Agile Can Be Difficult to Adopt – 5 Things to Consider
Agile has been all the rage in software development for many years now. Its popularity exists mostly among smaller teams that iterate quickly and release…
Category: Coaching
Culture is What People Care About
Are you a consultant, agile coach, or employee of a company? Lol. That’s all of you! Here’s the hard truth: You are not as effective as…
Story Splitting Poster Now in Polish
My popular How to Split a User Story flowchart has already been translated to French, German, Spanish, Russian, Chinese and Hungarian. Thanks to work from…
Turn The Ship Around – A View Into Agile Leadership
Note: This post is adapted from some posts that I originally created on Adobe’s blog while I was an employee there. I recently finished reading former…
20 Common Logical Fallacies – Don’t Be a Victim!
Faulty thinking is part of life. We’re not perfect, nor do we think perfectly. It is, however, helpful to identify faulty thinking in our own…
Be an Expert in a Year – Growing the Agile Way
The guys over at Expert Table Tennis had a great idea. What would it take to become an expert? Dedication? Heart? Perseverance?
Life Change Starts with Clarity
There are moments where each one of us have wished for significant life change – this could be related to our current circumstances, our jobs,…
Viktor Frankl’s Meaning Triangle for Organizations
Viktor Frankl was an incredible human being, having survived the Holocaust and establishing logotherapy, a type of psychotherapy. His book, Man’s Search for Meaning, details…
I’m a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) – so what?
This is a companion post to last year’s “I’m a Certified Scrum Coach (CSC) – so what?” post. In that post I spoke about the…
I’m a Certified Scrum Coach (CSC) – so what?
I’ve asked myself that question more than once in the 5 or so months since I became a CSC. I never doubted my decision to…
I've asked myself that question more than once in the 5 or so months since I became a CSC. I never doubted my decision to go through the process and I was thrilled to have been accepted into a very small fraternity (still only 21 in the world), but I couldn't figure out how to really talk about it. After spending a few days at the Agile2009 conference in Chicago I finally found the answer. Being a CSC is a big deal because these people are clearly among the most talented agile/Scrum coaches in the world.
Before the conference I had personally known three of the other 20 CSCs and all of them impressed me as being amazing, but I wasn't sure how I would feel about the rest of the group. Having met several more CSCs at the conference I now have a pattern of perfection - every CSC I have met is amazing. Because I now know a lot more of them, and I know most of the people who are on the certifying committee, I'm very convinced that each of the other 20 are amazing in their own ways. In the past 5 months I've read emails and documents which were so great I really wish I had written them! I've been in conversations where every one of the participants had a strongly held opinion yet each was also able to have an open mind about the topic because they wanted to enlarge their coaching toolbox. I've seen this group work together for the best interests of everyone, including those that aren't CSCs - because it is the right thing to do! To me the group shows incredible conviction in the belief that what is good for any one of the group is good for all, and also what is good for the agile community in general will be good for the group as well. They are selfless almost to a fault.
But what REALLY separates them is the experience they bring to the table. I know there are a number of Certified Scrum Trainers (CST) who also do significant amounts of coaching, but a great deal of their coaching is with people they taught in a CSM or other course. CSCs don't always have that situation, which makes their successes even more amazing. Imagine going into an organization and giving them agile/Scrum coaching without having built a prior relationship with all of the people there. It is a difficult task, yet CSCs do this all the time. They are able to be successful because they understand the difference between blindly following a process, and being successful with a process. They understand how to be an agent for successful change. They understand how to work within organizational boundaries and still achieve the desired result. Most importantly, they have been in MANY different situations so they simply have more wisdom and experience helping organizations be successful.
If you are looking for an agile/Scrum coach for your organization you should at least ask the following questions of potential candidates: