The Importance Of Being An Agile Coach On The Project Team - Term Paper Example

Communication and Facilitation of an Agile Coach The Importance Of Being An Agile Coach On The Project Team. Agile coaches more than often are the facilitators of their teams. As agile coaching requires the change of organizational culture, something that takes a considerable time, as most managers and organizations believe that they cannot change their culture, an agile n coach acts as an intermediary, who facilitates the team to achieve full productivity. Agile coaches, being experts in their fields have adequate information on the project. The coach acts as a trainer, part consultant and as an advisor. The team, in order to meet their goals and master their work requires constant training. The coach should be there to provide the team with the required training and consultancy whenever in need. Organizational teams focus in completing a particular project. As such, the team should have adequate background information on the project (Spayd & Adkins, 2011). Further, they require information on the objectives of the project. The agile coach in most cases, being the team leader, holds the mandate of providing the people with such information. Largely, the success of these teams depends on the expertise of the agile leader. In their own mandate, agile teams have to complete a project, not only within a short time, but also in an effective way. The team requires adequate training on the agility principles. If the coach has no understanding of the agile principles, then it is impossible for the manager to provide the team with the essential training and information required to complete the task. It is also the role of the coach to provide team members with a leeway for independent thinking, thus enhancing creativity among the members of the teams (Spayd & Adkins, 2011). The key roles the agile coach plays in team communication and facilitation activities The coach holds the facilitation process on behalf of the client in the team instead of acting as an expert in the content training. Largely, the coach is accountable for the individuals, the team and the group. Further, the facilitator holds the important role of conducting the meeting processes and content follow-up, but ensuring that there is no direct involvement with the content of the team (Linden, 2010). Since acting as a coach means allowing the priorities of the clients to determine the direction, the coach does not include individual expertise or opinions in the delivery of the services to the client. The coach reduces the fear that members of their teams have to face, thus increasing their trust in the leader. Trusting that the team knows the right thing to do is the most important way of helping the group members perform to their maximum (Linden, 2010). Whenever there is a problem, the coach trusts that they can bounce back and rectify the problem increases their confidence. Trusting that team players learn better through failures is yet another way of increasing confidence among the members of the teams (Spayd & Adkins, 2011). Through this method of facilitation rather than management, the team believes in themselves. This improves the communication between the members of the teams. Strategies that the agile coach needs to follow to avoid communication breakdown.  While trying to avoid communication breakdown among their groups, agile coaches can use different strategies. Communication is the most important element for the success of a particular team. Poor communication or the absence of good communication among the various players in a team is a recipe for failure. Lack of proper communication leads to poor coordination, lack of proper planning and eventually contributes to the failure of the team. Thus, ensuring that the team has proper communication is an important element for the success of the team. One of the most important ways of ensuring proper communication is establishing an agile culture among the members of the team and the entire organization. No team functions in isolation. In fact, successful teams receive overwhelming support from the organization, whether in terms of resources of emotional support. Such a project, constrained by time, and with the client exit means overwhelming responsibilities. As such, lack of organizational support would hinder the entire process. While establishing an agile culture, three major groups have to come together within the company. Executive management, being the top-level organizational management holds the mandate of endorsing the agile principles. Through endorsement, the executive managers give a leeway to the team to undertake its duties in a proper way. The working managers on the other hand play a big role in the success of agile teams. By learning to coach instead of directing helps in cementing and subsequently ensuring team cohesiveness. They act more as leaders of the team, becoming part of these teams rather than the managers of these groups. The third group is the project team, which undertakes the actual work of completing the task. They should understand and support agile principles and practices. Avoiding the failure modes by these coaches is yet another way in which they can ensure that the team remains in tight yet effective communication process (Linden, 2010). Expressed as personas, the failure modes for the agile teams include the spy, the seagull, the Opinionator, the admin, the hub, the butterfly and the expert. While the spy spends considerable amount of time observing the team to pick up topics to address during the next retrospective, the seagull swoops in at the team unannounced and takes away as fast as he came (Adkins, 2008). The opinionator on the other hand expresses opinions during team discussions and sticks to them that they forget other opinions. The admin on the other hand undermines the team ownership, assuming the role of an intermediary in meeting the logistics and administration issues among the members of the team (Adkins, 2008). The hub on the other hand acts as the center of the world communication between the team members and the task level coordination. The butterfly has no real stand and hopes from team to team only to make an appeal or pose a sophisticated question (Adkins, 2008). Finally, the expert is too involved in the teams work and requires all the details among the members of the team (Adkins, 2008). The ability of the agile coach to avoid these failure modes not only helps in ensuring proper communication among the members but also ensures the success of the team in meeting its obligations (Kelly, 2009). Best practices in communication as an agile coach It is important for coaches to understand that consistently achieving truly great results is extremely rare. Thus, great results require a great team, which rarely happen. Spending considerable amount of time in the planning stage of the team is the only sure way of having a cohesive team (Spayd & Adkins, 2011). Spending adequate time in training the team members gives them the required experience. The agile coach can employ both written and verbal forms of communication to improve the performance of the team. By using face-to-face communication, the coach ensures cohesiveness among the members of the team. Face to face, communication gives people an opportunity to share other ideas away from the duties they have to handle (“ICAgile”, 2013). Using phone calls is yet another practice that can lead to high performance levels. Thus, team members should have each other’s phone contacts, which help in instant problem solving through ease of consulting. Non-verbal communication and especially body language helps the coach learn the mood of the team. Even without their reporting, a wise coach can read the mood of the team and tell when something is wrong or right (“ICAgile”, 2013). Facial expression is yet another form of communication that the coach should emphasize among the members of the team. Finally, the use of written communication, especially in training and coaching lessons is important as it gives evidence for future reference. Whenever employing these methods, the coach should ensure that he allows for feedback form the team members. Further, the non-verbal communication cues should play a big role in establishing problems and finding ways of dealing with these problems. The coach also should allow members to raise their concerns without intimidation. Facilitation techniques among agile coaches Agile coaches use different techniques whenever facilitating their team members. These in fact are not just techniques but games that whenever employed by the agile coaches improve the performance of their groups (Kelly, 2009). Although all these techniques focus at improving the quality of the group members, they function differently. General brainstorming, regarded as the most effective facilitation technique and the most preferred by coaches involves affinity mapping, dot voting and pre-mortem. Among the three techniques applied in general brainstorming, affinity mapping is the best way to collect, organize and rationalize ideas. It is most even effective and yields great results in large amounts of ideas. Whenever people brainstorm, they generate many ideas that require careful scrutiny (“ICAgile”, 2013). For instance, constrained by time, members of a team could brainstorm on the ideas of how to compete the task, without experiencing delays. When the members come up with the ideas, they can then pick on the most important ideas and ones that promises instant results. Affinity mapping helps in mapping closely related ideas from among the various ideas raised by the team members (Kelly, 2009). The coach can then map closely related ideas in order to generate one reliable and strong idea. On the other hand, dot voting is a simple way of getting a group of people to form a consensus amongst them. It allows all participants an opportunity to share their ideas and thoughts (“ICAgile”, 2013). Further, it is an easy way of ranking things, according to their order of importance and effectiveness. When the coach is seeking for ways of ensuring high performance among the team, he can allow them to come up with different ideas on how they can improve their productivity. Subsequently, they come up with ideas, which they then rank according to the order of effectiveness and later implement them. The pre-mortem on the other hand is a great risk management technique. As mortem concerns with death, planning ensures that an agile coach creates a bucket list and understanding the various issues to address to ensure a healthy group (“ICAgile”, 2013). Further, it helps in establishing the various things that a coach needs to do in order to keep the team in a safe and cohesive manner. In case a coach was to adopt such a method, identifying the various issues among the team members is the best way of conducting a pre-mortem analysis before beginning on the actual facilitation process. References Adkins, L. (2008). Seven Agile Coach Failure Modes, Agile connection. Article. Retrieved from http://www.agileconnection.com/article/seven-agile-coach-failure-modes?page=0%2C3 ICAgile (2013). Agile Team Facilitation & Coaching Track. Retrieved from http://www.agilecoachinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/2013_ICAgile_TeamFacilitationCoaching-DRAFT-1.pdf Kelly, A. (2009). The Role of the Agile Coach, Agile connection. Article. Retrieved from http://www.agileconnection.com/article/role-agile-coach?page=0%2C0 Linden, M. (2010). Coaching is the key for scrum success, Scrumalliance. Spayd, M & Adkins, L. (2011). Developing Great Agile Coaches Towards a Framework of Agile Coaching Competency – Part I, Agile Coaching Institute. Read More