KEEP A BALANCE FOR MAXIMUM GROWTH
Let us admit it. Agile team often lives under a fast pace to deliver working software in a very short cycle. Some team members could not adopt agility and finally burst out that they started to dislike Agile. As a leader or an Agile coach, the major factor to success is to help teams keep a balance for maximum grow so team can engage in delivering software as expected.
The basic idea to maximize growth is to keep balanced amount of challenge and support as appropriate for your team. Just like when you are a little child, your parent give you challenge (”Here, kid, lace ‘em up!”) or support (”let me tie them for you…”). The imbalance could impact your team’s performance. Too much support, your team will never really learn what they need to grow and develop, on the other hand, too much challenge, and the team will become frustrated and possibly quit trying. It is important for leaders and coaches to understand that team will accept challenge when they are ready. For example, introducing pair programming to your team when they are not ready to adopt the technique, the action would become a burden or an artificial for your team. They may just fake it out.
How does all of this relate to the Agile practices? The Agile experience is one of the greatest experiments of growth in testing team’s collaboration. For that growth to occur, each team member needs to be challenged (and supported) appropriately through a variety of experiences, both inside and out of the team environment. Some of these experiences may be unpleasant, like fixing your own defects. Challenge and support does not imply that the team member will never experience failure or negative consequences, but what it does imply is that when those consequences take place, there will be individuals and processes in place to support the team member as they learn from the Agile experience. Support comes from a lot of places, including management, organization, Agile coach, CEO, or colleagues. However, a major component of that support comes from the encouragement we all give to the team to keep trying and to ask for help with each other.
Outline/Structure of the Workshop
- Introduction [5 min]. Briefly describe Lean and Agile Methods, their proliferation, their successes, and common problems. Briefly introduce how to coach team and help them keep balance between support and challenge to reach their full potential and avoid common issues.
- Balance Self-Assessment [10 min]. Provide a checklist to help audience understand whether they are in-balanced or out of balance. Audience can voluntarily share their results to the group.
- Introduce Level of Support and Challenge matrix [5 min]. The matrix is an indicator to understand whether in-balance or out of balance based on support and challenge. The key for team to grow is when challenge and support distribute equally.
- Activity. [8 min]. Identify a volunteer coach at each table. Each table will be given a situation. The coach facilitates to ask team what support and challenge they would encounter while working for an Agile team under circumstances. The coach will use support and challenge matrix based on table discussion.
- Discussion [7 min]. Volunteer coach presents the results and shows the support and challenge matrix to the group to seek feedback for areas of adjustment.
- Conclusion [5 min]. Present a coaching skill to help overcome inferior performance and how coaching makes a difference to help team keep a balance.
Learning Outcome
- Results. The evidence shows that well-coached Lean and Agile individuals, teams, and organizations perform well because of keeping a balance between challenge and support. Team synergy can collectively achieve the benefits of higher-performing individuals. If well-coached teams are 10 to 20 times more productive than uncoached teams, and the best teams perform hundreds of times faster with better quality, when highly-desirable Lean and Agile Values, Principles, and Practices are utilized. Coach’s job is to help team identify when team needs support or challenges. Through coaching, ordinary teams can achieve extraordinary results.
- Conclusions. Ordinary individuals, teams, and organizations using Lean and Agile Methods are up to three times more successful than their traditional counterparts. However, over half of Lean and Agile teams do not keep their balance for maximum growth. Lean and Agile Coaching keep a balance strategy to help information technology projects reach their full potential and keep the dream alive concerning superior performance using Lean and Agile Methods, Values, Principles, Practices, Tools, and other closely-related paradigms.
Target Audience
Agile coach, Agile Lead, Manager, Senior Executives, Agile team
schedule Submitted 6 years ago
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