• Agile & Scrum Basics

The basics: what is Agile Coaching?

For the Agile Coaches among us: you must have had to answer this question yourself on a regular basis to friends, family or colleagues. For those who are at the start of a possible Agile career; in this blog we would like to give you all the relevant basic information to answer the above question properly. For your environment and for yourself!

Just a refresher: the goal of Agile Coaching is to develop effective, transparently cohesive teams that deliver the highest value in products and services for customers. Agile Coaching always takes place based on Agile values and Agile principles.

As an Agile Coach, your intention is always to make the other person better. You accelerate the learning process of the other person. This can be an individual, but also an entire team. In addition to direct interventions on an individual or team, as an Agile Coach you also create a system in which teams can work together very effectively. So then the Agile Coach coaches the organization as a whole.

What is the purpose of Agile Coaching?

Agile Coaching is done with the following goals in mind, such as:

• increasing empirical capacity (ensuring experimentation and learning)
• validating customer value (ensuring that the best decisions are made based on data and actions are deployed that make customers happy)
• steering for self-organization and ownership (ensuring the creation of self-managing teams that can decide autonomously on the direction in which they develop)
• better prioritization and focus (ensuring that teams and the organization work very purposefully toward a goal, combining as much energy as possible to achieve a goal)
• Obtaining a rhythm and smart structure in the organization.

So as an Agile Coach, you have a clear focus on which you coach. Of course, the Agile Coach does this with the Agile pillars: Transparency, Inspection and Adaption. Coaching thus takes place to constantly look back at the progress that has been made and discover what experiment further enhances performance.

What is the skillset of an Agile Coach?

In addition to knowing and living the Agile values and principles, the Agile Coach coaches from different positions. We use 6.

• Teaching: instructing in specific knowledge and skills.
• Mentoring: sharing knowledge that helps the other person in personal and professional growth.
• Coaching: accelerating the learning process with a creative search that inspires to discover personal and professional potential.
• Facilitating: guiding a neutral process that helps reach better solutions and decisions.
• Business mastery: driving new customer value and smart organizing from a business context.
• Transformation mastery: deploying organizational change experimenting with new ways of working together.

The Product Owner is always one person, who converts interests into Product Backlog items. Next, the Product Owner determines which of these are important. These are then picked up first by the Scrum team. And can external stakeholders still exert direct influence? No. Because both the own organization and ‘externals’ respect that the Product Owner makes choices. Otherwise there is not enough room to perform the task. And the Product Backlog makes the process transparent to everyone. So you can see at any time what items still need to be done and what is important to do for now.

Do you want to know what the difference between an Agile Coach, Product Owner and Scrum Master is? Then read this article and you’ll know exactly what the differences are.