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Agile Coaching – Three Shades => Team Agile, Tech Agile, Product Agile

> Observations by an Agile Coach and a cool Venn Diagram

They kept repeating the same mantra:
You are an agile coach! Why are you so concerned about code quality and software excellence???

My client was incredulous and somewhat irritated with my suggestions.

I was explaining that focusing only on scrum team behaviors will lead to mediocre results.

In their minds – agile coach (es) should constrain themselves to making observations about the various scrum ‘ceremonies’ and improving the team adoption of team agile patterns.

When I started talking about DevOps and the CI/CD pipeline they were convinced that I was violating an agile coach boundary.

At the same time, there were others in the organization that understood the benefits of a holistic perspective on scaling a high performing engineering organization.

Yes, agile coaching is often team focused, however only focusing on team agility is detrimental to success.

In many engagements as an agile coach I find myself walking a fine line; Integrating team agility, tech agility and product agility. I share with clients the Three Shades of Agile Venn diagram to dispel agile coaching myths; In this post I’ll share the same with you!

Agile Coaching and Scrum Mastering is more than Scrum practices 

The reality of agile is more complex than merely building scrum practices into teams and agile coaching the teams to that effect. Team agile is hard – yet insufficient to creating team greatness.

For more on getting to team greatness from Team Agile perspective – Scrum- the art of doing twice the work in half the time.

The problem is that organizations adopting agile practices focus on the Agile Team practices, ignoring the vital elements of Tech and Product agile. This leads to un-balanced results. Teams improve and start creating code faster, however that code is riddled with bugs and not delivering value.

This pattern is exacerbated by the onslaught of big placement agencies. They are whole-selling agile coaches with little consideration to the client needs. This results in coaches who are predominantly Team Agile coaches.

In other words, without the proper focus on Tech Agile – the code the teams create lacks quality and engineering craftsmanship. The teams become ‘code monkeys’ (a somewhat derogatory term that I wasn’t familiar with until recently).

The teams are doing things fast – but not necessarily doing them right.

Without the proper focus on Product Agile – the code teams produce can be of high quality and delivered fast, however might not be aligned with delivery of customer value.

The teams are doing things right but not the right things.

The three shades of agile are vital to scale high performance agile teams and produce a highly functioning software organization. Many times focusing on Team Agile can lead to Agile by name only; see Understanding Fake Agile by Steve Denning.

Agile Coaching and Scrum Mastering is also about Tech Agile

I think we are letting ourselves off the hook way too easy!

By limiting our agile coaching to Agile team practices and scrum specifically we forget our commitment to the team’s overall success.

The signers of the Agile Manifesto were mostly software evangelists; their thoughts, posts and books were discipline specific. They discussed agile with the context of delivering better software. Since then, scrum has become the prevalent agile method and in turn assimilated other agile methods into it. The unintended result is that the Tech Agile practices are pushed aside;

Agile coaches and for-hire scrum masters working in software organizations  (sometimes erroneously referred to interchangeably) – who lack software background are hesitant to challenge the team with concepts such as: engineering excellence, build in code quality, daily clean code, continuous integration, continuous deployment, craftsmanship etc. For a great read about agile coaching both Tech and Team Agile – read: Scrum and XP from the Trenches

However, as coaches and scrum masters it is our duty to challenge the team with exactly these concepts. High performance software teams can only become such when they mature both in the Team Agile and their Tech Agile practices!!!

Note that Tech Agile practices are domain specific; the software Tech agile practices are software specific. Teams operating in other domains would have their own Tech Agile practices. For example read my post on Lean Agile Delivery on Cadence.

Master the balance – Tech, Team and Product Agile

Agile coaching is about offering what the teams need when they need it.

Starting with Team Agile practices such as:

• Definition of Done, Definition of Ready, Retrospective done well.
• Team agile scrum patterns – the metrics identified by Sutherland et al is a great starting point.
• Stop Starting Start Finishing to accelerate delivery.
• Team behaviors Trust, Psychological Safety – talking about the hard stuff.

Are a great first step in getting high performance agile teams – however without the complementing Tech agile patterns mentioned above – high performance often eludes the team.

From a team perspective, in order to have a successful DevOps transformation; Agile Product methods are needed:

• Lean UX.
• Value stream mapping.
• Lean startup – hypothesis and validated learning – Build Measure Learn cycle.
• Agile story mapping.
• Lean Agile intake process.

Learn more about Product Agile in this Graphic Novel – How To Survive When Technology Disrupts Your Business.

Getting Agile Product behaviors and patterns in place and improving them is also necessary to scale agile across an organization successfully.

Moving from dysfunction to high performance is a daunting challenge. Agile coaching provides teams with the necessary insights, support and mentoring to transform. Agile coaches and scrum masters must embrace more than just the prescriptive Team Agile practices. They need to transform themselves and develop understanding and insight in Tech and Product Agile to serve both the teams and the organization on the journey to high performance.

Learn more: My Lean-DevOps-Agile journey – The Good the Bad and the Ugly.

April 28, 2020