Tuesday 11 October 2016

Creating an Internal Agile Coaching Capability

Scope:
Recently I attended the Scrum Coaching Retreat Geneva 2016 [1]. It was a great event, mainly due to all the beer drinking. The pipe in the middle below is 5 litres of beer. We were happy ;)


Chris, Rickard, Tom, Mark, John

But back to the title, while we were there we identified a problem within Agile Transformations.

Problem:
The problem is when all the external Agile Coaches arrive, they often leave with more knowledge than they started with. Which is okay for them, but their clients are often left without any internal Agile Coaching capability.

Just like a diet when you come off it you go back to bad old habits and get fat again [2]. So, organisations need to develop their own internal Agile Coaching capability. But how do they do that when they do not have it in the firs place?

Solution:
The solution we came up with at the Retreat was a brand new programme that would train and coach the internal people. Thus growing their capability over weeks and months. It would not be a quick course and then failure. It would be an academic programme of learning and development.

This was done over several sprints within the event, in conjunction with 3 Agile coaches and 3 CST's from the Scrum Alliance.
The end result was an actual output whereby the participant would learn and grow over time, gaining skills and experiences. But they wouldn't have to wait until the end to gain the first benefit. Value would be obtained as they went along. Fruits could be be picked from this Agile tree of knowledge. Such as CSP, CTC and so on. 

The original design at a high level (we went into more detail, such as LO and so on) looked like a tree of knowledge with fruits that could be obtained as you progressed.

Tree of Knowledge

While this was only MVP 1.0, as a group we have decided to take it forward as a whole programme or work. We named it the Agile Coaching Academy. You can find the link below [3]. Watch out for MVP 2.0 as it progresses :)

Agile Link:
Its all Agile baby!

References:
[3] Agile Coaching Academy: https://agilecoachingacademy.org/