As Agile Coaches (and Scrum Masters), it’s your job to surface impediments blocking flow and team effectiveness, even if that leads to uncomfortable or different-than-usual conversations.
Put differently, you can spot opportunities for growth and improvement!
Your scope is the entire organization, but your impact is highest when you work with individual teams, stakeholders, and the people supporting them, e.g., their managers and leaders.
One strategy is to use your intuition:
“I’ve got a hunch we need to improve the release frequency.”
It might be spot on, but intuition can be fraught with biases, personal preferences, and wrong heuristics. Intuition is a prime example of System 1 Thinking. System 2 Thinking is the slow process of analyzing data and carefully making reasoned decisions. See Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast & Slow.”
Our preferred approach ties into System 2 Thinking. We use data, evidence-based feedback, and insights from scientific research to improve team and organizational effectiveness.
1. Collect Team Data
- Invite teams for a self-diagnosis
- Collect data, e.g., ‘Team Morale,’ ‘Value Focus,’ ‘Stakeholder Collaboration,’ ‘Release Frequency,’ ‘Retrospective Quality,’ and about 15 other topics.
- Spot areas for improvements, impediments, and trends over time
2️. Collect Multi-Team Data
- Invite multiple/all teams in your organization for a self-diagnosis.
- Identify essential patterns and insights across teams.
- Address and resolve broader organizational challenges.
3️. Gather Qualitative Data
- Include the perspectives of not only team members but also their stakeholders/customers and supporters (leaders, managers, and coaches)
- Analyze the data together, conduct interviews, and share observations.
- Jointly identify the next steps to start improving.
4. Use Scientific Insights 🔬
- Use the scientifically validated Agile Team Effectiveness model diagnoses.
- Improve with evidence-based feedback based on academic research.
- Learn additional peer-reviewed studies to compare team effectiveness across popular scaling frameworks and how diversity, conflict, and psychological safety impact Agile teams.
I firmly believe that if Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, and all other Agile practitioners want to survive, make more impact, and offer more value, they should focus on this.
Don’t stop here. Use more data sources, conduct other interviews, and explore market trends. Collect data, gather qualitative and scientific insights, and trust your intuition. Use it to develop improvement actions and strategies to resolve team- and organizational challenges.
In short, level up your game as an Agile practitioner! 🚀
Closing
What’s your take on this? What recommendations and experiences do you have?
If you’re interested in learning more about Columinity, contact us to explore the opportunities for your organization.