Agile organisation, the journey and transformation has been the conversation among many people in the recent years. Many organisations like to be agile, many think they are agile but they are still thinking oldschool. One example I came across myself is an instance where an organisation is using Kanban board because the columns visually look like waterfall! At the same time the team implemented this thought it’s good to do Kanban board (instead of Scrum) because it is still agile with less meeting and ceremonies.

Being agile is not a one night process or a switch that needs to be turned on. It’s complex process predicated on organisation’s culture, team dynamics and their size, individuals, industry and even products and offering organisation have. Many organisations, specially bigger ones, understand the process of becoming agile require time, support, and skills in agile hence appreciate the value of agile coach and engage with one.

This session was about understanding what agile coaches need in order to be successful in agile transformation. We used liberation structure, we teamed up and did few exercises in groups. This is a great way of doing things making sure you don’t want to have only few dominant voices and silent passengers in the train. People in the team interact to develop insight on the topic, teams share insights using techniques like Affinity Maps & Gallery Walk.

So, agile coaches are the face of transformation. They are the one everyone go to for agile-related questions. Here is some if the main themes we found agile coaches need, mainly divided into internal factors and practice-related:

Before they start thinking agile, coaches need to understand the hierarchy really well. Power of hierarchy is really important but they need to build a network with and around hierarchy.

Interestingly, communication was one of the most important factors for agiles coaches. Things like ‘don’t wait to communicate’, facilitation & communication; flexibility. Also coaches believe it is very important to “be communicated to” rather than be directed.

A strong theme in conversation. Many pointed out the emotional stress of transformation, uncertainty, growth through adversity and compassion fatigue

Another theme was the ability to ‘step in and step up’. Also few mention of bias on actions from agile coaches. Agile coaches mentioned they were very keen for their managers to be open to receive feedback.

It is vital for organisations to understand the complexity of change and transformation, time it takes, support it requires. Agile coaches need to understand organisational goals and how get involved in getting there rapidly.