The Team Agility Coach is responsible for shepherding the team, creating a trustful environment, facilitating team meetings, asking the difficult questions, removing impediments, making issues and problems visible, keeping the process moving forward, and socializing Lean-Agile within the greater organization. Many organizations call the facilitation aspects of this role the “Scrum Master.”
Getting started
Begin by reviewing the resources in the Context of the Team Agility Coach role box to understand how the Team Agility Coach role fits in the context of Lean-Agile. Then work through the Reading Path (guided readings) and library pages that pertain to the role.
The Team Agility Coach Reading Path. A general introduction to the Team Agility Coach role including standard work, essential practices, alternatives for your context, how to grow in the role, and helpful resources.
The Facilitation Reading Path reviews one of the most important skills for a Team Agility Coach. Lean-Agile teams places a premium on good communication. As a result, teams participate in many kinds of meetings: planning, improvement workshops, demonstrations, problem-solving. Making these meetings effective requires some level of facilitation. Often this falls to the Team Agility Coach.
The Scrum Reading Path introduces essential concepts for Scrum in a Lean-Agile environment. Scrum is a conceptual framework for undertaking software engineering projects that embraces and promotes evolutionary change throughout the entire life-cycle of the project.
The Team Agility Support page provides support for those leading a Lean-Agile transition at the team level. Team-Agility includes all of Scrum and Kanban and more.
Going deeper
Here are additional resources to explore related to the Team Agility Coach role.
Disciplines and practices. People engaged in the team level must master the disciplines and practices of Lean-Agile. Team Agility Coaches should pay special attention to the resources on Leanban, kanban, and Scrum. If you are using SAFe, see the SAFe library page.
Resource libraries for the Team Agility Coach. This page lists the complete set of resources in the Lean-Agile Portal related to the Team Agility Coach role. In particular, see the topics on ecosystem, continuous improvement, and quality. The Value Stream Levels library collects resources by level. Especially, see the Team Level.
The Lean-Agile Straight Talk podcast features interviews of experts in Lean-Agile. Subscribe to the podcast to receive updates. Here are sessions that apply to the Team Agility Coach role:
Net Objectives routinely hosts webinar series to explore important topics in Lean-Agile. Here are sessions that apply to the Team Agility Coach role:
Investigate Team Agility Coach-oriented training by Net Objectives, starting with the training roadmap. Then consider the relevant courses in Lean-Agile at the team.
The Team Agility Coach role in a transformation
The transformation to Lean-Agile involves everyone. While the transformation is guided by leadership, tThe Team Agility Coach is critical in helping every one on the team as they routinely make decisions about how to realize Lean-Agile in their own context. Lean-Agile Thinking guides these decisions so that everyone in the value stream is aligned. The Team Agility Coach should be familiar with the ideas, especially at the team level.
