A coaching friend of mine came to me the other day asking for coaching advice about a team she was coaching. I’ll try to get the story right…
She was coaching a fairly new Scrum team. They were refining a story and decided to implement it in the front-end. Even though the “proper” solution was a backend one. It seems they’d done this before so there was a precedent.
The primary reason for this technical decision was speed. It would take them 5x longer to do a backend implementation and they felt the need to get this feature done quickly. They would then defer any technical debt clean-up to a future sprint.
The Product Owner weighed in on the side of the team but really didn’t have a strong opinion either way. They simply wanted the feature delivered as soon as possible.
The Scrum Master, as they were new, also sided with the team. So, the leanage was unanimous.
One of the functional managers in the organization, realizing that the team was making a mistake and implementing a hack or work-around, stepped in and tried to influence the team to make a better call, the right call, by implementing it in the backend.
The coach asked me about defending the team from the manager and how I might go about it…
Within the agile community, I’ve seen quite a few examples of folks doing a, how do I say it, Failure Bow. To be frank, I didn’t know what it was all about. Sure, I get the gist of it. But where does it come from? And what are folks trying to represent by doing it? I never quite knew the backstory.
I also discovered that there were also several forms of it. There was the in-person failure bow. For example, a speaker making a mistake in front of their audience would do it.
But I recently received some email from Scrum Alliance folks that had mistakes in them. The senders then did virtual failure bows via follow-up emails. I’ve even seen folks do it via #failurebow in the twitter (and other) streams.
It made me want to explore it a bit deeper. So, I did.
I received a LinkedIn message from an agile consulting firm asking if I’d be interested in an opportunity. The had two levels of agile coaching opportunities available.
They were:
I sat back and I sighed. I’ve never charged rates this low for any coaching I’ve done…ever. I’ve got somewhere between 15-20 years of agile coaching experience from team level to project/program level to enterprise level including leadership coaching.
When I looked at the specification for these roles, the Sr. Agile Coach role had Enterprise level coaching requirements at my level. But from my perspective, the compensation was at a level that would not fairly compensate qualified agile coaches, nor even Scrum Masters.
In other words, they wanted Filet Mignon at Burger King prices. (with all due respect to BK)
Even Sadder
But what makes me even sadder is that there are people “agile coaches” in the world who will happily work for these rates.
Why?
Largely because they’re agile coaches in name only. They gain a bit of experience and then immediately call themselves an “Agile Coach”. For these folks, the compensation makes a whole lot of sense.
However, they’re leading with paper experience and bravado and not real experience. It’s a game of smoke and mirrors and the clients are the ones that lose in that game.
They are commoditizing agile coaching and driving down compensation rates for all of us. And the rate compression also minimizes the value of real-world experience and skill.
This is a true short-take on flow metrics. I want it to be a reference piece for other works…
I attended a Professional Agile Leadership class with Ryan Ripley not that long ago. Ryan is a colleague and friend of mine and I always appreciate (and learn new stuff) when we get together. If you ever get the chance to attend a Ryan Ripley class, take it!!!
But I digress.
Ryan was VERY enthusiastic about flow metrics in the class. He has moved on from a velocity position and then from a #noestimates position, and now believes that flow metrics that the most relevancy and value in agile contexts.
I was teaching a class the other day and folks were very distracted. Even though the class had been scheduled for months and everyone seemed committed to it, the following happened:
People were running in and out of class to attend meetings
Many were checking email on their laptops and phones
Several leaders, who were scheduled to attend, totally bailed out
Several “emergencies” came up that needed immediate attention
Believe it or not, this often happens during my classes. And I’m not that bothered by it. Meaning, I try to ignore the interruptions and focus my attention to those who ARE present. And who do want to add more skills and thinking to their practice of agile leadership.
That being said, I’m not writing this article to complain. But instead to make a very clear point…
It’s a CHOICE!
My colleague and friend, Daniel Mezick, posed the following hypothetical on LinkedIn in September 2019 –
You are an independent Agile coach, visiting a potential client with 1500 employees. It's obvious that the intelligent, well-meaning executive that is interviewing you does not really understand that employee engagement is essential to success in transformation. His org wants to "roll out" imposed Agile practices. They plan to use this big, huge framework. They already decided.
With all the training and everything else, it's looking like about 200K coming your way over the next 8 months if you get this account. But you are 100% sure it's the wrong approach. And if you say so, you figure there is a 60% chance your concerns will be lost in translation. And you know you have no more than 45 minutes with this executive. So, you sit there, intently listening to his story, and pondering what it means to "do the right thing." There are 25 minutes left at this meeting. And you know some other consulting firms who are good at marketing will also be interviewed as service providers for this engagement. You realize it's now or never. And you are not too happy about this...
Link to the post - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/danielmezick_you-are-an-independent-agile-coach-visiting-activity-6577891855055241216-oU7Y
As of September 16th, the post had received +20k views, 158 reactions, and 116 comments. Which is astounding to me.
Clearly, it’s created a buzz and generated reactions, which is probably why Dan posed it in the first place. I’m thinking he wanted to post a hypothetical that was open to interpretation and representative of a common agile coaching dilemma.
I wanted to weigh-in. Not as a way of directly responding to the scenario. And not, to the more than 100 comments. But more so, just from my heart. You see, I think the answer is quite simple.
I sometimes think that I’m the only agile coach who supports “management” and “leaders” in agile contexts. And I’ve written quite a few pieces with that perspective. For example –
http://rgalen.com/agile-training-news/2014/11/23/agile-coaches-trainers-have-you-walked-in-the-shoes-of-technical-management
So, I was surprised and delighted when I read this piece from Jason Little – Why Executives Don’t Go to Agile Conferences.
Based on the title, I thought Jason would join a long list of agile thought leaders who take a few swipes at executives. But when I got into it, I realized that he showed far more understanding and empathy than I could have imagined. Here are two quotes from the article…
It astonishes me to see so much information about bad leadership, and how executives don’t care because they can’t spare a day at an Agile conference to explore how to run more effective retrospectives. I don’t think many pundits have a clue how much stress these people have on them, and that executives are people too. Sure, some may behave in a more forward way, which is usually perceived as command-and-control, but from my experience, it’s not the case. They’re just busy.
