A week or so ago, out of a bit of frustration I posted the following comment on LinedIn:
Weird. Every day I see more and more "Agile Coaches" and they seem to have less and less experience. Does real experience matter anymore?
I received quite a few comments. Some of them are below:
- What's interesting is applying experience to different situations. As you know from last year Bob we transformed a product team under your coaching, I am now applying the same approach at a different firm. The objective is the same but the different people, process, tools and culture make it a different puzzle. Ask me in 6 months if experience matters - my guess is yes.
- I have noticed the same thing. Qualifications for being a coach are becoming "I was standing in the room when someone said agile". You get what you pay for.
- Sounds like you need a certification...that will solve the problem :)
I get bombarded with different points of view from agile coaching firms all of the time. This one crossed my screen from Mike Cottmeyer just this morning.
http://www.leadingagile.com/2015/03/lets-acknowledge-safe-for-what-it-is-and-move-on/
and here’s a snippet from Mike’s post, just to give you some flavor:
So… I want to say this one more time for emphasis… either you create the conditions to do agile well… or you do something else. SAFe is that something else.
We can say that SAFe is a cop out… or isn’t really agile… or that it’s the second coming of RUP… but don’t underestimate the complexity, the risk, or the cost of totally refactoring an enterprise to be the kind of organization that can really do agile at any kind of scale. Some organizations simply can’t or won’t invest in this. At the end of the day small batches are better than big batches. Iterative and incremental is better than waterfall, even if it isn’t agile.
I’ve recently been reading about and discovering some agile coaching firms who have different views towards client coaching. To be honest, I’m struggling to understand and accept some of their perspectives. So as is often my practice, I thought I’d write something about it to clarify my thoughts and position on the matter.
But first, let me share a story from a close friend of mine in Southern California:
A Coaching Story
I’m one of the best, most experienced personal trainers on the planet. If you view my website, you’ll see testimonials about my:
- Helping transform the health of large groups by running health camps;
- Assisting incredibly famous actors and actresses increase their physical performance to get ready for challenging physical roles;
- Serving as a lead fitness consultant on The Greatest Loser show;
- There’s even a rumor that the President will be inviting me to serve on the Council for Physical Fitness.
Several years ago I went to an agile conference, actually the annual agile conference put on by the Agile Alliance. One of the sessions was a 90-minute workshop put on by an incredibly experienced agile practitioner. In fact he was one of the original 17 signatories of the Agile Manifesto.
I got to his session early and I’m glad I did. The room became packed, with every seat take about 15 minutes before the session was scheduled to start. Then the floor started to fill up. By the time he arrived, the room was over capacity and the anticipation was electric.
This has been an ongoing debate for a number of years. There are essentially three groups of Project Managers:
- Traditional Project Managers – they’ve typically operated in Waterfall environments and frequently reference the PMBOK. They often follow best practices, templates, and models for effectively “managing” projects. Usually they view success to be plan-driven.
- Agile Project Managers – who are normally quite different than their traditional counterparts. They focus on the team and are more facilitators and coaches than project managers. They also consider success to be team-driven.
- Then there are Traditional Project Managers who want to play in agile environments, so they start looking for specific tools and techniques that they can “borrow” from the agile approaches. They take more of a hybrid approach to project management, and this group seems to be increasing as agile approaches have become mainstream. Often these folks have acquired PMI-ACP certification, but they have little else in the way of real world agile experience.
I have mixed feelings about Open Space events and I’m not sure why. My personal experience with them is two-fold. Either they are wonderful and powerful or they are terrible. There is sort of nothing in between.
Sometimes I’ve gone and the Marketplace is hardly populated with any topics. So the cupboard is bare and there is little energy and focus towards the Open Space.
At other times, the energy and collaboration is so compelling that the event can be termed a “defining moment” for the theme and group.
I’ve written several times on the subject of how coaches and trainers in the Scrum and Agile communities often use “management” as a term implying dysfunction and marginalization. Not always as clearly as that might sound, because they’re often paying the bills, but behind closed doors they’re often complaining about them.
If an agile adoption goes awry, we often blame it on the leadership team –
Clearly our training and coaching of the agile teams was complete. The fact that the adoption is failing or dysfunctional isn’t my problem. It’s those pesky leaders. I tried to invite them to the CSM class…and they didn’t have the time. They only had time for a 1-hour leadership overview and half of them were on their cell phones the entire time.
They keep asking me to do more team training, and I’m doing that. But they really need to get their act together for this agile transformation to work. Sadly, I’m at a loss as to what I can do…
In my last post I ranted a bit about hearing the phrase:
“But Bob, in the real world…”
too many times in my agile travels. That it seems to infer that the agile methods are a bleeding-edge approach with limited contexts and marginal results. But nothing could be further from the truth. The methods have been leveraged for 20 years and are, at this point, solidly in the mainstream of approaches to building software.
In this follow-up post I want to challenge folks with this view. But instead of simply ranting, I want to explore some constructive approaches to overcome this mindset…
Coming to you from MARS…
Everyone please. Hold onto your seats and possibly grab a relaxing drink. I have some grave news for you. And please, please sit down.
Ok, I’ve noticed a significant trend in my training sessions, coaching, and conference conversations. The frequency of:
“But Bob, in the real world…”
Whew! There, I said it, and now I feel a little bit better.
For years I’ve been coaching agile teams and one of the themes I’ve been emphasizing is:
- Co-location
- Sitting together at open tables
- Face-to-face collaboration
- Pairing: pair-programming, pair-testing
- Whiteboard, post-it notes, and flip charts
Have all been terms that I’ve emphasized during this time. I’ve pushed and tried to inspire teams to break down the walls and tooling and to sit together to build great products.
