Learning from your peers

Long time no see. :)

Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches are often promoting pair coding and collaboration. The reason for that is very simple, the best way to learn is to learn from you colleague, that drives both of you into the new path of learning.

 But how about the SMs and Coaches themselves? One of my mottos is practice what you preach. Which means in this case, that you should also do pair working yourself. One of the great opportunities, if you are in a corporate environment like I am, is to work together with one of your colleagues. If you find this hard, it's again a good opportunity for learning. If it's hard for you, it's probably hard for other people as well. My case hardness comes from exposing myself, as good as also in bad. Very sensible thing I must say.

BTW. We as Coaches and Scrum Masters must grab all the possibilities.

Organizations expecting Agile Coaches with Silver Bullets

I wrote a little bit provocative blog entry about the Cowboy coaches. In the of name of fairness I'll write now a blog-entry about Organizations which have unfair picture of what the Coach can bring.

I'm talking about my context, which is a big product, huge amount of people involved in multiple sites (I know, not recommended, but hey this is reality). These kind of organizations are generating a good stinking pile of waste, impediments etc, which causes pain. When you are feeling too much pain, you are calling Doctor(s), which is in our case are Agile Coaches. Now the organization is expecting a quick cure for the symptoms, but reality is something different. The organization should start to walk a path of self inspection and proper Root Cause Analysis to find true problems and fix them. On that path a good Agile Coach is more valuable than gold, because he is going to be your guide through, sometimes even very black moments.

Still a Coach cannot solve you problems, you must solve them by yourselves!

Cowboy Coaches

I have noticed this phenomenon where Agile Coaches are like lonely riders, with their six shooters loaded with silver bullets and they come to tell you (probably also little bit arrogantly), what you have to do to get yourself more Agile. Most sad thing in that is that they are not helping their cause. Getting Agile and being Agile is a really hard work, at least in the corporate environment where I am operating, and it does not happen easily and during this never ending journey more questions than answers have arisen . Acting like that just pisses people off.

Actually I have also been there. After my Certified Scrum Masters Course, held by Bas Vodde (was great course btw.) I thought I was ready, and I had my moment of revival. Now 2 years has passed from that and I have all that time worked in the same project, and I feel more humble now :)

To the end, small related quote.

"There ain't no way but the hard way. Get used to it."
- Airbourne

Dilemma of: Scrum from Above and Self-managed teams

Scrum values strongly self-managed teams, with a good reason and that probably works nicely, if Scrum has been taken first into use in R&D team(s) and after that it has spread up.

But when you are in situation where Scrum has been decided in the management and it has dropped to teams, situation is pretty much different. Job of a Scrum Master or an Agile Coach becomes very interesting when you offer the gift of self-management to persons who are absolutely not wanting it.

This is again the situation where your people skills are far more valuable than technical skills, because changing people to think that self-management is rather like freedom than a cage of responsibility, is a challenging task.