Our Thinking

Last fall I had the chance to share some thoughts about the value of Agile Coaches in a post I entitled 4 Ways an Agile Coach Can Boost Your Agile Adoption.  In that post I recommended that the Scrum Master should not act at the Agile Coach – this recommendation prompted several fellow Agile practitioners to reach out to me for clarification around WHY I was asserting this recommendation.  Many of them reminded me that the Scrum Guide™ mentions that coaching is one of the foremost responsibilities of a Scrum Manager and others reasoned that an experienced Scrum Master should be able to carry out most of the responsibilities that I have outlined for an Agile coach in my blog.

As Agile coaches, it is not uncommon for us to encounter companies that have made adopting Agile a priority in their organization but have come under scrutiny for not delivering any specific business value - despite what was promised. In many of these cases, we have seen these organizations revert back to their traditional ways of delivering projects, while others take a mix and match approach relegating Agile only to small co-located projects.

So, you’ve adopted Agile as your company’s method for project delivery. You packed up your books on traditional development best practices (lovingly referred to as waterfall or sequential) and put them in storage. You’ve invested sufficient time and money to ensure that every stakeholder has taken all the necessary training. You’ve setup all the required tools of the trade – installed white boards, hoarded bunches of post-it notes, identified space for stand up meetings, partitioned a large white wall with magnetic strips to show movement of work, etc. 

Things should be ticking along perfectly now. Right? Releases should be visible, you should be getting the maximum value out of your development teams, clients should be satisfied, and the quality of your product should be exceeding your customer’s expectations. Did you say, “Not really”?