame of blame into that of cooperation and collaboration with self-organizing teams
Achieves vision and goal attainment for the member, his organisation and the leader himself
Helps organisation harness new-age skills thereby retaining the best and the brightest amongst them
The Agile Mindset offers a broad variety of coaching options that have been specifically designed to meet the ever-changing needs of the organisation. The Agile Mindset provides specific coaching in Scrum, Lean, Kanban, SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), revising methods of project management and technical practices for Agile teams as well as coaching for full Agile adoptions that may use all, or a carefully selected sub-set, of these coaching services. Agile is all about people, and relationships are what binds them together. Hence, the key to the Agile way is not doing Agile.
Find out more with our training courses and classes at Leadership Tribe and contact us today to learn about the agile mindset and improving overall business agility for you and your team.
Agility isn’t a finite state that an organisation can set and forget. It’s important to regularly question the current status of your business’ agile framework. The goal of an agile organisation is agile maturity, so agile maturity assessments are implemented to discover where the team is on the sliding scale of metrics from immaturity to maturity – the ‘agile maturity level.’
What are some of the reasons for carrying out an agile assessment?
An agile assessment gives a definitive answer on exactly how agile a company is and it highlights opportunities for continuous improvement. It also allows a company to track the current state of its agile transformation against its objectives. It identifies areas that most need improvement and the coaching support required to achieve it. Once you understand the current state of the business, you have a baseline from which to move forwards. Subsequent retrospectives can assess how you’ve progressed from that point.
Originating in software development, Agile methodology can work across a wide range of companies. Agile processes provide a different mindset from the current state, seeking a general improvement over traditional project management.
What does an Agile assessment consist of?
Generally speaking, agile assessments will uncover the agility of your team or organisation. Different types of assessment can be performed, depending on whether you’re starting out or if you’ve already begun your agile journey. There are multiple agile assessment tools designed to reveal comparative agility, to measure competencies and agile maturity, or to set benchmarks and specific deliverables. Results are delivered in real time. Here, we outline the various types:
Agile ready assessment
This agile assessment determines how ready a business is to begin its agile journey. It’s suitable for a company that is just starting the development process to business agility. This form of assessment takes into consideration many factors, including those people and initiatives within an organisation that will encourage agile adoption and enablement, and those that will hinder it.
Agile maturity assessment
This agile assessment tool benefits stakeholders and product owners, new team members and project managers. For those already undergoing agile transformation, an agile maturity assessment is a useful tool to measure the culture, structure, processes and organisational dynamics within a business. It helps to identify improvement efforts that would aid agile development. This spans practices including project user stories, workload estimation, backlog work and daily scrums hosted by a Scrum Master.
Agile assessment sub-sets
Within the scope of agile readiness and agile maturity assessments, there are also different types of delivery that can work with continuous integration, each serving a different purpose. You may want to measure specific factors like speed, predictability or product quality for example.
The ad-hoc agile assessment
To provide a single snapshot of your business agility, a one-off ad-hoc agile assessment can offer insight into either your agile maturity or your readiness. This provides a view of your business from a third party perspective that you can use to adjust your strategy. Questionnaires and roadmaps might be developed, or Agile principles reviewed overall so that the company’s Agile maturity model improves in the next project lifecycle.
Ongoing agile maturity assessments
Usually used by companies that are fully engaged with the agile transformation process and the benefits it provides, an ongoing agile assessment is exactly what it sounds like. It’s regular, scheduled agile maturity assessments that help to tweak the ongoing strategy as it occurs. This is usually carried out by an external assessment body, to begin with, but can be replaced by an internal self-assessment, once your organisation or team becomes more familiar with agile practices.
Agile assessment & specific agile manifestos
When an organisation wants to focus on either the agile readiness or maturity of a specific part of its business, a specific area agile assessment can be performed. However large or small the Agile team may be, certain areas can be targeted, with recommendations for improvement efforts being provided along the way. It may look specifically at the scrum team, their workflows and development process, for example.
What are the benefits of an agile assessment?
Wherever you are on your agile transformation journey, agile assessments are an important tool to help you gauge your progress and direction. It stands to reason that assessments are a good idea, as you can’t get to where you want to if you don’t know where you are, to begin with. They embody the agile principle of continuous improvement and iterations of change.
Perform regular agile assessments and you get the framework for success, with a constant guiding hand to keep you on track. For that reason, they should be part of any organisation’s agile transformation.
Learn more on how to help your organisation to get better with Agile Coaches at Leadership Tribe and contact us for more info today on Agile Training, Scrum Training, Kanban and more.
“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”-Stephen Hawking
The traditional way of thinking has now become the old way of thinking. As the world is moving towards development, innovation has become a new trend. Curiosity is a part of human nature, so adapting and discovering new things isn’t very difficult. The same goes for organisations and industries; they are now inclined towards agility and change in their working environment.
What Does Agile Transition Mean?
Agile transition refers to transforming an organisation or industry from the traditional way to embracing gradual yet essential changes in the work environment to become more flexible, collaborative and innovative. Organisations now adapt to the dynamic changes in this fast-changing world and adhere to become more adaptable.
What is Agile Coaching?
An agile coach helps organisations, teams, and individuals change their traditional working methods to a more agile and modern practice. In agile coaching, the prime goal is to make the organisation or team more proficient, coordinated, and straightforward to ensure better results, services, and solutions.
An agile coach is responsible for incorporating agile teams in non-agile sectors, extend the agile methods all over the organisation, integrate the best tools, practices and techniques that assist the work in the industry and calculate the results of the agile transition.
Actions that might Disrupt Your Agile Transition
When your company is going through an agile transformation, some of the most common mistakes that leaders make can significantly impact your transition and disrupt, include:
· Not Putting a Priority on the Organization’s Culture
The culture of a company is one of the most significant parts of an organisation. Ignoring the culture while transitioning to agile can become an obstruction to the easy flow to agility. For a successful transition, changing at the team level will not be enough; how the executive sector operates and influences the company is equally important.
An agile transition can also impact the organisation’s culture and drive some significant cultural changes to increase profit and revenue and improve its conventional working system.
· Not Recognising and Investing in the Talents of Your Employees
The success of a company is directly proportional to the talented people working in it. To successfully go from waterfall to agile transformation, your company should hire competent people to secure the competition’s top spot. Here, it is to note that the right talent fuels the agile machine; therefore, organisations must invest in their employees to encourage them to take on agile roles and join teams.\
· Not Recognising that Agility is a Strategic Priority
Most companies limit the agile transition to one part or section of the organisation. Making one arm of your company agile and leaving the rest to operate traditionally might not help you in your company’s overall success. Starting from one sector and treating agility as a strategic approach, making the entire company gradually agile is the best game plan.
· Not Inducing Innovation in the Core of the Organization
Having a rigid framework in your company limits experimentation and exploration. Developing the right frameworks is an integral part of a company. Still, flexibility and adaptation should also be a part of it. A framework will help your company, and the individuals will not be afraid of a bit of trial and error.
Now that you know these missteps can mess up with your agile transformation, but fret not!
Here are some tips that you can follow to help make your agile transition easier:
5 Tips to Help You Obtain Agile Transformation in an Organisation
“In any given moment, we have two options: to step forward intogrowth or to step back into safety.” –Abraham Maslow
The core focus of an agile organisation is its customers. They implant customer-centricity in all their sectors. Five tips to help you tackle coaching agile transition in your company are:
1. From Traditional to Innovative
In a traditional company, people are taught to work like a machine and follow the rules. People get tired of following the same pattern and start drowning in complications. Encouraging innovation and experimentation is a part of an agile organisation. Employees are more open to ambiguity and embrace change more quickly in agile organisations. This way, the organisation can move from its traditional forms to more innovative and contemporary methods.
2. Be Creative Rather Than Reactive
Encourage the thinking of being more creative in any situation rather than reactive. Our mindset is set on a basic pattern, so adapting to new ideas and thoughts takes time. Coach the people so that, instead of seeing the world from someone else’s perspective, they get a self-authoring or creative mindset that helps us create our view of the world. Agile organisations focus on employing networks of autonomous teams and foster collaboration. It requires the leader to have a creative mindset and continuously tap into employees’ skills, ideas, and potential through trust, freedom, and accountability. It can only be possible by ensuring mutual acceptance at the workplace and respect.
3. Communication is Key
In coaching agile transitions, the main emphasis should be on communication. Communicating on what initiatives are being taken, reporting company progress and any changes that might have occurred determine its success. If there is a lack of communication in the organisation, it can notably hinder progress and transitions.
4. Embrace and Encourage Design Thinking
When coaching transitions, leaders must be ready to encourage and embrace change, including design thinking, which focuses on the organisation’s customers. To ensure better customer service and product results, the company should allow the need for design thinking.
5. Focus on the Agile Culture of the Organization
Shaping the culture of the organisation is the responsibility of a leader. Culture plays a prominent role in agile organisations due to the freedom and independence that agile organisations require. Leaders must be ready to undertake multiple cultural transformations in coaching agile transitions, such as building new behaviours and mindsets, installing new agile mechanisms, and promoting your team’s conviction.
Successful End-Product
When organisations make a successful waterfall to agile transformation, they help their company move forward and enable innovation and productivity in all of its sectors. Changing leaders’ mindsets and transitioning them to a new and agile way ensures their industry’s triumph.
“If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.” –Henry Ford
