Use this page to learn about how teams go through the process of transforming to an Agile way of life, and how coaches help them get there slowly but surely.
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📍 A lot of people think, a lot of people think that when, and you'll hear this in the industry, you'll hear this in jobs and companies and teams.
A lot of people think that if you put a methodology and you apply that to a team, you can immediately start performing in an agile fashion. And that is so far from true. The reason that we focus on. Human connection and collaboration and trust building is because those are not just nice to haves. Those are precursors to the work.
Your job as an agile coach is to help teams transform. What does it mean to transform the means to completely shift the way that you think and behave and approach work? And not that waterfall is a bad thing, but it's a risky thing. Waterfall and the way of phased approaches to work doesn't allow for any type of adjustment or validation or any type of collaboration with customers to really, truly de-risk things.
So when teams out in the world start trying to live a different way of life. That's why we call it transformation because this is very akin to therapy, very akin to behavioral change and habit forming. You all have lived this now other in the class, in the LJX class or in the projects. Hearing it is one thing.
Doing it is another thing. And learning the habit is the hardest part of mastering Agile.
You go through a complete transformation as a person and as a team, and as a company. Start thinking about things differently. Differently. Some teams don't ever get to the final result. Your team's agility will change over time. Which is exactly why we measure it, to make it very concrete somehow. But when you start, your agility seemingly is nothing.
If agility is how closely you follow the Agile principles in the Agile manifesto, you could rank that on a team. That team can start measuring how much they follow the Agile manifesto. That's the transformation that has how it plays out. But it's gotta be maintained. And when you have a team, you're dealing with resistance to change.
You're dealing with cognitive bias, you're dealing with subjectivity, you're dealing with people's willingness, you're dealing with people's egos, you're dealing with people's understanding of. Agile or what Agile is or what agile isn't. You say the word agile out in the world and people will interpret it different ways.
You as a coach need to follow the rigors of the Agile manifesto. Need to help people understand that Agile is not Scrum. Agile is not a method, it's not a process, it's a philosophy.
It is just this. That's it. It it applies to any type of work and it's the way that you think about the work. It's the way that you approach the work.
You value individuals and interactions over making a perfect process. You value working results over building a comprehensive documentation. You value collaborating with users over building a contract. You value responding to change over following that plan. When the plan needs to change, you change it.
You're not in a position to do the work yourself. You're in a position to empower people around you to learn the lessons of the agile philosophies. It takes time and energy and willingness, and if you have one person on the team that is resistant to change, you're not gonna maintain agility over time.
But it's not about perfection, it's about progress. It's about the evolution of a team. You have to get the team to own their transformation. You have to get them to make their own conclusions about the importance of what we present. I'll tell you right now, a lot of the times you do these workshops. We do these workshops in Tech Fleet and four weeks later, teams come to me and say, well, didn't really click with me yet, but I just realized what you were saying in the workshop.
That's very normal. That's very normal. People may not see the relevance, they may not be ready to hear it. They may not be paying attention to it for whatever reason. It's not a bad thing. It's just humans paying attention or not paying attention. It's our responsibility to show them the relevance of why we are presenting what we're presenting, but IT team's gonna go through this process forever.