Getting Better Agile Transitions

This blog is about dogfood.

Correction, this blog is about how some consultancies that preach agile don’t each their own dogfood.

So let me give you an example…

Joe Bloggs & Sons Agile Consultants make huge amounts of money by telling their customers how to be agile. They give them the usual schpiel about working in iterations and doing the most important , high value requirements first. Then they really stress that the key to all this is collaboration, communication and feedback.

Yet Joe Bloggs never meets with his sons (the coaches and consultants) or even calls them regularly to find out how their projects are going. Funny thing is , they don’t even realise that they have projects. That their projects are the transititioning gigs they are working on. There are no prioritised backlogs for their transitions – rather there are contractual days of coaching. WTF??

Worse still – Joe’s sons are all at different gigs, do they synchronise regularly and exchange ideas and technquies or even help counsel each other – hell no!. With Joe Bloggs & Sons, its the same bullcrap way of business as its always been – nevermind the ‘Agile Consultants’ at the end of the name.

Phew! Rant over. :{

So how do transitioning teams get better transitions… here are my tips:

• Form a relationship with your coach and as far as possible keep the same coach (if they are good)
• Look for a coach that actively encourages empowerment (i.e. doesn’t encourage your dependence on him or her)
• Actively check out their background, see what they do in the agile community, ask to talk to their previous clients
• Find a coach that will roll up their sleeves and help your team out and then debrief you afterwards – then encourages you to do better.
• Work with your coach to draw up a prioritised list of coaching requirements or stories, include what conditions of satisfaction you are willing to accept (how will you know the coaching is satisfactory?). Don’t be afraid for these to be intangibles (like feelings and innate knowledge) rather than simple physical artifacts (like code or user stories).
• Make sure you meet with your coach at the end of every day and identify what issues they are facing in coaching your team (hey these guys are not cheap, so make sure they aren’t blocked).
• Make all the people in the team to be coached as available as they possibly can.

These aren’t all the tips I have, but they are enough for even experienced teams to grapple with.

It really pisses me off to see wasted opportunities to help teams improve their agile adoptions. All it takes is a little thought and a whole lot of love.