Agile coaching.Agile is a diagnostics tool that helps facilitate a dialogue about the effectiveness of an organisation. Sometimes the data highlights issues related to the product, sometimes it is about delivery teams, sometimes about the wider organisation and other times the data reveals issues around leadership.
As an Agile coach, I work within all these domains. I’ve been involved in some form of Agile delivery since the early 2000s. I bring to the table a significant amount of experience with Scrum, Kanban and XP. I've seen Agile approaches work very effectively in organisations. I've also watched people proclaiming to follow an Agile approach contribute to significant cost overruns. I've seen the good, the bad and the ugly that can happen in an Agile initiative. I do not look at Agile as a panacea. Nor do I believe in a one size fits all approach. I believe in a principle oriented approach that remains sensitive to the organisational change challenge that Agile initiatives incur. I work closely with development teams, as well as mid-level managers and senior leadership teams. I have a large amount of experience coaching offshore and near-shore teams. I've worked on Agile transitions with teams of less than fifty, as well as facilitated Agile transitions involving several hundred people. I've honed my coaching skills through INSEAD’s Executive Master in Consulting and Coaching for Change (EMCCC), where I graduated with distinction (top 10%). EMCCC is an intensive two-year module based master programme. The programme applies a psychological perspective to leadership development, executive coaching and facilitating organisational change. For more on the EMCCC programme see About. I’ve led workshops on leadership, coaching and facilitating organisational change at Agile conferences. My articles on leadership, strategy and Agile delivery have been published in INSEAD Knowledge. |
John mentored both the management team and a key development team at Deutsche Bank to make the transition to operating in an Agile fashion. He has great people insight and understands that transitioning teams to Agile working practices is as much about coaching the management as it is about empowering the developers to bring transparency to the dev process and building trust between client and resources at the coal face. |