Agile Coaching

Practicing Agile can be quite of a challenge

• Set up a new team and learning Scrum in a safe environment
• Identify and address many issues while practicing Agile
• Building a common understanding and mindset around Agile and Scrum
• Getting multiple teams to collaborate to deliver valuable increments
• Educate and mentor Product Owners and Scrum Masters
• Help Business, IT, and Vendors to overcome organizational silos and focus together on building products that users love

Our Agile Coaching service

Our coaches are experienced in a variety of industries, from startups to large corporations.

By bringing in an outside perspective, we can help you discover the strengths and challenges of your team and organization so that you can make effective improvements.

• Wide scope from the leadership to team level
• On-site and remote support available
• Coaching in both English and Japanese
• From 1 to 4 days a week

1. Clarify the current situation and challenges, set up the goals and the scope for our coaching

Meeting with the business

We first work together and clarify the current situation, the desired state and benefits that your organization expects from the coaching relationship. This is usually done through several meetings involving leadership, management, and teams.

Observation of the workplace

We take some to time meet with the teams and observe their practices, their interactions, their processes, and their culture. This helps us make an assessment of the current situation from a different perspective.

• Participation to Scrum events, or team meetings
• Interviews with different players in the organization

Setting the goals

Based on the information and data gathered during the previous steps, we draft the goals and the scope for our initial coaching activities (usually on a 3 month period), and build up together our coaching contract.

2. Set up the ground with the teams

Alignment between the leadership, management, and the teams

We have met with many leaders who believed that they where fully aligned with their teams on the vision, mission, and goals. Guess what? We always discover some gaps!

As a first activity, we take the time to go back to the basics and help leadership, management, and the teams to re-align on the company and product vision, mission and goals.

Team building

We facilitate kick-off sessions in order to help the team have their best environment in place in order to make some magic happen. We usually plan some of the following activities:

• Inception Deck
• Lean Canvas
• Impact Mapping
• DTA (Designed Team Alliance)
• Working Agreements

3. Start the coaching

Once the initial preparations are made, we start actual coaching activities.

We respond to the needs and the situation of the teams and switch accordingly our stance (observation, questioning, facilitation, teaching, mentoring, consulting, pairing, etc.) in order to assist them during their journey.

Our activities can vary depending on the initial expectations, the maturity of the teams, and include some of the following:

• Scrum lecture
• Product Backlog building
• User Story Mapping
• Release Planning
• Scrum events facilitation
• Building the Definition of Done
• Kanban board
• CI/CD, DevOps
• Test Automation
• Agile Testing
• Mob Programming, Pair Programming
• UX Design, user interviews and research, data analysis
• 1to1
• Mentoring of the Scrum Master, and the Product Owner
• Learning Sessions, OST (Open Space Technology)