We coach people in organisations implementing Scrum and Agile practices.

We kick off with a management workshop as well as a retrospective with the team(s) to understand existing organisational structure, challenges and expectations.

Scrum implies change, not just for the team, but for the organisation as a whole. For this reason we want everyone to share a common vision of the Agile values and methods. An essential catalyst is a day of training in Scrum fundamentals with the team and management to communicate the intention of Scrum, its roles and the process.

The next step is to work with the Scrum team to build a common vision for the product and an ordered list of deliverable features called the Product Backlog. We facilitate a 1- to 2-day workshop create the Product Backlog, order the the Backlog items by business value and size (complexity) and create the initial release plan.

With the groomed Product Backlog is in place, the team can begin to build their first Sprint to deliver the first increment of running, tested features. We recommend three two-week Sprints for the Team and organisation to accustom themselves with the process quickly through repetition. We work closely with the Scrum team during these initial Sprints, in order to raise their knowledge of Scrum by doing, and to accelerate the transitional learning of the organisation. In parallel with this, the team invariably needs to work hard to improve its development practices and learn the meaning of ‘done’. This may require additional specialised coaching.

After several weeks of intensive coaching, our involvement changes from coaching the team(s) to coaching the organisation’s management to cope with the change that Scrum catalyses. It can take six to twelve months for the organisation to break its old dysfunctional habits and build new good ones. Larger enterprises also need help to establish meta-structures to support the broader roll-out of Scrum.

Implementing Scrum is hard work and can be frustrating. However a committed Scrum team with appropriate support from its management can double or treble its productivity with improved quality within the first year.

When asked what they would change if they did their transition to Agile and Scrum over, the most common comment heard from managers in organisations worldwide is “more coaching”!