Agile Facilitation and Coaching

Explore the basics of group facilitation tools and techniques and provide the learner the skills and knowledge to be able to apply these principles to group interactions for more productive discussions and better management of time and resources.
Introduce the concepts of team development and provide the learner with the knowledge of how to start and grow teams through self-awareness, understanding of team dynamics and the organizational system.
Provide the learner with an understanding of the mindset, role, and responsibilities of an agile team facilitator and an agile coach. The learner will be able to differentiate between mentoring, facilitating, consulting and coaching and will also gain the skills needed to communicate and coach effectively, and create a safe environment for healthy conflict and meaningful collaboration.
Explore the common hurdles to implementing agile practices and provide the learner with skills to help teams overcome them.

Prerequisite: Fundamentals of Agile

The Agile Facilitation and Coaching track was developed with the generous support of Software Education, a 2013 Gold Sponsor.

Purpose

The purpose of the Agile Facilitation and Coaching track is to introduce learners to the concept of facilitating and coaching in the agile context. It covers the roles and skills needed by an Agile Team Facilitator and an Agile Coach, to appropriately lead and effectively facilitate, coach, mentor and teach agile teams. This track consists of the following eight primary Topics, the first three of which define what is needed for an Agile Team Facilitator, followed by five additional topics that are needed for an Agile Coach :

1. The Mindset and Role of the Agile Team Facilitator

The purpose of this topic is to understand the most fundamental functions of an Agile Team Facilitator including facilitating the agile practices, fostering collaboration amongst team members, and generally supporting a self-organized team.

1.1. Theme: The Agile Team Facilitator Mindset
1.2. Theme: Development Path for Agile Coaching

2. Facilitation Tools and Techniques :

Understand the role of a facilitator and the tools an agile facilitator or coach uses from the facilitation role in the context of an agile team. New coaches may begin by facilitating various team practices, then grow through exploration of advanced facilitation concepts, facilitating larger or more diverse groups, and facilitating deeper conflicting issues.

2.1. Theme : What is Facilitation?
2.2. Theme : Facilitating the Meeting
2.3. Theme : Facilitating Collaborative Conversations : It's common for conversations to be mediocre – improving conversation quality leads to better understanding, fuller collaboration and remarkable results.
Purpose: To give learners techniques to facilitate better, more meaningful intra-team dialogues by maintaining awareness of one's own style, gaining understanding and acceptance of other styles, and increasing the capacity to give and receive feedback. Through better conversation teams establish shared understanding, context and create better results.
2.4. Theme : Facilitating Team Decision-making : Being able to come to decisions is a critical function for a team, frequently problematic, and essential for moving teams to action.
Purpose: To familiarize the learner with decision making frameworks and how to select an appropriate one. Additionally the learner should know how to clarify scope of authority and know when to move toward a decision and when to let it ‘brew'.
2.5. Application : Facilitating a meeting

3. Facilitating the Agile Practices :

The primary role of the agile team facilitator or coach is to empower the agile team toward a successful outcome. This requires identifying common hurdles to the implementation of key agile practices, as well as applying the coaching skills needed to help teams overcome their own hurdles and successfully execute the practice.

3.1. Theme : Choosing the Level of Facilitation Intervention : Enhance the team's self-sufficiency by consciously choosing the amount of facilitation.
Purpose: To help the learner to become choiceful about the amount of facilitation required, keeping in mind that the level of involvement differs as the team matures and as they begin to take on facilitation duties themselves.
3.2. Theme : Instilling the Agile Mindset
3.3. Theme : Chartering
3.4. Theme : Planning
3.5. Theme : Day to Day – Inside an Iteration
3.6. Application : Designing Meetings for Team Interaction
3.7. Application : Facilitating a Standup

4. The Mindset and Role of the Agile Coach :

Through the coach's own self-awareness and understanding of team dynamics and the organizational system, the coach can be better prepared to help agile teams work with these structures to plan and manage agile adoption. The purpose of this topic is to understand the relationship between agile and coaching in order to coach, facilitate, mentor and teach an agile team. And, to understand the relationship of a coach to a self-organized team.

4.1. Theme : The Agile Coaching Mindset
4.2. Theme : Responsibilities and Skills of the Coach
4.3. Theme : Setting boundaries for Coaching
4.5. Theme : Self-Awareness / Self Managing
4.6. Application : Establish a coaching contract or coaching alliance

5. Coaching & Communicating Effectively :

Coaches and team members alike know that effective communication is critical to team success. Similarly, expanding communication capacities and skills of every team member is also critical. The coach plays a role in setting an example through their own communication clarity and conciseness, openness to feedback and differences, self-acknowledgement of being wrong, and inclusion of all. The coach fosters a safe environment for open communication through setting this example and encouraging others to mimic it. The purpose of this topic is to explore the value that effective professional coaching and communication brings to the team, including purposeful participation, effective use of silence, how to surface healthy conflict, and conflict management and resolution.

5.1. Theme : The Coaching Stance :Coaches consciously support the client's goals and directions (their agenda) as opposed to the coach's own agenda “for” the client.
Purpose: To help the learner understand and embody the characteristics of a professional coach (reference: ICF Competencies) and to land the idea that agile coaches employ self-awareness and self-management to prevent imposing their agenda on the client.
5.2. Theme : The Coaching Conversation – Coaching for Action : Coaching conversations integrate various coaching skills into a fluid process that helps move individuals toward achieving their goals.
Purpose: To help the learner understand one or more models for conducting the coaching conversation, moving the client from issue identification to exploration to action in a complete conversational arc.
5.3. Theme : Communication Skills for Coaches
5.4. Theme : Basics of Using Emotional Intelligence : There is a vast body of research showing that emotional intelligence (EQ) is a better differentiator of top performance than cognitive intelligence (IQ). Unlike IQ, EQ can be developed and improved.
Purpose: To understand one of the models for Emotional Intelligence, ways Emotional Intelligence can be improved and the business case for improving or raising EQ.
5.5. Theme : Internal vs. External Coaches : Internal coaches and external coaches work under different constraints. Understanding the differences and limitations between the two and being able to adapt is crucial to success.
Purpose: To understand the key differences between internal and external coaches, identify the unique challenges faced by internal coaches (i.e. maintaining neutrality and confidentiality, holding people accountable and challenging the status quo) and how to adapt given the current situation.
5.6. Application : Conducting the Coaching Conversation :

6. Mentoring and Coaching People :

Mentoring and coaching are decidedly distinct yet complementary. As team members transition to (or become more adept at) their agile roles, the agile coach is in a position to mentor their personal and professional growth by sharing the knowledge and insights they have learned. In addition, using professional coaching skills, the agile coach can help them find their own pathway to agility. In the Agile context, mentoring and coaching helps people step into their agile role fully and to transition to the agile mindset.

6.1. Theme : Understanding the Individual Change Cycle :Whether they are just beginning in Agile, or as they develop into skilled practitioners, individuals on Agile teams are confronted with the need to learn new skills, develop new mindsets and engage in new relationships with their colleagues. In short, they are required to change.
Purpose: To expose the learner to one or more models for how individuals change, grow and learn. Such a model should distinguish between self-chosen change and organizationally imposed change. It should also emphasize the need to “meet a person where they are at” in their change process, rather than the coach imposing their beliefs or needs.
6.2. Theme : Mentoring and mentoring practices : A mentor facilitates personal and professional growth in an individual by sharing the knowledge and insights they have learned.
Purpose: To provide the learner with a model or explicit definition of mentoring (e.g., creating relationship, establishing goals, creating an action plan, giving feedback, etc.). In the Agile context, mentoring may be around the roles, transitioning to the Agile mindset, or when and how to incorporate practices at various organizational levels. There are models for how to create a good mentoring relationship, how to establish goals, helping the mentee create an action plan, etc. There is an inherent tension between giving direct advice as a mentor as opposed to helping the mentee explore options for themselves. Therefore, this LO contextualizes the mentoring role within the Agile context, and compares mentoring to coaching (defined elsewhere) and explores when to use which skill and mind-set.
6.3. Theme : Mentoring and coaching the roles in AgileThe Agile roles, whether on the core team or part of the stakeholder community, may require both coaching and mentoring because people's roles often change upon adopting an Agile framework. Knowing when to coach and when to mentor is a key success criteria.
Purpose: To differentiate coaching and mentoring, help the learner decide when to use each and to articulate the purpose of assisting people in their new Agile roles through teaching, mentoring/coaching, supporting success and helping learn from failure to increase the learning. These roles may include product owner, testers, developers, analysts, managers, other agile coaches and other stakeholders such as customer or executives.
6.4. Theme : Mentoring and coaching the key transitions for the roles in Agile : Everyone goes through some kind of transition in their role when they encounter agile and an Agile Coach helps them through that transition.
Purpose: To help the agile coach understand the typical transitions faced by the people in various roles when agile is brought in, such as analysts who will move out of the customer/team intermediary role, testers who need to become part of the action rather than ‘victims' at the end of the cycle, product owners who need to focus on the “what” and “why” of the product rather than managing to a schedule, and agile managers who need to become agile enablers rather than problem solvers. This LO presents key transitions, such as these, and also offers critical success factors or key failure modes for each.
6.5. Theme : Identifying and handling resistance from individuals : Agile coaches use resistance rather than resisting resistance.
Purpose: To help the learner understand how to work with resistance from individuals as they take up their agile roles, rather than seeing resistance as an indication of failure or something to be solved. In this LO, the learner is exposed to at least one model for working with resistance as information and as a resource for moving forward with greater depth and real buy-in from the people experiencing the resistance.
6.6. Application : Problem scenarios - Mentoring vs. Coaching in pairs :Purpose: To practice mentoring and/or coaching a particular role in a particular circumstance. To practice opening the conversation and working through the flow between mentoring and coaching, either by doing it and/or by talking through the thought process of how you would do it.

7. Starting Up Teams :

Effective coaching starts by helping agile team members see what is occurring within themselves, with others, and around them in their environment. The purpose of this topic is to create a level of comfort with exploring individual and team preferences, perform start-up activities such as project and team chartering, self-organization team constructs, being comfortable in learning through doing, starting before you have all of the answers, creating definition of done and other social contracts, defining roles and responsibilities, etc.

7.1. Theme : Understanding Team Development :Understanding how a team develops is crucial for starting up a new team, including how to work with the issues of team dynamics, team developmental stages, how development progresses and the choice to become a team in the first place.
7.2. Theme : Teaching the Agile Basics & Mindset Shift
7.3. Theme : Setting up the Team Environment
7.4. Application : Creating a Team Kickoff/Startup Agenda

8. Growing and Developing Teams :

Teams are a social construct whose purpose is to capitalize on individual strengths toward a common goal. The agile coach understands the difference between a group and a team, when to build a team, how to facilitate the different stages of team development and how each stage may impact the adoption of certain agile practices. Effective agile coaching means understanding when to seamlessly alternate between pushing for results and stepping back to focus on the team's development, or dancing between teaching, facilitating, mentoring or coaching. This critical difference can greatly impact the success of the project or product, as well as the organizational culture change that needs to occur within and around the team. An agile coach understands how high performing teams are formed and maintained, in general, as well as how to grow and develop teams toward their potential, given each team's specific case.

8.1. Theme : Characteristics of an Agile Team :
8.2. Theme : Coaching the Journey toward High Performance
8.3. Theme : Handling Organizational Impediments
8.4. Theme : Handling Dysfunction within the Team
8.5. Theme : Creating adaptive teams
8.6. Application : Facilitate a conflict in a team Purpose: To simulate a conflict among members and practice techniques for observing the behavior, deciding if and how to intervene, surfacing the conflict, either by doing it and/or by talking through the thought process of how you would do it.

Types of Agile Coaches

The Facilitation and Coaching Track differentiates between three different types of agile stewards: the Agile Team Facilitator, the Agile Coach and the Enterprise Agile Coach. Each type of steward has progressively more experience and broader responsibilities within the organization. This track currently addresses learning objectives for the Agile Team Facilitator (Topics 1-3) and continues on to the Agile Coach (Topic 4-8). The ICAgile Coach designation requires all eight Topics’ learning objectives be completed. The learning objectives for an Enterprise Agile Coach will be covered in a separate track.

Agile Team Facilitator (ATF)

An ATF is developing the basic skills of facilitation, mentoring or training and conscious communication, typically within the confines of one or two agile teams. An ATF is not responsible (or qualified according to this curriculum) for Agile adoption or transformation initiatives but rather they are more suited to facilitate the activities of an agile team.

Agile Coach (AC)

An Agile Coach is an ATF who has achieved an expert level in lean/agile practices and one or more knowledge domains (technical, business, etc.) while having developed some professional coaching skills and a significant level of skill in facilitation and mentoring and/or training. The Agile Coach’s purview is multi-team, starting up new teams, mentoring ATFs and looking out toward the wider organization.

Enterprise Agile Coach (EAC)

The Enterprise Agile Coach (not addressed in this track) is an Agile Coach who has achieved advanced systems coaching, organizational development, culture, change management and leadership skills and uses those skills to affect organizations at large. The Enterprise Agile Coach works at all levels in an organization to help the organization use agile as a strategic asset for business value generation, which often includes culture change.

How to read & use this document

This document is not a description of a course – it is a description of what a learner (agile team facilitator and/or agile coach) will encounter in courses, or study to learn, to become proficient in facilitating and coaching agile teams.

These learning objectives are intended to support any of the agile methodology variants and apply to individuals and teams with varying skills and backgrounds.

The Agile Facilitation and Coaching track is constructed around 8 primary Topics, with Themes and Learning Objectives (LO) for each. Watch, in each section, for concept elements, where a concept is introduced; and description & application elements, where the learner gets to learn a technique, practice, or apply a concept.

Curriculum Design & Certifications

The contents of the learning objectives for this track require 5 or more days of instruction to cover adequately. At ICAgile, we encourage instructors to take more time (i.e. during class and between classes) to cover the material, to let the learner embed the learning and have experience applying the concepts. We find that "embedding time" is key to conveying the concepts and skills needed as an agile team facilitator or agile coach. Acceptable course designs must be heavily weighted toward application of these skills.

Finishing all 8 topics results in the learner earning two certifications – the ICAgile Team Facilitation Certification and the ICAgile Coaching Certification. In order to receive a certification for ICAgile Team Facilitation a learner must have completed one or more courses covering all three ATF topics. In order to receive a certification for ICAgile Coaching a learner must have completed one or more courses covering all five AC topics plus the three ATF topics.

Topics	ICAgile Team Facilitation Certification	ICAgile Coaching Certification
The Mindset and Role of the Agile Team Facilitator	x	x
Facilitation Tools and Techniques	x	x
Facilitating the Agile Practices	x	x
The Mindset and Role of the Agile Coach		x
Coaching and Communicating Effectively		x
Mentoring and Coaching People		x
Starting Up Teams		x
Growing and Developing Teams		x

Instructors are expected to include group activities of their own design and to incorporate their own, personal specialties that highlight particular aspects of coaching and facilitation models and techniques. The hours next to each topic are meant to convey a general sense of how deep one should go to adequately convey the topic. They are not meant to be followed verbatim.

Click here to download ICAgile Learning Objectives for Agile Facilitation and Coaching

Primary Authors:

Marsha Acker
Lyssa Adkins
Ahmed Sidky
Michael Spayd

Reviewers:

Pete Behrens
Erin Beierwaltes
Dan Mezick
Laurie Reuben

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