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Culture & Methods

How to Run Your Product Department Like a Coach

Having found what I thought was my calling as an agile coach, I took the tough decision to move sideways into Product Management in the hopes of using what I’d learned to one day run my own department. I believed that coming from coaching would allow me to see things others could not and create something special. Time will tell if I have succeeded. This is the story of where I am so far.

Benji Portwin
on May 23, 2022
Culture & Methods

Building an Effective and Enjoyable Remote Onboarding Experience

The onboarding experience will make up the new hire’s first impression of your team and company, so it’s really the ideal place to set standards, and therefore requires thoughtful planning, patience, and compassion. In this article, I will dive into some of my own learnings as I onboarded new team members remotely as well as my own wonderful experience joining a new organisation in 2021!

Kate Wardin
on Feb 17, 2022
Culture & Methods

Agile Coaches, Agile Guides and Other Family Members

Companies look at agile coaches as agile experts to guide teams through agile working. But that is at odds with the deeper philosophy of true coaching. Perhaps they should be engaging agile guides instead. Calling out Agile Guide as a distinct role when moving into uncharted territory can be especially effective and allows true coaches to maximise their effectiveness too.

Allan Kelly
on Nov 25, 2021
Culture & Methods

How Tech Leaders Can Leverage Their Mentoring and Teaching with Coaching

You may have heard about coaching and wondered what it entails and how you might incorporate it into your role. Do you need to have “coach” as part of your job description in order to use coaching skills? This article defines coaching and shows how anybody can use it in their role. It also shows how coaching can be incorporated into management and technical leadership roles as examples.

Damon Poole
on Sep 01, 2021
Culture & Methods

Thoughtfully Training SRE Apprentices: Establishing Padawan and Jedi Matches

This article shares how Padawans and Jedis can inspire and teach us how to help people of a wide variety of backgrounds, ages, and experience levels to observe and understand failures in production. It covers practical lessons learned and shares how you can create and rollout a program for SRE Apprentices within your organization. It also shares feedback from the SRE Apprentices themselves.

Tammy Bryant Butow
on Aug 04, 2021
Culture & Methods

Augmenting Organizational Agility Through Learnability Quotient (LQ) - an Architect’s Perspective

By creating a robust learning framework for the organization, and involving architects and other key technical leaders, Halodoc improved their organizational agility.

Abhijith Krishnappa
on Jul 08, 2021
Culture & Methods

Preventing Transformational Burnout through Collaboration, Transparency, Feedback, and Coaching

Burnout is not only an individual issue; it happens in teams and organizations. This article explores probable sources of mental breakdowns, lack of motivation and confidence, along with types of burnout, and describes the role agile coaches and organizational leaders can therefore play in addressing burnout.

Anna Lavrova
on Jun 29, 2021
Culture & Methods

Leveraging Small Teams to Scale Agility - a Red Hat Case Study

This article gives you a sneak peek into the adoption of Agile methodology at Red Hat. It shows how they have split the existing large subsystem team into smaller durable Scrum teams. Small teams scale well. They can more easily clarify dependencies and increase focus, leading to an increase in the ability to complete work, can mature faster, and can learn from a “fail fast” mentality more easily.

Dominika Bula
on Jun 21, 2021
Culture & Methods

How to Spread Technical Practices Like TDD in an Organization

One of the success factors for Agile and DevOps is developers changing the way they work and adopting practices like Test-Driven Development (TDD). It’s not something that just happens by itself, and many of the “usual” ways of introducing change fail for TDD. This article outlines some of the things that actually do work and explains “Samman,” which is a coaching method used with developers.

Emily Bache
on Jun 15, 2021
Culture & Methods

Virtual Group Coaching: How to Improve Group Relationships in Remote Work Settings

Due to the pandemic, many software development teams will work remotely longer or permanently or work in blended venues such as some team members working in an office, some working from home, some working from other venues. Virtual coaching can help to improve group interaction or social dynamics in virtual settings where people work together remotely as a group or team.

William Rothwell Cho Hyun Park
on Jun 04, 2021
Culture & Methods

Q&A on the Book The Rise of the Agile Leader

The book The Rise of the Agile Leader by Chuck Mollor is a blueprint for leaders navigating change in the pursuit of success. Mollor shares his story of self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-development, while demonstrating a leadership paradigm, a roadmap of what makes a great leader, and what organizations can do to develop great leaders.

Ben Linders Chuck Mollor
on Jan 07, 2021
Culture & Methods

Q&A on the Book Responsive Agile Coaching

Niall McShane has written the book Responsive Agile Coaching, aimed at people who are coaching individuals, teams and organisations in new ways of working to help guide others in adapting to changing circumstances and responding to new demands. He presents a model for coaching based on knowing when to tell clients the answer versus when to guide them to find the answer for themselves.

Niall McShane Shane Hastie
on Jan 04, 2021