The Lone Agile Coach and Disparate Coaching
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In talking with other agile coaches about the downfalls of coaching in a hierarchical organization, I’m struck by how strongly my experience resonates with others. We also end up talking about another common pattern that was likely a precursor to the challenges of a centralized coaching group: being the lone agile coach or one of a few. It goes something like this:
(1) Organic efforts have led to agile practices being adopted by one or possibly a few teams. Some may have attended training; others may have brought agile in from other companies. In any case, they are beginning to work differently from how things have been typically done. And success—or glimmers of it—are being seen. Enough momentum is generated to justify hiring an agile coach so that the benefits of agile are increased and spread more widely.
Or
(2) A leader has heard about agile and may have experience with it from somewhere else. They are bought into it enough that they want their teams to adopt agile, so they hire an agile coach.
These kinds of activities may happen in different pockets of a large organization. Agile coaches are brought in independently of one another and work with leaders in separate departments, so the structure for coaching is simple. The agile coaches face different challenges and have different goals; success may look different for each of them. They don’t interact with one another or work together because they have their own groups to focus on, and they help those groups improve.
Individual agile coaches working independently in separate parts of a large organization can do good. They can increase transparency of the work being done by teams, enable team members to collaborate better, and work with leaders to resolve impediments that exist in that area. Yet there is likely a limit to how much change can happen given the group’s context within a larger organization. The agile coach may help leaders optimize locally such that bottlenecks are now in other organizations. Improvements can be more challenging at this point.
All of this is to say that agile coaches can co-exist in an enterprise and provide benefits in their respective areas. And there are likely challenges beyond their areas that might be better addressed by them joining forces.
