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!

Get Agile! Stay Agile!

My previous blogging raised some more thoughts about Agile itself.

I would like to use an analogue to sports here. What I have experienced Agile is like sports, and if you want to be the best in the world, you must take practicing it very seriously. It does not help that you just get yourself fit (Agile), it's more important to stay fit (Agile) and also improving a little bit all the time. And it really needs enthusiasm to do what you do.

You should also consider the pain you feel during iterative way of doing, more like healthy pain, rather than car crash pain. Pain is something that tells you that you should improve yourself. Characteristic of doing eg. Scrum is that you are painfully exposed and that should be thought as a good thing. Knowledge is good, especially when you know that there are areas where you should be better.

In company context this means, that system itself should be Agile and also people inside it, should be Agile and you should constantly find a new ways and practice to be better.

Btw. In the picture my friend Sauli Kotisaari is finishing his half marathon in Austria. 

Does a Scrum Master become impediment to Agile transformation.

I must clear myself a little bit. :) I really believe that there is huge amount of work for higly skilled Scrum Masters during the transformation from Waterfal/C&C model to the Agile/Self management-mode. But where I'm heading with my topic?

This queation raised when I read Mike Summer's blogging about Situational Coaching with Agile Teams


Scrum Master is presented as a guardian of Scrum Proccess and also facilitator, impediment remover, coach etc. But the aim of the whole thing, in team perspective, is to get team in self management mode and actually, I truly believe that with a good team, there is no more place for Scrum Master. Which is paradoxal and people have a tendency for wanting to feel needed and if a person is not ready to move on (to the next team, to do "real" work etc.) does he become impediment to the team to move real self management or even organizing mode?