Agile Coaching by Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley

Title: Agile Coaching
Author: Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley
Year: 2009
Pages: 221

Agile Coaching by Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley is an essential guide for professionals who want to learn the skills and techniques necessary to effectively coach agile teams.

To lead change, you need to expand your toolkit, and this book gives you the tools you need to make the transition from agile practitioner to agile coach.

Agile Coaching is all about working with people to create great agile teams. You’ll learn how to build a team that produces great software and has fun doing it. In the process, you’ll grow a team that’s self-sufficient and skilful.

As a result, I gave this book a rating of 8.0/10.

For me, a book with a note 10 is one I consider reading again every year. Among the books I rank with 10, for example, is Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.

3 Reasons to read Agile Coaching

Actionable Techniques for Real-World Coaching

The book is full of hands-on techniques and tips that can be applied directly in Agile coaching scenarios. If you’re looking for practical advice on handling specific coaching challenges, this is a must-read.

Comprehensive Overview of the Agile Coach Role

Whether you’re new to Agile coaching or a seasoned professional, this book provides an in-depth understanding of the many facets of the role. It covers more than just coaching techniques—it also explains how to build trust, facilitate change, and grow in your role.

Focus on Continuous Improvement

Davies and Sedley stress the importance of continual learning and improvement, not only for Agile teams but also for the coach. This philosophy is weaved throughout the book, making it a valuable resource for anyone dedicated to growth in their Agile career.

Agile Coaching provides you with a deeper knowledge of how agile practices work and how to inspire your team to improve.

The book begins by explaining what an Agile coach is and the role they play within a team. It covers the difference between coaching, mentoring, facilitating, and teaching, and emphasizes that an Agile coach should know when to wear each of these different hats. The authors emphasize that coaching is about helping the team discover their own solutions rather than dictating what they should do.

The authors explore various techniques for coaching individuals and teams, including how to handle resistance, how to introduce new practices, and how to create an environment of continuous improvement. Through real-life examples and anecdotes, they make the case that coaching is not about pushing Agile onto a team, but about facilitating change in a way that the team owns and drives.

Another key aspect of the book is the focus on the importance of building trust within a team. Davies and Sedley offer advice on how to foster an environment where people feel safe to share their thoughts, experiment, and fail without fear of blame. Trust, they argue, is essential for the success of any Agile team.

Discover how to coach your team through the agile lifecycle, from planning to writing software, and learn the secrets of running effective agile meetings and how to get your team to follow a consistent approach to creating software.

Find out what works and what to avoid when introducing agile practices to your team.

Featuring easy-to-follow steps, the book provides readers with the tools and strategies needed to successfully coach and mentor team members, foster collaboration, and increase productivity.

The authors draw on their extensive experience to provide readers with actionable advice and real-world examples that are essential for successful coaching.

Some key insights and learnings from Agile Coaching include:

– Become an effective agile coach and mentor.
– Identify and address team dysfunctions.
– Foster collaboration and trust between teams.
– Encourage continual learning and improvement.
– Use effective facilitation techniques to ensure successful meetings.
– Utilize agile principles to increase team engagement.

The authors cover many situations that can occur with teams new to agile and some ways to get them past obstacles.

Throughout the book, the authors share their personal coaching stories from experience with real teams, giving you insights into what works and what to avoid. Each chapter also covers hurdles that you and your team may face and what to do to clear them.

What are the Key Ideas

Understanding the Agile
Coaching Role

The book provides a clear framework for understanding the different aspects of being an Agile coach. It differentiates between the roles of coach, mentor, teacher, and facilitator, and explains when each approach is most appropriate.

Building Trust and Fostering Collaboration

Trust is crucial in Agile environments, and this book outlines practical steps to create a safe space where team members feel comfortable taking risks, sharing ideas, and learning from failures. Collaboration thrives in such environments, leading to greater team success.

Coaching Through Resistance

Change can often meet resistance, and Agile Coaching offers techniques to coach through that resistance, helping teams to embrace Agile principles without feeling forced or pushed.

Focus on Continuous Learning

Davies and Sedley place a strong emphasis on the importance of ongoing learning, both for teams and coaches. They advocate for a mindset of continuous improvement and provide strategies to embed this mindset within Agile teams.

What are the Main Lessons

Iterate, Evaluate, and Adjust

To be an effective coach, you need to know when to be a mentor, teacher, facilitator, or coach. Agile coaching requires flexibility in approach, and the book teaches you how to shift between these roles based on the situation.

Create a Culture
of Trust

Without trust, teams can’t be truly Agile. The book emphasizes the importance of creating a safe environment where team members feel free to express themselves, share ideas, and learn from mistakes without fear of judgment.

Promote Continuous Improvement

Agile is about more than just following a process—it’s about constantly improving. The book provides practical advice on how to foster a mindset of continuous improvement in both teams and individual team members.

My Book Highlights

During stand-up meeting, make sure each team member is reporting to the team and not to one individual in particular. This is not a status reporting meeting, but an opportunity for the team members to coordinate their day’s work. At Insidr, we have the scrum master take notes during the meeting, and it can very easily devolve into each member reporting status to the scrum master, each in turn, while nobody else pays attention. This is the opposite of what the stand-up meeting is meant to be

Have the stand-up meeting at the task board, or bring the task board to the stand-up meeting. The meeting is more meaningful if the tasks being discussed are right in front of everybody

Approach reading a book like building a jigsaw puzzle: peruse all the pieces, find the edges, work out the easy parts of the interior, and keep the most difficult pieces for last. When dealing with a book, scan all the headings and illustrations to get the overall message, then read the parts that provide the overall structure, skipping hard passages to focus on breadth over depth, then coming back to parts of interest

In conclusion, Agile Coaching is a must-read for professionals who want to learn the skills and techniques necessary to become an effective agile coach.

With its comprehensive approach, Agile Coaching offers valuable insights into agile methodology and provides readers with the tools they need to become successful coaches and mentors.

By leveraging facilitation techniques and encouraging continuous learning and improvement, readers can foster.

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