How is an X Agility coaching engagement different to a consulting engagement?
In the coaching engagement, our primary objective is to understand your business, the business context, and the challenges you are facing. In essence, what are you aiming for and what do we need to overcome to deliver those outcomes.
- What is happening in the organization?
- What is the organizational culture?
- What are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats?
- What have the executive and leadership team already tried?
- Why has that failed to achieve the primary goals and objectives?
And so forth.
What is the current appetite for change?
Agility is significantly more difficult to achieve when it is imposed on departments and teams. It is better to invite others to explore the opportunity of Agile than to insist that they adopt agile or an agile framework.
There’s often a primary reason for change, but there are often reasons behind those reasons, and so our agile coaches are invested in discovering what those reasons are and what kind of appetite for change exists within the organization.
Appetite for change is important because an executive may have a superficial investment in change but won’t support or champion elements if it requires too much effort, policy change, and a solid commitment to removing impediments that block teams.
We need to identify the real appetite for change so that we can design a solution that works rather than a series of interventions that won’t be supported.
Custom-designed Agility
Imagine walking into a restaurant and seeing an a la carte menu filled with loads of options.
As I, and other agility chefs, learn more about the organization and the challenges you are facing, we will use our expertise and experience to remove certain items from that menu.
Some things simply won’t work in your unique context and agile application, and it is our job to identify what elements will serve your agile transformation and which items will derail the adoption.
Our job is to help identify which elements of agility, which agile frameworks, and which tools and processes are best suited to helping your organization achieve agility.
Contextual Application
The agile industry does have purists who are deeply invested in agile dogma. The idea that only one way works and that you can’t deviate from the playbook regardless of what is required to succeed.
At X Agility, we don’t strive for consistently across functions or departments.
We are more than happy to work with team A who are deeply invested in building and developing a strong scrum team, and team B who have opted for Kanban.
Our goal is to help the organization achieve authentic agility rather than impose a specific framework or insist on uniformity across the organization.
There are challenges, such as synchronisation, associated with different teams working in different ways but these are relatively easy challenges to solve, and we’re invested in helping you design and create the solution that best serves your organization.
People are unique and different teams are working on different problems, and so it makes sense to have pockets of agility across the organization that work with the agile framework or set of tools that best applies to their context.
Our job is to help cultivate, nurture, and grow agile capabilities across the organization, regardless of what that looks like.
If team A are using Scrum, team B are using Kanban, team C are using Extreme Programming, and team D are using Kanplexity, that is absolutely fine with us.
Summary of X Agility Coaching
So, we aren’t striving for consistency or insisting on imposing a specific style of working on teams and the organization. We are, instead, looking to identify what works and helping those teams adopt and apply the framework that best works for them.
We have practices such as flight levels to help synchronise efforts and ensure that organizational agility is being cultivated in a way that optimizes for the whole system rather than localized elements of it.
About John Coleman
John Coleman has deep experience and expertise working with executives, #leadership teams and product development teams to achieve increased #organizationalagility and create environments where creativity and collaboration produce high-performance teams.
https://linktr.ee/johncolemanxagility – social and podcast links
https://linkpop.com/orderlydisruption – order training from right here
If you are interested in helping your team or organization achieve greater agility and want to explore agile training options, visit our training page.
If you value coaching and would like to work with a deeply experienced agile and executive coaching specialist, visit our coaching page.
If you are looking for an agile consultant that can help your leadership team identify an appropriate roadmap to organizational agility and take the most effective course of action in your agile transformation, visit our consulting page.
#agile #leadership #agileleadership #certifiedagileleadership #professionalagileleadership #psm #psm2 #scrum #scrumorg #xagility #executiveagility #xagility
