Almost 80% of Agile Coaching is the same for the first 4 Sprints no matter the domain of an Agile team.
We’ve been Agile coaching and consulting over 300 organizations and 3000 teams so far since 2007. One day we sat down as almost 30 coaches and tried to find the commonalities of our coaching to help Scrum teams get mature. At the end of lots of bickering and arguments we came to a list of things that are crucial in the first 4 Sprints of a team doing Scrum. Mostly that period is 8 weeks, 2 months after a healthy kick off. We wanted to call that period the “Mechanics Era”. The goal in that period is to help the team understand the mechanics, the way of working in Agile and helping the team become aware about the impediments. Once we get closer to what’s happening inside that period and which of them hardly needs human coaching, we can summarize it as follows:
1- The team understands the events in Scrum and tries to apply Scrum by the book. Creating the Product Backlog, coming up with a Product Goal, crafting a Sprint Goal, pulling work from the Product Backlog, Defining Done, generating the Sprint Backlog, refining the Product Backlog, using a tool for transparency etc. – Mechanical > Professional
2- Team learns the time-boxes and the impact of the time-boxes on their daily life. – Mechanical > Professional
3- The team gets more jelled during that period. Forming, storming, norming and performing takes place during that period – Professional > Mechanical
4- The team should learn how to get prepared for their events (Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, Retrospective and Refinement) – Mechanical > Professional
5- Scrum Master should learn tactics for facilitating events and help the team pull work rather than the work pushed to the individuals. – Mechanical > Professional
6- The Scrum Team experiences self management and understands how they can manage their work; who is doing what when and how… – Mechanical > Professional
7- Storming among the team members where conflict management needed – Professional > Mechanical
8- Helping the stakeholders learn Scrum and their role in Scrum – Mechanical > Professional
9- Scrum Team tries to become aware of the impediments and make a list to follow and remove those impediments. Mechanics > Professional
We came to an understanding that Agile Coaches are spending a lot of time in mechanical stuff; they try to coach the teams during the events, check their backlog, sometimes come together with the Product Owner and try to teach them some more mechanical stuff again. Therefore, they are usually in a position to spend their valuable time not in human, professional stuff but in mechanical stuff which can be supported by software. This situation is also making many companies question the existence of Agile Coaches or Scrum Masters in a company since what they are doing is just going into meetings and speaking a few words after a while.
oNabu is aiming to help Agile People (Agile Coaches, Scrum/Kanban Masters, Product Owners, Developers) to have more space on human stuff and create a difference by using their creativity and humanity which is hard to be copied by a machine, at least for a while.
