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Clear Benefits
Practical Team Level Coaching
Practical Team Level Coaching
Practical Team Level Coaching
Maybe you invested a lot of money on enterprise agile coaching in the past with no ROI, or maybe you just need someone to serve as a temporary consultant to figure out what is needed.
I can help - this is what I do. Working with teams is my passion.
I am a collaborative senior level Scrum Master / Agile Coach with loads of experience in the areas of business analysis, product backlog management, product ownership, technical writing, acceptance testing and edge case testing.
I use this experience to help my teammates succeed.
Ultimately my job is to help your teams consistently set goals and achieve them.
I have played a key role in three successful agile transformations, resulting in massive ROI in all three cases.
Operational Continuity
Practical Team Level Coaching
Practical Team Level Coaching
We'll start with the team's existing schedule - there is no need to take up valuable coding time with new meetings. If you want, I can start facilitating team meetings right away, but it is not required.
If you already have a team member serving as a "scrum master" or similar role, I can join the team as a non-directive consultant and mentor the team as well as the scrum master.
Let's keep your teams working - I will engage directly with them as they go about the business of performing the work that has been brought to them.
We'll fix this plane while it's flying.
Waterfall: A Realistic, Pragmatic Approach
Most Agile practitioners hold a dim view of Waterfall. "It's great for building a bridge but not for software." That is 100% true, but flexibility is required. Here's a hint as to how I approach this question:
If Product Management brings an important high-level capability/feature to the Development group and an agreement is reached to fund the conversion of that vision into an "MVP" solution by a certain date, a waterfall mentality will soon surround that project.
From the perspective of the product owner, that date on the calendar is an area of focus every day, and the Dev team will become acutely aware of it, strengthening the waterfall mentality.
This is natural and fully understandable.
As an experienced Lean-Agile practitioner, I would embrace this challenge at the team level and adjust accordingly with these two Lean-Agile coaching tactics:
1. Gentle but firm scope control based on simplicity and a constant vigilance to avoid "gold-plating."
2. Frequent system demos (especially if the solution is large enough to require more than one team to build it) to reduce the risk of production defects that famously plague waterfall projects.
These two tactics are proven winners and if your project has strong similarities with the example above, I will make sure this pragmatic approach is utilized for the benefit of your project.
Establishing Best Practices
In addition to the Lean-Agile activities normally associated with Scrum, there are proven tactics and practices that I will promote each and every opportunity, with your buy-in.
From my personal experience, these practices are highly correlative to superior delivery:
- Stable rosters (no people-splitting)
- Paired Programming or Paired Work
- "Swarming" on difficult work items
- Cross-functional team members (steady elimination of "Silo'd" Skill sets)
- Test Driven Development, Behavior Driven Development OR Automated Regression test suites covering at least 85% of all function points delivered to Production
- Routine System Demos that involve more than one workflow step in the larger system
These practices are not universally supported, and not every team is a good fit to attempt them, so you and I will agree up front which of these proposed practices are realistic for your teams to approach early on, and which ones are better introduced to the team later.