Here are practices for this role. In some of these practices, other roles are also involved:

• Create the ecosystem.
  • Helping to build a peer team culture
  • Helping establish roles
  • Helping create teams. See Starting a Lean-Agile Team Checklist in Checklists
  • Maintaining governance reports
  • Encouraging colocation as much as possible (see the note about non-colocation, below)
• Support the value stream.
  • Helping to assess team production capacity
  • Helping to assess readiness to pull stories
  • Participating in governance meetings (see Scrum of Scrums)
  • Facilitating planning events
• Manage Workflow
  • Facilitating Iteration 0 at the start of a release
  • Maintaining the team’s project environment
    • If using kanban, maintaining the kanban board
    • If using iterative (Scrum), maintaining the Agile life-cycle tool
    • Maintaining visual controls and metrics
    • Managing Team Backlog
  • At the end of the iteration,
    • Facilitating the Product Demonstration (see Product Demonstration and Review Checklist in Checklists)
    • Assuring team is attending to Carry-Over Work
    • Facilitating the Iteration Planning Meeting (see Iteration Planning Meeting Checklist in Checklists)
    • Helping the team review the iteration.
• Help the team improve continuously.
  • Facilitating the Daily Stand-up for the team (see Daily Stand-Up Checklist and Daily Stand-Up Ground Rules in Checklists)
  • Facilitating improvement sessions for the team using improvement techniques such as:
    • After-Action Review
    • Kaizen
    • Root Cause Analysis

About facilitating teams that are not colocated

Communication involves written, verbal, and non-verbal / body-language elements. Timeliness and context are important. When teams are not colocated, they are missing the elements that make communication effective. Unfortunately, colocation is not always possible. For example, a project may require using multiple, large development teams or teams may be distributed across multiple sites (local or across countries). This requires special attention by the Team Agility Coach and the team.

Here are some special considerations:

• As much as possible, try to locate project team members near each other.
• Use dedicated broadband communication as much as possible: audio, video, story-boarding.
• Use an Agile tracking tool for managing product backlog, impediment backlog, stories, tasks, and tests so that teams can collaborate asynchronously.
• The team has to be very disciplined in creating and using artifacts, code, and discussion repositories.
• Teams must define usage criteria for code and tools and must be consistent across all teams on the project.
• Teams must coordinate their schedules for collaboration, planning, Daily Stand-ups, and reviews.

For more information, see Recommended Books: Facilitation with Virtual and Global Teams in the facilitation article.