Introduction
Agile has changed the way teams deliver value focussing on customer needs, collaboration and pivoting which is also the way of looking at product delivery in the current times. We have seen the adoption of agile ways of working growing rapidly with not just the teams, but organisations also adopting agile for their businesses. But when it comes to scaling agile from team level to enterprise level, there could be a lot of challenges which can be faced, some of them include:
- Who will take accountability for bringing in agility at the enterprise level?
- Who can educate the leaders, get a buy-in and onboard them?
- How can we bring in other departments in our transformation?
- Not having clear roadmap at the strategy level for the transformation
- How can we bring common practices for non software departments?
Generally, without a strategic approach at the enterprise level, agile adoption or transformation becomes chaotic and often organisations go back to traditional ways of working. Team level coaches or even a group of team level coaches will no longer be sufficient for organisations to bring in agility at the enterprise level. To focus on aligning agility at the business level, work with leadership, and to even select the best fit framework for our organisation, we will need one person, one subject matter expert, a mentor, a change agent and that is the role of an Enterprise Agile Coach.
In this blog, we will understand:
- The role of an enterprise agile coach
- What does an agile enterprise do? And how to become one?
- What are the skillset of an enterprise agile coach and their responsibilities
- Challenges agile enterprise coaches generally face
Who Is An Enterprise Agile Coach?
An Enterprise Agile coach is an agile subject matter expert and an experienced professional who helps in bringing in agile principles and practices at an organisation level. Agile enterprise coach is the one who helps in scaling agility across multiple departments, business units and teams. They help organizations in strategising the agile transformation marrying agility with the business goals and needs. Enterprise agile coaches play a broader organizational level ensuring agile values and mindset are imbibed throughout the company and –
- Help businesses or organizations become more adaptive and customer centric and help stay relevant with continuous value delivery
- Streamline flow of value, improve collaboration, transparency and capability to inspect and adapt
- Implement and sustain faster innovation and alignment between business goals
- Help business overcome challenges during the transformation by mentoring, coaching and trainings
What Does An Enterprise Agile Coach Do?
Enterprise agile coaches are change agents who are not just experts in agile frameworks, they are mentors and leaders who are good at organizational changes and who guide the transformation which is aligned with the business goals. They work at multiple levels in the organization hierarchy to bring in agility at all layers. They usually are accountable for:
- Enterprise level transformation – Agile enterprise coaches are the drivers of the transformation, they start with assessment of the current state, understanding the gaps in the value flow, understanding the business needs, and preparing the roadmap for the transformation. Also driving the execution of the vision of the transformation
- Coaching and mentoring – They teach, conduct awareness training workshops, and provide one on one coaching to help people and teams understand the concepts of agility. They coach and mentor leaders and stakeholders on agile practices and principles
- System Thinking – Agile enterprise coaches don’t just understand individual teams, but understand the organization, business as a whole and the systems they have. This system level thinking helps them resolve conflicts, dependencies and potential bottlenecks for the transformation
- Change culture – They bring in and help teams understand the why and what of collaborative working, continuous improvement and customer focus with practices at all levels of the organization.
- KPIs and Metrics – Enterprise agile coaches help in defining and deriving business and other metrics and help organizations in measuring them
- COE building – They helps creating multiple change agents by creating role specific center of excellence for knowledge sharing and help them create sustenance of agility adoption
The Impact Of Enterprise Agile Coach
Enterprise agile coaches play a vital role in making an organization reap the benefits of agility. They can have significant impact on the way business operates and make direct effects on key business parameters like visibility, transparency, quality and business outcomes. Below are some of the key impacts an agile enterprise coach can have:
- By streamlining the processes and workflows, and removing dependencies, they help in increasing efficiency and productivity
- They bring in the practices of continuous feedback and reviews with which the product quality increases
- With incremental and iterative delivery of most valued work items, they help organizations respond to customers needs which helps in increasing customer satisfaction
- They bring in scaled frameworks like SAFe, LeSS and Spotify model which helps other departments like HR, finance etc to easily fit in the transformation reducing silo mode of working
- They help in setting up information radiators for decentralization of decision making which makes the teams empowered
- With cadence based delivery and synchronization of cadences they help organizations to be more transparent and predictable
- With retros and problem solving workshop they bring in the culture of inspect and adapt within the organisation
- They help in building internal capabilities with role based center of excellence
How To Become An Enterprise Agile Coach?
Becoming an agile coach is a journey. An enterprise agile coach is a mentor, counselor, trainer and a servant leader. While certifications and training workshops can give you enough awareness and content, there are certain skillset one should develop before becoming an enterprise agile coach like,
Develop A Strong Agile Foundation
To master any skillset, the core foundation has to be strong. Foundational knowledge defines how good a professional is. The first step in becoming an enterprise agile coach is to understand and gain as much knowledge as possible. Here’s how you can gain knowledge on agile:
- Learn and understand the basics of agile frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, LeSS
- Understand the basics of roles like Product owner, scrum masters, RTEs
- Take certifications like PSM, PSPO, SA etc to validate and gain deeper understanding of the framework
Build Practical Experience
Practice what you have learnt. Theoretical knowledge can only take you to a certain level. Once you understand the concepts, put them to use.
- Play the role of scrum master, product owner and RTE in your systems
- Implement a framework and get the hang of all the challenges and grow your expertise
- Be part of 1 or 2 organizational transformation and gain practical experience
- Conduct one on one sessions, solve team level problems, get a small win with a major achievement to build confidence in coaching and mentorship
Deepen Coaching Skills
One vital skillset of enterprise agile coaches is to work with leaders and influence them to bring in the change.
- Work on your negotiation skills and conflict resolution skills
- Read coaching stances and implement in your day to day life
- Get a hang of psychology of people to build professional relationships and to influence them
Educational Background
While it may not be a criteria to have, some coaches have degrees in business management, coaching or even psychology. But what matters most is to always keep learning new concepts and implement them in your teams to gain deeper knowledge.
Gain Enterprise-Level Experience
Do not be in your comfort zone of a team level coach. If there is a chance to work in a program/portfolio level initiatives grab them. Get hands-on experience of working or transforming a big team/program/portfolio to understand the whole system. If not, create an opportunity to be part of such transformations. This will help you understand key concepts like organizational structure, dynamics and politics. Understand business agility and explore value streams, lean portfolio, OKRs.
Networking And Mentoring
Networking for Enterprise agile coaches are very important as it helps in learning from other coaches on how they approach, what they did and how, what is going on in the market, what are the new trends in the market, new tools and to build credibility as a thought leader. There are so many ways to network, join agile communities, attend webinars, publish blogs, create thought leader posts on social media like linkedin you can network with whatever option suits you best.
Certifications For Enterprise Agility
Certifications always build credibility. Look at getting trained and certified on advanced topics like enterprise agility, lean portfolio management to improve your credibility in a big enterprise level agile transformation. Below are a few certifications that you can consider:
- SAFe practice consultant – SPC
- Enterprise business agility strategist – EBAS
- CAL – Certified agile leader
- ICP – ENT – Enterprise Agile Coaching
- ICAgile ICP-CAT – Coaching agile transformation
Role And Responsibility Of An Enterprise Agile Coach
As mentioned above, enterprise agile coaches play a key role in transforming an organization with agile ways of working. They drive the adoption of agile practices and principles across the entire organization, their roles and responsibilities are as follows:
Working With Organizational Structures And Culture
When it comes to agile transformation, it involves people, process and culture. It requires a shift in traditional organisation skillset based structure and move towards cross functional teams and change of mindset from completing a project to incremental value delivery. Agile enterprise coaches collaborate with leadership and stakeholders to assess and adjust the structures and processes to facilitate agile ways of working. Some examples include:
- Moving away from silo mode
- Forming crossfunctional teams
- Enabling continuous feedback loops for continuous improvement
- Heroism to One team mindset
Developing Leaders
Leadership buy in is one thing which makes any transformation smooth. But why should leaders support agile transformation? Why should they sponsor such initiatives? Agile coaches help leaders answer all these questions with necessary one on one coaching, awareness training workshops, handholding them to help them become agile change agents themselves.
Building A Strong Team Culture
Agile promotes one team mindset. It requires constant intervention in case the teams do not work in such an environment. Agile teams are self managing that means everyone in the team is equally responsible and accountable for their success or failure. Enterprise agile coaches enable this with a lot of practices like collective planning, solutioning, collective retrospective, ensuring everyone’s voices are heard and everyone’s opinions are considered.
Growing Technical Practices
Agile goes hand in hand with technical excellence and systems. Agile enterprise coaches work with architects and technical SMEs in bringing in technical practices like Peer review, mob programming, Test driven development, continuous integration and deployment, continuous refactoring. They work with quality teams to set industry level benchmarks with metrics to improve quality. They help engineering teams to also continuously monitor the technical systems with metrics like DORA.
Change Management
Enterprise agile coaches are experienced and subject matter experts whose forte is change management. They are highly skilled in change management techniques. They are experts who can navigate common challenges like resistance to change, removing roadblocks for the transformation, getting leadership buy-in and providing support for the transformation.
Complex Adaptive Systems
An enterprise can be complex in its structure, that means there are multiple teams and departments involved. Enterprise agile coaches come equipped with expertise scaling approaches like SAFe, LeSS and Scrum and Scale which help them in managing these complexities and bring in agility at the enterprise level.
Leadership Agility
Enterprise agile coaches mentor and train senior leadership and stakeholders to adopt an agile mindset. This may include:
- Helping leaders move away from command and control to servant leadership
- Promoting healthy leadership with empowering the teams
- Help decentralise the decision making
- Coaching leaders to be the change agents who inspire the teams
What Are The Skills Required To Become An Enterprise Agile Coach?
An enterprise agile coach wears multiple hats based on the need and situation. They must adjust their stance based on the need sometimes as a mentor, sometime as a facilitator, change agent or even a consultant. Let’s explore more about the skills:
Teaching Skills
Teaching agile frameworks, principles and practices is one of the key aspects of becoming and agile enterprise coach. They are responsible for training individuals, teams and roles on agile and do’s and dont’s.
- Conduct agile workshops on different agile frameworks
- Role based trainings and creating learning paths for them
- Training teams and groups on agile practices like relative estimation, story writing and slicing, agile planing, prioritization etc
- Train teams and stakeholders on metrics, how to read them? Why do we capture them? And how to interpret them?
- Assess the learnings and provide growth plan continuously
- Creating knowledge base
Mentoring/Advising Skills
Sometimes, teams and individuals may require customised need based guidance and handholding. Some people may be shy, someone may be scared, someone needs help in opening up, and someone may be rude. Different people may need different advice and mentoring styles. So an enterprise agile coach should be able to:
- Listen and empathise with people to understand the problems and give advice
- Probing people with the right questions to enable people to self realize
- Guide without judgement and provide constructive feedback
- Be patient and not rush to conclusion
- Give unbiassed, perspective based suggestions
Professional Coaching Skills
One of the important skillset for an enterprise agile coach is to help individuals, teams and leaders identify solutions on their own and make them own it. Helping with the answers or solutions every time makes them dependent on you and you end up becoming a blocker. Instead:
- Use probing techniques to guide people self realise
- Actively listening to analyse the context/situation
- Understand a adequate psychology concepts and apply them in the coaching
- Challenge people and motivate them to achieve their goals
- Encourage accountability by not always being the person in control
Facilitation Skills
Another important stance for an enterprise agile coach is the facilitation skills. Agile coaches are subject matter experts, they sometimes need to pass the message of the workshop, resolve conflicts, provide training and workshops. So below are a few pointers on facilitation skills of an agile enterprise coach:
- Providing engaging and simulation based training workshops for the teams
- Timeboxing ceremonies with proper head body and tail approach
- Experience with facilitation techniques like brainstorming, decision making.
- Skillset to ensure everyone’s opinions are heard
- Skillset to ensure everyone participates
- Ability to diffuse tensions
- Setting the context of a meeting and then revisiting the agenda at the end
- Ensuring everyone’s energy is high during any ceremony
What Are The Most Common Challenges Faced By Enterprise Agile Coaches?
While business/enterprise agility has its own benefits, the journey of agile transformation could prove to become challenging. Especially for an enterprise agile coach who is the key person to plan, execute and drive the transformation. Some of the common challenges an agile coach face are:
- Leaders and stakeholders resisting the change because of fear of losing control
- Lack of clear vision for the transformation
- No awareness of the new roles and responsibilities may cause chaos
- Making Agile just as a process checkpoint rather than understanding the principles
- Not having continuous improvement mindset and sticking to quick results
- Rigid organisational structures because of politics
- Leadership still working in a top down manner
- Non IT departments not wanting to become agile and following their legacy processes and structures
- No common alignment between IT and Non IT teams
- Not defining the success of the transformation
- Rigid mindset and blaming the process
What Is The Difference Between Enterprise Agile Coaching And Agile Team Coaching?
While both agile team coach and enterprise agile coach play a vital role in the transformation, the main difference is the level at which they operate. Below are a few differences between the two roles based on key aspects:
- Scope – Team level agile coaches work in bringing in agility within individual teams while enterprise agile coaches work across multiple teams and departments at an organisation level
- Goal – Agile team coaches focus on agile frameworks, team collaboration while enterprise coaches focus on business agility, leadership coaching
- Work with – Agile team coach closely work with scrum masters, product owners and development team while scrum master agile coach work with leadership, mid management, executives and other departmental agile leaders
- Responsibilities – Team level coaches mainly concentrate on scrum and other frameworks facilitating the ceremonies, mentoring scrum masters and product owners. While enterprise agile coaches mentor and coach leadership, align business goals with agility, implementing lean portfolio management
- Challenges Faced – Team level coaches work on resolving team conflicts, improving team performance whereas enterprise agile coaches face scaling challenges, bringing in non IT teams within the framework
- Frameworks Familiarity – Team level coaches master frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, XP, TDD, BDD etc while enterprise level coaches master frameworks like SAFe, LeSS, Spotify model, Scrum as Scale etc
How Can Benzne Consulting Help With Enterprise Agile Coach?
Benzne is one of the best agile scrum consulting firms with a proven track record of successful turnkey agile transformation across domains and industries. We provide custom, tailored approaches to solve organisation problems like execution certainty, siloed mode of working, transparency, lack of predictability, streamlining workflows and processes, scaling agile adoption, reduced time to market and increased customer satisfaction leveraging our indepth agile transformation experience and expert agile practitioners. Being one the best agile transformation company, here is how our typical transformation or consulting journey looks like with what we offer at each stage:
- Do an As-Is assessment to understand the current team’s maturity and practices
- Create a tailored customized roadmap to align with the problem statement or goals
- Provide training and awareness workshops on the framework and practices needed
- Educate and certify the roles needed in the framework
- Design and recommend framework implementation based on need and the system
- Work closely with a few pilot teams and leadership to guide them through the transformation process
- Provide continuous support, observe and provide feedback, and guidance on implementing the practices and by resolving challenges
- Cross pollinate the success story to multiple departments, portfolios and programs
- We create internal center of excellence for sustenance of the transformation
- Create adequate knowledge base with playbooks, guides and manuals
Conclusion
Enterprise agile transformation is a journey. Mainly driven by a high impact role that is Enterprise Agile Coach. They just don’t stick to agile frameworks and not just scale the practices to multiple teams or stick to IT teams, they play a vital role in transforming organizations, bringing in the necessary cultural change to enable business agility at the enterprise level.
Becoming an agile enterprise coach is also a journey that requires a strong foundation on agile principles, hands-on experience, coaching skills and leadership management expertise. While this is not just enough, certifications and networking along with mentorship brings in the credibility to overcome challenges which are commonly faced.
Enterprise agile coaches are not just framework coaches, they also come with a lot of other stances like, mentorship, trainer and counsellor/advisor and a facilitator. If you are planning to become an enterprise agile coach, you will definitely need to pay attention to these aspects as well to be an impactful coach. Enterprise coaches create business impact by coaching leadership, growing technical practices, being the change agent, managing complex systems and developing leaders. So building these skillset becomes important to anyone who wants to become an enterprise agile coach.
With this our blog on “Enterprise Agile Coach” comes to an end and we sincerely hope it helped with necessary content for our readers. Please write to consult@benzne.com for any suggestions or feedback or in case you are looking for agile business consulting.
Frequently Asked Questions About Enterprise Agile Coach
1. How does an Enterprise Agile Coach influence organizational transformation?
An enterprise agile coach influences organizational transformation by mentoring and guiding leadership teams, aligning agility with business goals, and bringing in one team mindset not just in IT teams but also in other departments. They do so by implementing scaling frameworks like SAFe, LeSS, Scrum at scale, Disciplined agile and others. They influence not just the process but also the cultural and mindset shift that is required.
2. Can an Enterprise Agile Coach work with non-Agile teams?
Absolutely. Enterprise coaches work with non agile teams like HR, Finance, Sales, Admin who all come in the purview of organisational agile transformation. They coach and train other department teams with agile practices and principles to align them with a common shared goal.
3. How do Enterprise Agile Coaches measure the success of Agile initiatives?
Enterprise agile coaches use qualitative and quantitative metrics to measure the success of agile initiatives. Some of them include,
- Business Level Metrics – Customer Satisfaction, NPS, Revenue growth, Innovation rate percentage, customer heat maps
- Operation level Metrics – Lead time, cycle time, flow distribution, defect removal efficiency, change failure rate, deployment frequency, mean time to change, predictability measure, Flow distribution
- Team Level – Velocity, Burndown, Defect created vs resolved, version report, Team health
- Portfolio level metrics – Portfolio velocity, flow distribution, predictability measure
4. How long does it typically take to become an Enterprise Agile Coach?
The time taken to become an enterprise agile coach varies from person to person. However, on an average, a person may take around 7-10 years to become an enterprise coach. First 2-3 years building the foundation and next 2-3 years getting hands on coaching experience, next 2-3 years working with leadership and understanding the enterprise dynamics
5. What industries are most in need of Enterprise Agile Coaches?
Almost all industries can use enterprise agile coaches for their transformation. Any company irrespective of the domains like healthcare, manufacturing, fintech, retail, customer services , who are in need of organisational agile transformation can use an enterprise agile coach.
