WHY come along?
Recently there has been quite a bit of discussion in the practitioner community about what an Agile Coach Academy is and what it means for independent coaches.

In this presentation I will take the audience through the process from idea to establishment of Telstra's Agile Coach Academy. My role as the Academy Lead was to take 50 internal staff members of varying backgrounds and have them move through a developmental journey taking 20 weeks before they were deployed as beginner coaches.

Concurrently I was hiring senior experienced coaches to support and act as mentors; which was an critical part of the approach. I'll explain what we did, who was involved and how competency was progressively built throughout their journey.

You’ll hear from my heart not just my head
It was a transformational experience for all of us and I want to tell the community the story.

You’ll hear about my journey and the journey of the trainee coaches; what we all learned about agile coaching and ourselves from this experience together.

Come with your questions about agile coaching- I’ll have time to answer them

Recruitment and selection for coaches requires finding people with a combination of the right mindset/attitude AND competencies (skillset).

This talk will take the audience through a real life case study on how Telstra sourced candidates for a recent recruitment drive for 60 ways of working coaches. Hiring processes had a strong focus on mindset using new ways of selection processes.

Once candidates had been selected they were enrolled into a micro-credential capability uplift program that recognised competency as it is achieved throughout a learning journey.

This presentation will proved practical insights from a real initiative that executed a bold experiment in prioritising mindset over experience during recruitment, selection and induction.

As a coach there are natural tensions that come into play as you execute your role to affect the system of work, influence culture and change behaviours. The EGDE that good coaches are able to find allows them to navigate these tensions whilst maintaining the balance of stance in the moment that the situation requires.

Think of seeing the "trees versus the forest" but on multiple levels/layers concurrently. Being an actor on the stage versus maintaining distance from the system of work (being in the audience).

In this workshop I will take the audience through some of the tensions I've recently experienced and navigated as a coach and how I have assisted other coaches to learn this skill and how you can develop it yourself.

An anti-pattern: “something that looks like a good idea, but which backfires badly when applied”.

My recent work implementing scaling frameworks showed me the inherent risk of using frameworks as an explicit means to affect change; any framework will always contain anti-pattern risks.

The infographics associated with frameworks (whether SAFe, LeSS or DaD, Nexus) are always drawn with the best of intent but how they are applied is where things can run contrary to agile principles.

Using real work examples and telling the story of a recent 18-month, 40-team experiment in scaling; Niall will highlight some of the "pot holes" to avoid when using frameworks.

Niall will also present his approach to using frameworks including when and how to "let go" of ceremonies/practices when they become redundant.

Lastly, a coaching approach will be presented to enable coaches to leverage the best of what frameworks offer without getting caught up in dogma.

NOTE: this is NOT a framework-bashing presentation but a hands-on report on the risks of mis-interpretation of any principles-based scaling framework.

Over the last 2 years Niall has coached teams of agile teams through the launch of two Agile Release Trains (SAFe). Niall helped leaders, managers and teams through the process of adopting SAFe.

Using his real experience as the basis for the presentation, Niall will make the case for moving past SAFe and going to the heart of scaled Agile using Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS).