Striving for business agility requires a different approach from the agile coaches. When organizations proceed on their agile journey their needs shift. I’ll share my experience of how this insight came to me and what this shift meant for us as agile coaches. In my organisation the agile coaches where organised in an CoE. Last year the coaching model was adapted. We learned that there was a growing need for leadership coaching. This implies that that we were challenged to learn new skills and techniques. Rather than hosting a retro session, suddenly they were involved in more complex processes, like epic refinement, planning cycles, tribe-retrospectives, performance meetings, etc. I learned that it is important to manage expectations clearly. Agile coaches that engage on department level and start with leadership coaching, have less time to support individual teams. In my case that led to dissatisfaction at team level. I will share how the demand shifts over time and what agile coaches can do to anticipate this.
In this experience story I’ll share the setting and how we changed the coaching role. I also explain how we re-vamped the role of the Scrum master in order to have support at team level. I started with a clear role description, that we aligned with other departments. Beside creating the role we needed to implement it in the departments.
