Opinion: Agile Coaches Frequently a Source of Adoption Problems

Coaching and mentoring is one of the key roles and practices that are very beneficial to aspiring Agile teams. Coaches help teams learn Agile practices get from 'Agile seems to be something we should do' to 'we are practicing Agile development and succeeding by regularly delivering business value'.

Increasingly there are reports of initial success followed by failures with Agile adoption. The first team in an organization does really well. This team is frequently formed from the organizations top-performers and an experienced Agile coach(es) is brought in to help learn the new skills. This is usually followed by less successful Agile adoption by other teams and frequently it gets so bad that Agile is discontinued within the organization.

There are several reasons that this typically happens, and in the literature it is often blamed on the culture of the parent organization or a mistake of the teams coming afterwards. These reasons can be summarized as follows:

 The organization has a culture that is hostile/contrary to the Agile cultures of visibility, self-organization, and decisions made on-the-line instead of in management. After the initial success of the Agile team, politics take over and parts of the organization that are intimidated by the success of the Agile teams or annoyed by the loss of control attack and destroy the initiative.

The members of the initial Agile team are now anointed "experts" and the team is broken up and each one of the team members seeds another team and acts as their coach. Unfortunately, these team members only have one experience under their belt and (probably) in a different context on the new team. So as they attempt to apply what they learned in one context to another, they get less than stellar results.  

The reasoning above is valid in many ways, but it also put's the blame squarely on someone other than the original Agile coach(es) since they are usually no longer in the picture. Also, depending on who you are, the first point seems incredibly arrogant. But what if there is a different reason, one that precedes the attempt for growth within the company? What if the original Agile coach(es), in general, are failing to properly prepare the teams for success after the first project?

I believe that there is a problem to how current Agile coaches - especially external ones (such as the author) - have traditionally performed their jobs. In fact, I think we are part of the problem. Let me explain:

We do a very good job - in general - teaching the skills. That is, teaching the team to run an iteration with a kickoff, demo and retrospective. Teaching test driven development. Some of us even do a very good job teaching the team to be pseudo-self-organizing by taking a socratic approach to coaching and standing back and letting the teams make their own mistakes and learn from them.

We even do a good job - in many ways - teaching the team the values of Agile development. If we are there long enough, the values come from diligent and disciplined application of the practices.

What many of us do not do good job of is help the teams to be independent of us. We are there as a safety net.

Given today's economic model, an external Agile coach may be with the team 100% of the time and they tend to rely on her. Or, even if she is there only periodically - say 1 week a month - she is still there for an extended period of time. The teams depend on her in the difficult problems. She is called in to help 'convince' others of the value of the initiative. She is called in to keep exceptions from creeping in and sliding back to 'the old way of doing things.' She is also expensive. She frequently isn't there after the first significant success. When she is gone, things slip and eventually the Agile initiative goes down the toilet. The perceived value of Agile goes from 'wow!!!!' to 'it's not as bad as it was before.'

This is the problem I have seen again and again. I've been guilty of being this type of coach in the past when I wasn't with the team 'long enough' so that other champions are there and I step back before I leave the team. But that's not good enough. I think that as Agile coaches we should look in the mirror and stop blaming our clients (even though there are legitimate concerns) for the problem and take ownership of it.