Agile coaches often get caught up in the excitement of solving the next big problem or frustration when things don’t match their ideals. I’ve been there myself. Early in my career, I relied heavily on intuition, and was impulsive until I learned how to observe more deliberately through Esther Derby, Johanna Rothman, and Jerry Weinberg’s PSL-training. My coaching practice transformed further when I got my ICF-ACC and started using a coach log—a tool I now rely on to track my interventions and stay intentional in my approach. In product development, teams are encouraged to follow a roadmap aligned with their long-term strategy. Agile coaches can gain a lot from thinking…
Coaching teams that do not want to be coached
Anyone doing Agile Coaching long enough will inevitably find themself in a situation coaching teams that: do not want to be coached. should not be coached. cannot be coached. do not respond well Your coaching. The differences between these situations are significant. Yet it is difficult for many coaches to understand what situation they are in. One reason for that is the similarities in how these situations display themselves: You’re being challenged directly There’s poor meeting attendance The team has an inability to generate actions despite meeting, or to act on actions The teams proposed solutions have no bearing towards their problems or goals There are interpersonal conflict in teams…
Informed Interventions
I recently held a talk on Agile By Example about the importance of agile coaches making informed interventions when coaching systems and agile, and that many coaches are making dogmatic interventions. I argued, and still do, that more often than not, agile coaches and scrum masters fall short in their intervention process. They intervene when they ought not to, and they skip interventions that could have a significant and positive impact. I want to make some clarifications in this post, mainly to define “Informed interventions” and to offer suggestions on how you can move beyond dogmatic interventions. I also want to repeat here that I think this is not a…
The Holistic Observations of Teams Framework: Using Active Observations to Identify Strategic Interventions
We speak a lot about interventions when nudging teams along their team effectiveness journeys. But what are we really aiming for here? Interventions alone and just for the sake of doing something are not enough. We need our interventions to also be strategically placed at the right leverage points. In other words, we need strategic interventions. The first step towards making strategic interventions is to actively observe your team in a holistic and objective way. This requires structure. Without structure, our observations are more prone to bias and thus less helpful. In this post we introduce our Holistic Observations of Teams Framework that we’ve been using when observing teams. We…
agile transformation at Avanza: a case study
Agile Transformation (capital A and T) and agile transformation. Same words, vastly different concepts. An “Agile Transformation” is a cookie-cutter product that anyone can buy off the shelf. It comes with manuals, guides, predefined role descriptions, and everything else you need to get your organization looking and sounding like an Agile organization. Plug and play! Some call it the starting point and some call it all you’ll need, because it’s better than whatever you have today, right? “Agile Transformations” are a tool on the tactical level, and, while there’s certainly some value in them, I believe there’s more value in lowercase a and t agile transformations. agile transformation is a…
Why Agile Isn’t Working For You: The Top 5 Agile Coaching Pitfalls
In taking a look back at our time as coaches of systems, teams, and individuals, we identified the top 5 agile coaching pitfalls we've run into over the years and that we see coaches old and new still struggling with today.
3 Powerful Observation Techniques
Some agile coaches and managers are uncomfortable with setting expectations, offering feedback, and making decisions on behalf of other people, and they go around asking powerful questions. “Who am I tell people what to do in our autonomous organization?” they sometimes say. However, utilizing powerful questions when there is a specific answer that the team needs to arrive at only allows the situation to continue, can damage your relationships, and can subdivide your team. One alternative to asking powerful questions is making powerful observations and in this blog post I share three different examples of how to make and visualize powerful observations. Making powerful observations helps teams see themselves which makes…
Questions I ask in interviews – How do you enter new teams?
Coaches at Spotify are expected to help squads who need help. Sometimes we stay with a squad for a year and sometimes we only stay for a few months. Some reasons to this include organisational changes, that squads split, and new priorities, etc. But how you as a coach enter a teams greatly impacts your effectiveness, the speed of which you’ll gain context, the amount of relationships and strengths of those. In short if affects the impact you can have on a team. Because it has such an impact, if you’re interviewing with me for an agile coach, product owner, or manager role I might explore how you enter systems…
No, Agile Coaching Is Not Cat Herding
Agile coaches and leaders in agile organisations sometimes refer to parts of their job as herding cats. While said with a smile it has a negative connotation. I’ve done this in the past myself and I think it’s important that we stop talking about our jobs, and people and teams this way for several reasons: Talking about cat herding hides the real problems at hand. What exactly is the team doing that makes them appear as cats? And what should the team improve in order to not be a bunch of cats? It’s disrespectful and as a coach or leader you are likely loose influence. Sure, cats are smart, independant, and resourceful, but what coaches/leaders…
Case Study – Optimizing Cycle Time for Data Center Maintenance
Overview Most teams do not measure lead time and cycle time [1], missing opportunities to improve their system’s value flow. Here’s an example of how a data center team I worked with managed to reduce their cycle time from 32 days to 5 days by starting to measure it. Initial Setup and Discovery We visualized our work on a physical board and tracked our metrics manually because the available tools (Jira, Trello, LeanKit Kanban) did not meet our specific needs. We did not know what we would discover, but once we measured our metrics, we learned that our cycle time was significantly higher whenever work involved scaling a part…
Here’s how you can help teams improve their planning meetings
About a year ago I worked with a team that wanted to improve their planning meetings. As I observed this team, I noticed that they used their planning meeting for 5 other things. Technical discussions and designing solutions – about features or requirements not a part of the coming Sprint’s backlog. Grooming the backlog – preparing the backlog for the future. Walking the board – progress review and status updates on stories and milestones. Discussing ways to improve e.g. teamwork, process, etc – reviews of how the team works, their process, and collaboration. Off-topic requests for help – team members asking each other for help with work and features unrelated to the…
Questions I ask in Interviews – How do you prioritise your backlog when there’s too much to do?
Subjective models are charming but hinder clear thinking but are common and easy to understand due to their quadrant nature. In addit,ion they do not require you to motivate your conclusions which makes them charming to many, but unfortunately, this is also what’s inherently flawed with them. If you’re coaching a team e.g org leads team or dev team that uses any form of subjective prioritization model e.g. MSCW, Risk/Value, Urgency/Importance you can help them make a greater impact by introducing them to objective prioritization models. Objective models encourage conversations and creates alignment Objective prioritization models e.g. Kano, CoD, WSJF help members of organizations understand why decisions are made, and what’s…
Surface Silent Disagreements
If you’ve ever worked in a team that makes lots of decisions but that struggles with making progress on those decisions, here’s a technique you can use to understand if your team is aligned on decisions or if people are disagreeing in silence. To avoid confusion and potential conflict it’s good to get your teams consent before trying this technique out. Build surfacing silent disagreements into your decision making process[1] Whenever your team has made a decision ask someone to repeat the decision then make the following three statements, one at a time, and ask the team to answer yes or no depending on if they agree or disagree with each statement. Three statements to surface disagreement I agree with this decision. I feel that…
Things I wish I knew before I became an agile coach
In late 2014 Daisy Pilbrow and I sent out a survey to the agile community. The survey asked agile coaches what they wish they’d known before they started coaching, what was challenging about the role, and what they’ve learned about themselves and others. With the replies Daisy and I hoped to create a short and inspiring recommendation that we could give to interns and new coaches at Spotify. The survey received 30 replies. We analysed the responses and were able to identify a few patterns that we’d like to share with you. You can find all the responses in their full format here, but we have removed peoples names to…
What does an agile coach at Spotify do?
A common question that I receive from the agile community is “What does an agile coach at Spotify actually do?” and about 2 years ago Joakim Sundén answered this question in his blogpost The agile coach role at Spotify. This blogpost is about my current focus and how it has evolved over the past months. While I won’t go into specifics about the challenges we have had and still have, I will illustrate what reality can look like for an agile coach at Spotify. Four months ago I left the IO-tribe (Infrastructure Operations) to join the six month old BITS-tribe (Business Information Technology Systems). I was the first agile coach to join (btw we’re hiring) :) and the…