AYE 2010

There’s More Than Meets the Eye to Agile Coaching

December 7, 2010 by Jason in AYE 2010, Coaching tips | 2 Comments

This year at AYE Jerry Weinberg hosted a session titled “Coaching the Coaches“.   Jerry split the group up into people who self-identified as Coaches (coaches or managers who do coaching stuff), people who have been coached and people who didn’t feel they fit into either category.

Jerry asked the coaches how they received the title ‘Coach‘ and when it came to my turn I said it’s for marketing.  All the cool kids are doing it, that’s what the industry is asking for and it sounds a whole helluva lot cooler than ‘Business Process Consultant‘.

About a year ago while talking to a couple senior people at the organization I was working with, I realized there was a whole lot more to ‘Coaching‘ than I thought.  I was getting pressure to commit to having a project done with fixed scope for a fixed date and instead of trying understanding their perspective, I immediately went into ‘Agile Coach‘ mode and tried to explain to them why they were wrong.  Needless to say it failed miserably.   Over the last year I’ve had several epiphany’s about what a coach is and it all became crystal clear during a recent coaching session hosted by Michael Spayd. Read More

AYE Workshop Wrap-up

November 15, 2010 by Jason in AYE 2010 | Leave a comment

The last day at AYE was a full-day workshop on knowing your options when attacking problems.  This session was particularly interesting as all the hosts, sans Jerry, facilitated.  The goal of the session was to give participants the ability to figure out what approach to problem solving might work best in their situations.

In this workshop there were 4 main approaches: Solve, Manage, Cope, Exit.   We were asked to envision a work-related problem and then choose which particular approach we felt we were using by spreading out across the room from Solve to Exit.  Everyone ranked their problems from 1 – 10 with 10 being “holy-ka-smoly I need to fix this now”

Our Finished Product

The first half of the session was a simulation where we broke into groups and the hosts gave us a ‘problem’.  Well, actually it wasn’t a problem, it was a goal where we needed to work as a team and deliver ‘the most value’ to our customers who were Star Wars collectors.  Ah, the good ‘ol Lego game.  Steve Smith handed out the boxes of Lego and my first instinct was to do nothing and instead give our collectors an autographed box from the original Star Wars cast.  That seemed like it was have the most value to collectors.  Something neat happened then.  The team LOVED the idea and we had instant buy-in through a unanimous fist-of-five which more or less contributed to our LACK of problems since we dissolved it through solid buy-in.

Other groups that built the model ran into skill problems (some people aren’t good at building Lego), workflow problems (hard to co-ordinate that many people on 1 model) and other issues that collaborating teams typically face.

We did a bit of planning to figure out how to make the display case, get the autographs and print out a certificate at the hotel desk and during our execution everyone volunteered for a task and did it.  As people were coming and going from our main work area, we talked about how the goal was extremely clear and there was never a moment where we questioned each other.  Perhaps it was dumb luck.  Perhaps not. Read More

2 Ways to Build Trust Between You and Your Team

November 11, 2010 by Jason in AYE 2010 | Leave a comment

During Steve Smith’s ‘Power, Authority and Teams’ session at AYE 2010, one of the attendees mentioned that her team has told her that they don’t know what she does.

I’ve been a manager before and now as a coach/consultant, I’ve experienced the same issue and I’m guessing other managers probably have as well based on my experience.

A couple of ways for handling this are:

  1. Make YOUR work visible: I’ve used personal task boards at previous companies, where in fact, all of us did.  It was accepted to question anybody anytime about what they were working on and it was self-imposed, not management directed.
  2. Track impediments over time: Again, make this visible.   As your teams run into problems, and whether or not you’re ‘agile’, take that data and make it visible that you are making progress towards removing them.  This type of accountability shows the team’s concerns are not falling on deaf ears.  A simple wallboard that shows a list of impediments to resolve now or later as well as impediments that are in progress, done and a cycle time showing how long it’s taking to remove them.

How Does This Help Build Trust?

Making your own work visible shows you care enough about the team to model the behaviour you seek from the teams.  It also helps prove to your team that you expect to be held accountable for your own work.

Simple work boards that visualize the team’s impediments, how long they’ve been open and data around how they get resolved can be a powerful motivator for the team and a great way to keep yourself honest.

Finally, it can be an effective way to influence others on the value of making work visible outside your direct sphere of influence.  The best way to figure out if it’ll work is to try it out, get feedback and adjust as necessary.

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