Agile Coach Types & Things About Them from Horse’s Mouth
I’ve been an Agile Coach/consultant for quite a while now and I had a good exposure to other Agile coaches either with working with them and mostly by following them through social media. I am not exempt of some of the things that you will read below 🙂
Some Agile Coach Types:
- Agile coach who primarily uses Scrum
- Agile coach who almost only uses Kanban
- Agile Coach with Lean mindset
- Agile Coach who uses multiple frameworks/method at the same time (method Agnostic)
- Agile Coach who is obsesses with metrics (usually Kanban coaches)
- Agile coach who focuses on collaboration, work a lot on teams and individuals
- Agile coach who works as a consultant and focus on removing organisational wide problems
- Agile coach only comfortable working with teams
- Agile coach working with only managers (Enterprise Agile coach)
- Agile coach priorities
- Agile coach who gives training and some followup workshops (training and workshop person). Usually writes lots of blogs.
- Agile coach who likes Tribes
- Agile coach who hates SAFe
- Agile coach who hates all certifications
- Agile coach who uses visual facilitation lots
- Agile coach who admires and jealous of nice drawings:) (like me)
- In house Agile Coach
- Outsource Agile Coach
- Teller Agile Coach
- Doer Agile Coach
Funny things about Agile Coaches
- Agile coaches are great when it is other people’s business. But how Agile are they in real life or in their own businesses ? Typical example, are they able to limit their own WIP ? 🙂
- Agile coaches think they know almost everything about Agile. Experienced coaches probably spent vast amount of time in reading and they are usually highly opinionated. One of the hardest challenge of an Agile coach is to work with other Agile coaches 🙂 Agile Coaches might struggle to team up.
- If an Agile Coach is biased about a method or an approach, it may be harder to change her/his opinion than transform the entire organisation 🙂 Question pops up here is: why should we change her/his opinion ? 🙂
An Agile coach is someone who bashes other’s opinions in Twitter as hard as they can 🙂 - Some Agile coaches twitter/linked like only certain Agile coaches. Liking an unpopular Agile person may discredit your skills 🙂 Likewise instead of liking it is better to comment to show off 🙂
- Agile Coach almost always struggles what to put as title in linked in. Coach, consultant, enterprise coach, engagement manager, learner, experimenter, whatever….:) Titles are not important when it comes to coaching organisations 🙂 See bullet one
Agile Coaches can help you to speed up your Agile adoption due to their vast experience, given you work with the right organisation and coaches but don’t forget they are also human and they have their own biases and weaknesses. They also go through constant learning with the organisation they try to help.
