Debating whether you need an Agile coach or if taking a few Scrum courses will suffice? Many organizations grapple with this dilemma when they’re on the edge of an Agile transformation. How much help do you actually need? Will courses be enough?
The short answer is: It’s not Agile coaching vs. Scrum courses. It is Agile coaching and Scrum courses. For a successful Agile transformation, your organization needs help from an expert in Agile and Scrum… but your team also needs to take Scrum courses. Here’s why.
What is an Agile Coach?
According to Scrum Alliance, an agile coach helps organizations, teams, and individuals adopt agile practices and methods while embedding agile values and mindsets. The goal of an agile coach is to foster more effective, transparent, and cohesive teams, and to enable better outcomes, solutions, and products/services for customers.
Scrum’s Relationship to Agile
Scrum is a lightweight framework that is supremely adaptable and provides value to many different on-the-ground business scenarios. The Scrum Team is composed of a Scrum Master, a Product Owner, and Developers.
A Scrum Master ensures that the Scrum Team understands Scrum and inhabits Scrum values, while also serving and supporting the overall organization. Scrum Masters coach their teams and the organization in Agile practices.
An Agile coach, by contrast, is generally not embedded within a particular team, but may observe and facilitate multiple teams. An Agile coach very often has a temporary relationship with individual teams, and serves in an advisory role in Agile adoption or development.
The industry has unintentionally put a hierarchy in place and considers becoming an agile coach the next step for a Scrum Master. Done right, they are basically the same with the Scrum Master focusing more on using Scrum correctly than agile coaches. Agile coaches might be a little more agnostic when it comes to how to be agile, but still use Scrum as a foundation. So if both Agile coaches and Scrum Masters coach teams and the organization, do you really need both? Food for thought.
Have commitment issues? Then Agile coaching might be for you. Go in, get the job done, and move on.
Training vs. Coaching
Scrum courses are designed to teach the fundamental principles and common practices of Scrum and how they broadly apply. Scrum is an incredibly versatile framework, one that focuses on empirical learning and iterative development of complex solutions that enable small, flexible teams to produce huge value quickly.
Scrum courses (like those hosted by Responsive Advisors) are a great way to get to know the fundamentals of Scrum—the language, the ideas, the history, the inner workings of the framework. Course topics range from the basics of Scrum to particular roles like Scrum Master and Product Owner to understanding applications of Scrum in real-world scenarios.
Think of Scrum courses as a way of coming to understand the bigger picture. When you complete a course and get back to the office to interact with an Agile coach, you’ll have a better understanding of the motivation behind decisions being made.
Just as you aren’t going to conduct brain surgery after your first few biology courses, you likely won’t fully grok Scrum after just one class and a level 1 certification. You’ll also need some experience under your belt. Becoming a real Scrum practitioner involves maintaining curiosity, continuously asking questions, and educating yourself about the framework.
Bottom line: The main difference between Scrum training and Agile coaching is that training provides you with high level knowledge and understanding of Scrum principles, while coaching helps reinforce ideas that come from training by applying them to the real world.
One Shouldn’t Exist Without the Other
Would you play football without knowing the rules? No.
But that’s what many companies do. They try to protect the budget by skipping internal team training and instead hire an Agile coach. Understandably, it’s difficult to get a team’s buy-in if they don’t have a greater understanding of the Agile space. Every coach needs an educated team.
On the other hand, some companies send employees to training in the hopes of bypassing the need to hire a professional. That’s like training a team and sending them out onto the field without a coach. You might score some points, but it won’t be pretty.
Agile adoption is not a one-size-fits-all process. Every situation is unique. Courses are a great introduction to Agile frameworks and methodologies, but any teachings you pick up will not be customized to your business needs.
Meaningful Change Means Both
You need a team that knows the rules and a coach that can effectively motivate and focus that team on accomplishing goals and winning. Start with a solid educational base. Send employees to learn about Agile thinking and how Scrum works. Then introduce an Agile coach into your organization to help guide the company toward better practices.
Responsive Advisors employs experienced practitioners with years of experience leading real-world Agile transformations in several industries. We think holistically and focus on results.
We’ll be there for your initial consultation regarding Agile adoption. We can get your people trained in Agile methodologies generally and in Scrum specifically. We’ll send in an Agile coach or Scrum Master (does it really matter what you call them?) to work directly with your teams to foster, hone, and implement Agile values and principles on the job.
Let us usher you into the future by giving you the tools to implement and maintain Agile practices within your organization.
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