Many people, even the people supposedly using Agile, have too much work to do. You have project work. You have support work, formal for customer support or sales, and informal for your colleagues. You have reports to write or file, time cards to fill out, or other periodic events. You know your multitasking is slowing down your work, making you crazy, and making it difficult to deliver your best work. You need a way to say no to more work.
As an Agile Coach or Scrum Master do you want to add energy to your team that looks not enthusiastic or resists change? Is it possible to cause harm to your team even with proper Agile coaching? Yes, if you are working with tired, exhausted or even burned-out teams, they do need special treatment, usually counterintuitive to the coaches.
How do you assess your skills as an Agile coach? An Agile coach herself, Karen Greaves proposes to define the coaching activity using 5 areas and 15 different items, a perspective that could naturally be adapted to your own context. This simple tool allows the coaches to reflect about their work and plan improvements.
A Coach’s Guide to Release Planning is part of the nice series proposed to Agile coaches by Samantha Laing and Karen Greaves. This book provides a complete plan to run a workshop where people can learn how to plan their release in an Agile way, a topic that should interest the whole Scrum team.
When you look for inspiration in the Agile Coaching community, the name Gordon Ramsay is probably not the first name to come to mind. He has been known to be belligerent, condescending and downright rude, but underneath this brute facade is a treasure trove of skills and talents that influence change. This presentation draws insights from his ‘Kitchen Nightmare’ escapades and draw parallels with how much his work aligns with that of an Agile Coach and the goal to successfully drive change and introduce a number of models and techniques that are indispensable in the coaching toolkit.
Agile technical practices like refactoring and TDD (Test-Driven Development) have become mostly mainstream in software development. However, software developers in many companies are either oblivious or have a different interpretation of these practices. As a software development coach, the interest of the presenter is to help developers adopt technical practices and being a mentor has played a big part.
TastyCupcakes is a community-run site that presents games, techniques and approaches that could be used by Agile coaches and ScrumMasters.
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