Agile Coaching in mode post-apocalypse

While preparing to return to economic life, there are many challenges. Here is what Agile Coaches will need:

#1. Innovation.

• Find innovative ways of reaching sprint goals. In Scrum, we organize work in features and user stories to understand better how to deliver business value. Work is about providing advantages. How could we reach these benefits?
• We measure velocity in story points to measure progress. If the story points don’t give visibility to the Product Owner on the progress of product development, how might we show it?
• Human interactions will not be so close for months to come. Having a Program Increment Planning Meeting with +150 people in one room sounds insane. But how might we recreate that energy by respecting the social distancing? How might we build the team spirit differently?

#2. Adaptability.

• Before COVID-19, I was helping Agile teams to become predictable, to give visibility to the top management of what the teams can achieve at a certain time. Now I think agile teams predictability will empower c-level management to adapt their strategic decisions in times of crisis, knowing they can trust their teams to adapt.
• The Agile Coach post-apocalypse must help the teams to rediscover themselves, their new strengths, weaknesses, their new opportunities, and to adapt. Teams will create a new “normal”.
• Top management and teams will learn to count on data to assess performance, make decisions, and appraise customer value. The crises will make the squads more aware of the importance of facts and how they might extract the information from data.

#3. Prioritization.

• Have you heard this before: “everything is important, we’ll do everything. Thre is no way this product will go on the market unless it is perfect?”. We lived a pandemic together. If the world will shut down tomorrow again, what will be the essential thing the Product Owners will want to get out there to their clients? As Agile Coaches, we will determine with the teams what prioritization techniques suit each team we coach.
• Customer-centric is a must. Products must provide a competitive advantage to their clients. Design thinking techniques help organizations to create products clients love.
• Pragmatism helps prioritization. Measure progress, implement metrics to measure objectively even the subjective business value delivered. Combine data with customer data and learn to set your priorities.

#4. humanity.

• Agile coaches will need to master human relationships, understand personal enablers, team strength, and tailor the agile transformation to organizational needs.
• Use the technology on the service of humans. Technology helped us to fight together. It united us as species more than we were before. The coaches will continue to enable teams with the latest technological trends.
• We are humans, after all. The sacrifices, the social distancing, everything we did were to save our lives. But COVID-19 crises have shown the human part of us, nature, the meaningful things in life. I strongly believe that this crisis has united us as human beings, and we will be more tolerant, more caring, more human in our professional lives.