Coaching Agile Teams
, Liz Sedley
The goal of the workshop is to collect and develop useful guidelines for Agile Coaches. We encourage you to come along to share coaching experiences of what worked (or did not work) for you. You will have the opportunity to meet other practicing Agile Coaches and hearing how they work with their teams.
Background:
The surge in Agile adoption has created a demand for project managers and technical leads who coach rather than direct their teams. A sign of this trend is the ever-increasing number of people getting certified as scrum masters and agile leaders. Training courses that introduce agile practices are easy to find. But making the transition to coach is not as simple as understanding what agile practices are. Your challenge as an Agile Coach is to support your team in learning how to wield their new Agile tools in creating great software.
By running this session as a workshop, we’ll bring together practicing scrum masters, agile project managers and coaches at the conference who want to help their team get Agile.We’ll be sharing techniques that you can use when working on-site rather than in a classroom. And exploring different coaching styles with tips and tricks from practicing coaches who have experiences from working with many teams.
We'll start with an introduction from presenters and lead into the topic of coaching with some examples from our experience. We'll also have some time for sharing coaching stories from the workshop participants. [15mins]
Next we want to shift into a simulation to exploring coaching styles. We'll be working in small teams of 4 people each with a coach and an observer. Each team will have a task to perform and some practices to use to accomplish the task (such as user stories or working in pairs). The coaches work to coach the team and the observers note how the coaches go about this. We'll wrap this section up with a debrief - what did people in the exercise notice happening and do these shed any insights on coaching techniques. [30mins]
Now we shuffle into groups of 6-8 people, who will work to distill their ideas into guidelines for coaching agile teams. Teams will need some fliphart paper and markers for this. [30 mins]
Each work group will take a turn to present the coaching guidelines that they have developed to the session group.[15 mins]