Agile coaching
Making a difference through Agile Coaching
30 November 2022 • 5 min read
Before we explore Agile coaching at AND Digital, let's first understand what the role of an Agile coach is. The State of Agile Coaching Report 2022 refers to an Agile coach as somebody who…
“Helps organisations, teams and individuals adopt Agile practices and methods, while embedding Agile values and mindsets. The goal of an Agile coach is to foster more effective, transparent and cohesive teams, and to enable better outcomes, solutions, and products/services for customers.”
AND Digital’s mission is to ‘close the digital skills gap’. So, how can an Agile coach help achieve this mission? What does it mean in reality, and how can we help both clients and ANDis become more effective and cohesive to enable better outcomes and value for customers?
What does Agile coaching mean at AND?
It starts with our unique ‘Club’ model, each comprising 6 squads and approximately 80 ANDis across all levels - ranging from Club Executive (accountable for the Club's overall success) to Associate (who could be in their first full-time working role). Each business unit has a dedicated Agile coach whose job is to support the Club, clients and ANDis. This scale helps dedicated Agile coaches to build and maintain relationships with everyone, ensuring a culture of empathy and understanding - vital for a people-first business.
Our purpose as a coaching team is to ‘help teams and organisations be the best they can be, particularly in the context of their digital, product and Agile ambitions.’
To achieve this, we work with people and teams to increase their confidence in applying Agile, product and lean principles. We also help them use coaching, mentoring and upskilling techniques to further their personal and team development.
The techniques applied are bespoke; flexing depending on the circumstances or challenges the team is facing. It's up to us as coaches to discover and interpret the team's needs and ambitions, and to ensure we cater our approach to help deliver those ambitions.
Hear from two of our Agile coaches about life as a coach and the difference we make to our clients.
When can we help?
The simple answer to this is the sooner the better. As coaches, the most value we can provide is when we are involved with teams from the start. This would ideally be in their ‘forming’ stage, giving us the opportunity to lay foundations for success - like creating trust, a psychologically safe environment and a forum to develop the skills needed for success.
We appreciate this may not always be possible, which is where AND's "Guide, Build. Equip" business model comes in. It enables our coaching team to vary its input as the situation and state of play requires. We can provide impartial, objective and unbiased Agile support where clients need help restructuring their teams (Guide), and a specialist perspective when delivery pressure mounts in the thick of a project (Build). Throughout, or at any stage in our engagements, we can upskill and coach individuals and teams to achieve their goals (Equip).
What sort of problems do we help solve and how?
Our clients face a huge range of challenges, and we relish helping them take these on in creative ways - whether that's the move from waterfall to Agile practices, or helping them understand the real, in-practice values of 'agility.' The role of a coach is never exhaustive, and in fact as we move forward in our journey to close the digital skills gap it will evolve and become more and more vital for business success. As an overview, here we share a suite of Agile, product and lean techniques we often call on, depending on the challenge:
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Problem |
How? |
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Creating a culture and environment where Agile teams feel safe and can thrive |
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Become more customer-obsessed so that they solve real customer problems and needs |
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Upskill and coach teams to increase knowledge, expertise and skills enabling them to become high performing |
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Overcome delivery challenges |
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Optimise the end-to-end flow from idea to value realisation to improve time to market |
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Understand best practices when trying to scale effective teams |
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Be more effective with knowledge-sharing practices and collaboration through the creation of communities of practice (CoPs) |
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In summary
At AND Digital, coaching plays a massive part in helping clients and ANDis achieve their potential. As coaches, we have to be pragmatic, treating every situation on its merits and dealing with what’s in front of us. We take great pride in the value of our work and in the reward of helping clients and ANDis learn, grow and achieve their goals.
Learn more about the role of our coaches and the value they can bring, in this interview with our Agile Coaches Chris and Paul.
