Is an Agile 2 Coach an Agile Coach?
Yes, and so much more.
Agile has changed. We know that. So already, many Agile coaches embrace Agile 2 ideas, because Agile 2’s ideas are, by and large, the “new” Agile that you tend to read about from more recent authors—those authors who are not invested in the early Agile narratives and are able to write from a fresh perspective: authors such as Nicole Forsgren, David Marquet, and Klaus Leopold.
But how do you know if your Agile coaches think in terms of these newer ideas, or are still wedded to early Agile ideas that were too simplistic for large organizations?
Also, Agile coaches are often saddled with habits and practices that they started advocating years ago, years before Agile grew up and independent thinkers realized that early Agile ideas were too simplistic. As a result, many Agile coaches who embrace Agile 2 ideas are still advocating old approaches out of habit. For example, while they might now advocate for neurodiversity, and recognize that not everyone does well in a face-to-face group discussion, they might still be in the habit of setting up group meetings for everything, because it has simply become how they do things. They might not know how to effectively facilitate asynchronous collaboration and written communication in general.
An Agile 2 coach is an Agile coach; but they have a much more nuanced and sophisticated view. Your Agile initiatives will run much better.
In contrast, Agile 2 coaches have invested time in rethinking their entire approach, from an agility and effectiveness perspective, with the explicit understanding that not everyone is the same. While an Agile 2 coach might have certifications for Scrum, SAFe, and other frameworks from Agile’s early days, they have gone through training that required them to take an inquisitive approach, rather than blindly accepting the unproven practices of someone’s framework and forcing a one-size-fits-all approach on teams. They are able to look through a clearer lens, and ask,
What will really work in this situation, for these people? Because every situation is different.
So yes, an Agile 2 coach is an Agile coach; but they have a much more nuanced and sophisticated set of Agile approaches; their approaches actually work, at scale. And that means that your Agile initiatives will run much better. You will see great outcomes. Agile will succeed in your organization.
Remember that Agile 2 is a set of ideas and approaches. It is not a company. In contrast, Agile 2 Academy is a company founded to leverage the insights of Agile 2 in order to help organizations to achieve agility. Agile 2 Academy has expertise in Agile 2, organization culture analysis (using the acclaimed Human Synergistics culture analysis tools), and DevOps, because those are three legs of the stool of product development and delivery.
Agile 2 Academy’s Agile coaches are, of course, Agile 2 coaches, but they also are trained in DevOps. The ramifications of that are huge.
Agile 2 is an open set of ideas and approaches. Agile 2 Academy is a company
What do we mean that they “know DevOps”? We did not give them a little two day fluff course. They have built microservices. They have deployed to an Amazon ECS cluster. They have devised test integration strategies and created automated integration tests using Behavior-Driven Development. They are not necessarily engineers, just as someone who is shown how to ride a horse and throw a lasso is not yet a cowboy. But they have experienced Devops issues, firsthand. They have not just learned some buzzwords: they have experienced the issues that occur, because that is what their training is set up to do: to reproduce the actual multi-team issues, and teach them patterns to solve those issues. That is invaluable, because Agile does not scale without DevOps.
But back to Agile 2. Here are some examples of how an Agile 2 coach might approach a situation differently from a traditional Agile coach.
Situation 1: A product has 30 teams, and they have not been collaborating sufficiently about how they perform integration.
Typical Agile approaches:
During PI planning, facilitate identification of dependencies
Set up a Scrum of Scrums
Possible Agile 2 approaches:
Challenge the team tech leads to devise a technical integration practice, that enables teams to integrate early and often
Set up a tech lead team, consisting of the tech leads, and challenge them to maintain an ongoing list of delivery issues, and work continuously to devise, try, and refine their approaches.
Challenge the tech lead team to identify both leading and trailing metrics that indicate quality and cycle time
Discussion:
Agile 2 coaches think in terms of flow and cycle time. They are not wedded to Scrum practices such as Scrum of Scrum or any other “standard” practice. They consider the problem, and what might solve that problem. In this case, they realize that fundamentally, there is not enough leadership happening between the teams.
There are many ways to solve that. One way is to appoint someone who has the desired leadership behaviors. Another way is to first challenge the teams and see if they can solve it, to see if good leadership emerges, but they might need some structure and guidance: in this case the structure takes the form of assembling the tech leads, and the guidance takes the form of asking for specific kinds of metrics. The next step would be to see what the tech leads do, and decide if the approach is working, or if a more directive approach is needed.
The coach will also sit in on the discussions that the tech leads have, and assess if someone is dominating—that is, if poor leadership has emerged—and if so, whether someone less domineering and more inquisitive needs to be empowered to lead the discussions. This needs to be addressed very early, before discord develops or patterns become established.
Situation 2: The Product Owner has not been able to define features that customers actually like, and customers have complained about the product’s usability.
Typical Agile approaches:
Insert a “UX” person on each team
Possible Agile 2 approaches:
Set up a product design team, that works in parallel with the development teams.
Challenge the product design team to invite members of the development teams to brainstorm with them on a frequent recurring basis.
Challenge the product design team to include select development team members, on a rotating basis, during discussions with trial users.
Challenge the product design team to solicit product ideas from the development teams.
Challenge the development leads to empower developers to suggest and prototype ideas for the product’s features.
Discussion:
Agile coaches usually do not have experience in product design, and their training in frameworks like Scrum have taught them to assume that a Product Owner is all you need. The reality is that product design is a difficult specialty; but it is a specialty that cannot operate in isolation.
Agile 2 coaches know about product design, and patterns for integrating product design with development. Depending on the kind of product, an Agile 2 coach will recommend one of several ways of establishing a robust product design activity that is well integrated with product development, and that makes sure that developers are not treated as mere implementers. That is because Agile 2 coaches know that developers who understand how the users will be using the product tend to have some of the best ideas for features and how to make features more effective.
What an amazing difference. Hopefully you can see how the approaches on the left are little more than shouting in the wind, whereas the approaches on the right are actually a form of leadership coupled with empowering knowledge.
But powerful as that is, it is not enough, because coaches need to understand how the work is done. Otherwise, they cannot understand many of the issues that arise for development teams. That’s why Agile 2 Academy coaches not only know Agile 2, but they also have DevOps training. Because of that, they would be able to solve the following situation in this way:
Situation 3: There are enterprise rules that do not allow development teams to define their own deployment architecture.
Typical Agile approaches:
Just accept the rules
Complain that “the organization is not Agile”
A possible Agile 2 + DevOps approaches:
Identify who set the rule.
Request to meet with that person.
Explain how the rule is holding the teams back.
Propose an alternative, that maximizes flow while managing risk
Discussion:
This approach requires the coach to be an advocate; however, the issue is likely to be highly technical. The coach can bring the tech lead along, but tech leads often are not very adept at explaining complex technical issues to managers. If the tech lead is, then that person can explain the problem.
That still might not be enough though. If the organization’s culture is one in which people are expected to accept the rules and “do things the way we do them,” then the tech lead will not try very hard to convince the manager to change the rule.
Convincing someone to change a rule is a sales process. That requires experience and skill in selling ideas. A coach needs to be able to advocate for the teams, and so a coach needs to be able to sell ideas. But to sell a technical idea, the coach needs to understand the idea. If the idea pertains to DevOps methods, then the coach needs to understand those methods. Good news: Agile 2 Academy coaches do.
Conclusion
Agile 2 coaches can be plugged into any spot where you would have an Agile coach. You can also upskill an Agile coach, by training them in Agile 2’s ideas. That frees them from the shackles of the many obsolete views and practices of “classic” Agile and arms them with newer, more nuanced and effective approaches.
In this article we did not get into the many ideas and approaches of Agile 2, but they include a rich set of leadership models, a better understanding of the many modes of collaboration, better ways of linking product design and product development, the importance of including data modeling in early stages of development—so that one does not end with a data lake that cannot be leveraged for machine learning—and much more.
The bottom line is that Agile 2 helps people and their organizations to be more effective. Agile 2 coaches are Agile coaches—they are just better at their job because they are armed with more effective Agile viewpoints, because as we explained, Agile has changed.
Agile 2 Academy’s Agile coaches also know DevOps, so if your organization operates on a technology platform—like most do today—your coaches will be able to participate in conversations about technical workflow and ask powerful questions to help reduce cycle time and improve quality.
It’s a no-brainer: Agile coaches who know Agile 2 and DevOps, or those who don’t.
