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An Agile Coach's Toolkit is dynamic and complex

Agile Coaches Toolkit is dynamic and complex

Agile coaching is a relatively new professional and research field, made recently popular by its successful use within Spotify, and is gaining in popularity and demand.

Generally, organisations hire coaches with backgrounds in technology and business management to streamline their workflows. Coaches then help employees develop effective teams and ultimately create more customer-centric products, like user friendly/oriented software.

Tools may include:

• The Agile Coaching Roadmap - a tool to help Agile Coaches to manage expectations by providing visibility to their activities. Also a useful facilitation tool when inspiring teams to think beyond their current practices.
• Daily Checklist - a useful crib sheet to get you into good habits when coaching teams.
• 4 key delivery principles that all Agile Coaches should be pushing and nurturing across teams.
• Kanban Data Visualisation tool provides a consistent way to render Kanban metrics.
• Leanware assessments are used to gauge where a team is up to in terms of their Agile maturity. Assessed against 23 principles of high performing teams.
• Team Temperature Check is a survey tool used to gain anonymous insight into the people side of delivery (needs to be used with care).
• Working out loud - making our work visible, shared and discoverable to increase learning and create purposeful networks.
• Hackathons - a creative problem solving activity, often associated with technology, where people come together to solve problems in a new and novel way. Some can be run in parallel with workshops.

• 5 Whys – teams look at the issue and ask “Why?” up to five times to get beyond habitual thinking.

• Visualisation workshop

Games and Stories

Can games motivate organisations to adopt Scrum practices?

Scrum is a common Agile method or framework that promotes teamwork, rapid learning and knowledge sharing throughout the team and the organisation, with the intention of streamlining workflows, speeding up development cycles based on customer/consumer feedback.

Agile methods are designed to help organisations create new or improved versions of their products and services. The motivational potential of incorporating a gamified reward systems into Agile Scrum practices may encourage the adoption of Agile.

• 5 Monkeys Experiment - the metaphor and the lessons that apply to work from this are clear. Despite the exhortations from management to be innovative and collaborative, cold water is poured on people and their ideas whenever someone tries something new. Or, perhaps worse, the other employees suppress innovation, and learned helplessness spreads throughout the network.

Games could include:

• The Coin Game - a popular simulation used by Agile Coaches to demonstrate the power of flow and batch size to teams new to Lean and Agile concepts. It is normally played face to face.
• Lego Simulation to reproduce the design and examine any flaws.
• The Bottleneck Game to identify key blockages in a system.

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