Agile Coaching CoP Partnership Program

AGILE COACHING COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE OR CENTERS OF EXCELLENCE

PARTNERSHIP PROGRAM

Agile Coaching in the world of Business Agility can be a uniquely challenging space. One of those challenge areas is with your Agile Coaching Communities of Practice. A group encompassing your Agile Coach and Scrum Master teams that encourages their ongoing collaboration, learning, and growth. It can be a centerpiece of your overall impact and value proposition or another boring group meeting.

Bob Galen is the author of Extraordinarily Badass Agile Coaching. He’s an accomplished coach with a long history of coaching from the team to the boardroom. His personal goal is to disrupt, challenge, and raise the professionalism and craft of Agile Coaching everywhere. And there is no better place to do it than within your Communities of Practice!

Bob can help with—

• Setting up and kicking off your CoP.

• Re-energizing your CoP or CoE (LACE) by bringing fresh ideas in.

• Group and 1:1 mentoring, modeling, and coaching.

• Providing masterclass-level training for your CoP team members.

• Visiting periodically to keep the momentum going.

• Assisting you in leveraging the Comparative Agility, Agile Coaching PI in your learning journeys.

• Speaking at and participating in company-wide events.

If you need help with your Agile Coaching group practices, contact Bob to explore how he can help you and your coaches become more Badass in delivering real Value.

How We Built a Global Bad-Ass Coaching Community

My colleague and friend Julee Everett is an incredible agile leader and coach. I met her quite a few years ago, and we’ve continued to stay in touch, influencing one another.

Recently, she wrote an article entitled— How We Built a Global Bad-Ass Coaching Community: 5 C’s to Drive Powerful Coaching Outcomes and Scale a Coach Community on Medium.

I just read it, and I think it’s a great case study into some of the critical steps in setting up an Agile Coaching Community of Practice, not in a theoretical or academic sense, but in a real-world sense.

You’ll notice that Julee references my Extraordinarily Badass Agile Coaching book and related work when you read it. While I appreciate the references, that’s not why I’m bringing it to your attention.

It’s because CoP’s are essential to bringing effective agile coaching in organizational contexts. The coaches are often loosely organized with little to no collaboration or support. Not only does that isolate the coaches, but it decreases their overall effectiveness as a team.

Julee’s hard-earned wisdom and advice show you how powerful a Community of Practice can truly be. And to entice you to read it, here are the 5 C’s—

1. Clarity

2. Cohesiveness

3. Competencies

4. Community

5. Consistency

Wrapping Up

One of the things I’ve been focusing on in my coaching practice is a new service offering in 2024 dedicated to helping organizational Agile Coaching Communities of Practice become more energized, effective, and impactful.

If you’re looking for a CoP organizational impact jolt, consider reaching out to explore what might be possible…

Stay agile, my friends,

Bob.

Three related posts –

• https://rgalen.com/agile-training-news/2021/5/3/community-of-practice

• https://www.agile-moose.com/blog/2021/10/9/community-of-purpose

• https://rgalen.com/agile-training-news/2020/8/18/agile-leadership-community-of-practice-cop

And a reference to our CoP coaching service offering –

https://rgalen.com/agile-training-news/2024/1/18/agile-coaching-cop-partnership-program

CoP and the LACE

SAFe LACE Alert

In my last post, I shared some ideas around the value of a Community of Practice and how to re-energize it if it’s lost a bit of momentum. Please read that one if you haven’t before reading on here.

Now I want to contrast things a bit between CoP’s and CoE’s. Specifically of the LACE kind… 

Contrasting between a CoP and a Center of Excellence?

There’s another notion you’ll often hear when discussing this area. It’s a Center of Excellence or CoE. My bias is going to shine through a bit here, but please bear with me.

A CoE is a more formal, top-down mechanism whose primary goal is the consistency of practice. That is, it’s focused on regulation and governance. Often metrics and agile performance metrics are tied to it as well. A good example of this idea is the Scaled Agile Framework’s – Lean-Agile Center of Excellence or LACE[1]. And you can also see the idea often marketed or aligned with the Agile PMO or PMI’s Disciplined Agile[2].

I’ve already alluded to the two problems I have with generic CoE’s. First is the prescriptive top-down nature—where the organization tries to mandate practices. I think that’s a non-starter in agile contexts and particularly not aligned with the agile mindset. So, implementing a CoE can actually do harm to your culture you’re trying to instill or support.

The second is that it disengages from the people doing the work. Which are the very people who are part of the “community” you’re trying to create. Typically, the teams and individuals only engage with the CoE because they’re told to. Not because they’re inspired to or are invited to participate.

In my opinion, you don’t create an agile culture by top-down mandate. It’s just doesn’t work. Instead, the organic nature of building a community of practitioners aligns so much better with our agile mindsets.

And the third challenge with creating a balanced and effective CoE relates to the agile maturity of the leadership team. If they’ve not evolved to an agile mindset, across leadership, then the CoE often becomes a mechanism for reinforcing controls and measurement.

All of these lead to problems if your goal is to truly develop and mature as an agile organization. So, approach LACE and all Centers of Excellence with caution and care.

 Stay agile my friends,

Bob.

[1] https://www.scaledagileframework.com/lace/

[2] https://www.pmi.org/disciplined-agile/people/centers-of-excellence