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Naresh Jain's Random Thoughts on Software Development and Adventure Sports
     
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2 Cents of Caution Before Hiring A Coach for your Agile Team

Recently I read Esther Derby’s blog post on Five Reasons to Hire a Coach for Agile Teams. While I agree with all her points, following are the questions or concerns running through my mind.

  • What are the risks involved when hiring a coach?
    • What is success ratio? How many teams you know (not heard of in some cooked up report by a consulting company or a tool vendor) who are successful adopting Agile with a coach’s help? And how many teams do you know who have failed trying to adopt agile without using a coach? Let me clarify, when I say adopt Agile, its not about a bunch of practices. Its about continuously evolving the process to make it lean and more efficient and more enjoyable.
    • Can any coach do or do we need a special type of coach? Point I’m getting at is, your chances to succeed is based on the quality of the coach and her experience.
    • In my opinion your chances of failure is much more if you hire an average coach from outside who does not understand the business, organization and team context & culture.
    • The big problem we face today is we don’t have a good way to know if someone is a good coach or not. What are the chances you’ll end up hiring the right coach? Its not sufficient if someone is a certified professional. In some cases, its not even sufficient if someone has written a couple of books.
    • Also in my experience, ability to connect and influence the team members is very important. A good team member is in a much better position to achieve this than any average coach from outside.
  • How sustainable is the model of hiring a coach?
    • What happens when the coach leaves? Is the team evolving their process or still using what the coach put together?
    • Hiring a coach from outside might speed up things. But I’m not sure if people will be able to understand the rationale behind doing certain things. In my experience failure is a great learning tool. Taking more time to achieve something (and in the process failing a few times) is not bad, it make something more sustainable and scalable.
  • Can you teach/coach someone to be agile? Agile has been around at least for the last 10 years, what are the chances one or more coaches can change that? (I’m not saying its not possible, I’m trying to highlight that its not simple. It involves organizational transformation and change in individual’s mindset).

My advice is before looking for a training or coaching, do sufficient homework?


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