Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition

by Adkins Lyssa

In the second pass, the product owner lets the impediments in, one at a time. For this pass, invite the team to join the party. Together, they may find that some impediments are truly hard technical dependencies and cannot be moved. If so, perhaps a lesser-value story needs to get done before the higher-value one. Almost anything else, though, falls into the category of “We’d like to help you, but...,” which signals that the company simply doesn’t value the product highly enough to remove the impediment or that the cost of removing the impediment outweighs the benefit.

Make decisions transparent, and make the impact on the team known. If it’s true that the company chooses to allow the team to deliver less value than they can, then let that reality stand in full view.

In a healthy relationship, with a fully functional coach and a fully functional product owner, when asked about direction, schedule, and budget, the agile coach simply replies, “That’s a good question for the product owner. She has all the details.” A whole host of team problems can usually be remedied by teaching (or reteaching) the roles of agile coach and product owner. When you do this, include the team by asking them to hold both agile coach and product owner up to these role definitions and expect that they will fill them completely. Consider anything less an impediment.

When you coach product owners to be good for the team, remember this: Teach the role, coach the role, and ask the team to expect the product owner to uphold the role. Beyond this, let the role fail. Then, help the team and the product owner learn from the failure, recover from it together, and become stronger.

Be of one mind with the sponsor: The product owner and product sponsor must be so completely synchronized on the current and future direction of the product that if they were standing side by side there would be no daylight between them.

For the agile manager, teams become a fundamental object of study, including how they work and develop over time; how to form them and nurture their growth; and how to measure, reward, and sustain them for the long term.

Managing investments becomes less focused on schedules and the “next big deadline” and more focused on what is the best investment now.

Getting the most from agile means moving from the “conformance to plan” paradigm to “conformance to value” thinking.

Protect no one from the natural consequences of the situation because therein lies the learning. Coach the manager one-on-one to take the lesson further. In this way, you accomplish damage control that addresses the current situation and may compel the agile manager to take the next important step in their agile journey.

It was hard for me to move from being a project manager with subject-matter expertise to being an agile coach until I had this realization: I can be just another voice on the team discussing today’s problem, or I can step fully into this role of agile coach, helping them get better and better. This is important and something no one else is doing yet.

With informal conversations, the coach stays focused on working within the team to increase the quality of their interactions so that they can increase the quality of their products. This is so much more expansive and valuable than being yet another subject-matter expert!

Get a fresh start: No matter how the last sprint ended, this sprint is new. The team comes to sprint planning with a renewed sense of commitment resulting from the agreements they made with one another during the retrospective. The past is gone. The future is uncertain. This sprint is the only thing the team can control.

Create focus and abundance: By choosing the right amount of work for the sprint based on the team’s previous achievements, the team has created focus for themselves. They are able to give the work their focused effort because they are excused from worrying about everything. That mental load has been lifted. Instead, they worry only about what they have committed to do.

Sprint planning is done when we can answer these questions: • If the goal of this sprint were a newspaper headline, what would it be? • What is the team composition for this sprint? • What is the total team capacity for this sprint? • What are the highest business value product backlog items? • What are the concerns (technical, political, cultural) about these product backlog items? • What other concerns does the team have? • Given all this, what are the stories, conditions of satisfaction, tasks, and estimates for the items that will form the sprint backlog? • Given all this, is there any change to the stories or conditions of satisfaction for this sprint? Do items need to move from the sprint backlog back to the product backlog? • What is the team’s final commitment for this sprint?

As the vision keeper, the product owner says “what” needs to get done and stays out of the team’s domain, which is “how” it will get done and “how much” effort it will take.

“I heard an offer to add someone to the team. I want to make sure that you know the team has a say about who is on the team. Having a say requires you to say something. Otherwise, someone else will make the decision for you.”

Over time, you will probably come up with your own observation questions. They will naturally arise from what you observe (that’s how this list was initially created). Add your questions to the list and share them with fellow agile coaches. See whether you can help build up an agile coach storehouse of great observation

Invite the highest-ranking person you can find to paint for the team a vision of the product to be created by them. This person’s opinion matters to the team. It’s someone they want to impress and who has a vested interest in the product because the company has conferred formal authorization to this person to achieve company goals. More than likely, this person sponsors, or pays for, the project. The one holding the purse strings has great influence. Use it.

As the product owner completes the product backlog review, ask the question, “Product owner, what short phrase, like a newspaper headline, encompasses the goal for this first sprint?”

If a team gets off to a rough start, that’s OK as long as you don’t save them from themselves. Educate throughout, coach, and abide by their choices. Let them feel the natural consequences of their decisions and then, when they are ready, guide them back to the core of agile.

To help them, remember this memory-jogger: CRACK. An effective product owner is Committed, Responsible, Authorized, Collaborative, and Knowledgeable (Boehm and Turner 2003): Committed to the work and engaged in it fully, like any other team member Responsible for the outcome so that “skin in the game” is a reality Authorized by the person paying the bills to make decisions about the product under development and to know which decisions can be made solo and which require consultation with others Collaborative as a normal mode of interacting with people Knowledgeable about the business purposes of the endeavor and the business domain itself

“It’s the team’s commitment, not yours.”

Does “Take the problem to the team” mean that an agile coach does nothing to see danger coming or notice problems right under her feet? Certainly not. It just means that she doesn’t go looking for danger, identify a potential problem, assess options, choose a solution, and implement it all by herself. She need not be alone to do all that work anymore. And that’s a good thing, too. When the team takes their rightful place as problem solvers, she can clearly see how often she must have wrongfully solved the problems of the past for them.

A problem is brought to your attention, or you detect a problem. Pause (really, take a pause), and reflect on the problem to see it clearly. Take the problem to the team. Allow the team to act (or not).

Remember, it’s their commitment, not yours. Whether they act or not rests with them, not with you. Whether they follow through with the actions they planned or not has everything to do with them and nothing to do with you.

the job of the coach ...is not to repair or “fix” the system but rather to reveal its nature to its members. Armed with new awareness the systems’ members can become “response-able” to better perform the tasks of the system. This mirroring process empowers the self-regulating function of the system (

only job of the agile coach is to reveal the system to itself through observation that invites exploration. As the coach, you simply state what you observe and then allow silence.

People will eventually talk, and when they do, the coach remains focused on helping the team reveal more about their (eco)system to one another. Wherever it goes, the coach follows, asking questions and then remaining silent so that team members can uncover more and more and get a richer view of what’s going on. Then, having attained this view, they will naturally move to correct what needs to be corrected.

With agile, the makings of structures abound: the practices and principles inherent in agile methods, the agile manifesto, values, the purposes of recurring events such as sprint reviews or stand-ups, role definitions, and the focus on removing waste. All of these serve as fertile ground for creating structures that help the team become conscious of dealing with conflict in the context of getting better at a particular bit of agile. Choose one of these bits to bring to the team—or reaffirm it—when the team experiences conflict. Pick the one you think will get to the core of the conflict. Pick something inspiring. You can find much inspiration in the simplicity and depth of agile methods. You need not look far to find a piece of agile the team can use to create a structure that will serve.

So, too, with collaboration. The ideas that emerge don’t come with a straight-path way to trace back to their origins. When collaborating, team members build on top of one another’s ideas, each person giving away their cherished vision of what it “should be” so that something better, something that no one of them could have imagined alone, emerges from the ash of their burned and forgotten personal visions. This creates an environment of courageous sharing and vulnerability, an environment where the whole truly can be greater than the sum of its parts. The agile coach sets the tone that allows this environment to grow.

Arriving fully “on time” means that team members have done what’s necessary to clear from their minds everything but that which is required and relevant for the day’s work. This requires each person to discover what helps them clear the clutter and get into the day. In a collaboration seminar I conducted, 30 participants came up with more than 75 ideas for doing just this in less than five minutes. Among them were listen to classical music, make sounds for no particular purpose, look at art, walk the dog, eat breakfast, do nonessential reading, count steps on the way up the stairs, drink coffee and listen to heavy metal, look myself in the eyes in the mirror, and sit on a rock in the woods. None of these is radical or hard to do. All of them are personal and have been done before by the people who listed them (so they know how to do them). All of them bring one’s attention inward to quiet one’s mind and get ready to be involved with others.

Collaborators re-conceive a problem or process in light of each other’s contributions, using them as material out of which, in combination with their own ideas, they make new, unpredictable ideas (Austin and Devin 2003).

Through re-conceiving, the team makes new, unpredictable ideas. We need unpredictable if we’re going to get astonishing results, the kind agile enables but doesn’t guarantee. To increase the chances of seeing the astonishing, encourage re-conceiving wherein we build up ideas, not break them down.

agile coaches must help the team “produce synergy through the discussion and appreciation of different perspectives, because two types of behavior kill synergy: people saying more than they know, and people saying less than they know” (Avery 2001).

Let’s do Fist of Five on this statement: I am excited about this conversation, and I am freely contributing my ideas with ease.

Holding fast to “win” creates a negative self-fulfilling prophecy. If a team member clutches their ideas close and refuses to let them meld and merge with others, then the bigger, better idea will be blocked from coming forth.

The power and beauty of emergence is so moving when it happens that it becomes something to cherish and believe in. Teams who see emergence occur create a kind of faith that something great will emerge, if only they believe it will happen and share fully and openly in the process of coaxing it forth. Once a team has seen the beauty of collaborative, emergent ideas arising, they are powerfully motivated to relax their personal agendas in deference to the force of the collaborative. Breaking the negative self-fulfilling prophecy has to start somewhere, and that somewhere starts with you.

Keep your own backlog of team improvements, and prioritize them according to business value. When you don’t know how to split your time between teams, let the backlog tell you. Work with the teams in business value order. Spend the most time with the team that’s in the middle of the highest business value improvement and less time with another and maybe no time with the third (for today). When you are with a team, give that team your full, undivided attention and presence.

The battle cry of a team may be, “If we’re going to fail, let’s fail fast.” They (and you) can adopt a cavalier attitude about failure because the timeboxed sprint ensures that no one fails very far or with very far-reaching results. And, if the failure reveals that the endeavor should have failed, then we’d rather know that now. This step toward trusting is provided for you by agile itself.

While observing a team as it works, get curious about what’s going on. Ask yourself questions such as these: What’s trying to happen here? Where is the team headed? What might the team find useful? Then, notice what’s going on some more. Take the time to see what’s really there, to get the clear view of the team—the view uncolored by your judgments and assumptions. Then, notice what’s going on with you. What failure mode is happening for you? What are you feeling? Is fear motivating you? Where is the trust? Where is your attention?