How Would You Measure an Agile Coach? This question is very tricky. The obvious answer is a question. What dimension are you talking about? Are you talking about the height or length? or the Volume? Then you need to have the proper tool to measure an Agile Coach. After all, all human beings are being measured the same; Usually, with a measuring tape, stadiometer and a weight in doctor’s office would do the trick.
If you heard such an answer, you were most probably talking about a very unique version of a human being, an Agile Coach. They tend to ask questions rather than answering questions, and when answering, you find many questions that you need to ask next.
Jokes aside, I want to talk about how to measure an Agile Coach and how you can make sure if that person is effective or not. It is a very hard task but I’ll do my best to give you the best possible answer. You don’t need to look no further. There are many people that are asking what a good coach looks like, and once for all I want to make sure they have their answers.
Metrics for an Agile Coach
The following are the factors you need to consider:
Leadership
As an Agile Coach, you need to have capabilities to lead people. It has to be coming from inside. You don’t want to and can’t go on a course to learn those. If you don’t have this, then it is not for you. Forget it all at once. Leading means you can get things done and make people get it done for you.
Motivator
As an Agile Coach, you need to be able to motivate people. They know how to do their job. You are not there for just watching them and thanking them. You are there to motivate them to do their job better and produce better results. If you don’t have this, again, you are out of luck for being an Agile Coach.
Process Friendly
As an Agile Coach, you need to be very friendly with the process. You don’t want to change it that much. You want to move it become friend with it and change it here and there, only and only if most people are ok with it. If they are not, you probably have not motivated them enough. Go back one step.
Manager
You need to have the capability of managing people. As an Agile Coach, you are going to work with Scrum Masters mostly. If not, then who you are coaching? The teams? There are going to be so many changes in them that you don’t want to coach them. You need to have authority on your Scrum Masters and be able to order them into Agile.
Change Agent or Chaos Master
As an Agile Coach, you want to change people, process and whatever you see in your way. If you are not changing, people might ask questions why do we have the coach still? Everything is stable and very productive. A trick for the unstableness is to make chaos. So when I am writing Change Agent, please read it as Chaos Master. You need to create chaos, in order to lead and motivate people.
Community Architect
You want to have a strong community behind you. Whatever you are suggesting, you want all your Scrum Masters and others that might be reporting to you (also usually referred to you by resources) agree to. You would want to build a community of people, that when get together and at the end of each session, have an action item to work on.
Last Thoughts
You have other thoughts? You don’t think these are perfect measures for an Agile Coach. Yes, you are right. Not all of them has the same weight. In some circumstances, you might want to have a more managerial side of an Agile Coach and in some, you want to have more of the Community. For sure, there are always negotiations for which one has the most weight. However, there is no other factor that you can think of that is needed for an Agile Coach to be measured on.
Still not convinced? Don’t take my word, go ask an Agile Coach and see how they are measured. I am sure you’ll find something very close to this.