Amplio Value Coach

Why attend?

You must transcend the Scrum Vs Kanban conundrum and be team coaches working with the science of Agile on your side. Doing Scrum with this understanding will bring the different roles together and make your Scrum more effective.

If you are a Scrum Master, you must be aware that the career path for a Scrum Master is dwindling. Many companies no longer want to pay for a Scrum Master per team. While it may not be a good decision for them to just eliminate Scrum Masters, that does you no good if they make that choice.

The combination of solid theory combined with Al Shalloway’s over 2 decades of experience with Scrum accelerates taking you to the next level.

Becoming an Agile coach enables you to provide much greater value than being a Scrum Master alone.

Details

For four months from the start of the workshop participants can attend Dr Is in. They can also retake the workshop during this time.

Certification is now available for those on this journey through a program of reading these books and helping refine the materials in the workshop part of it.

Learning objectives

Acquire a thorough understanding of the foundational principles of Agile, which elucidate the causal relationships in knowledge work. These first principles are self-standing and emerge not from explicit definitions, but from diligent observation and continuous assessment. Transgressing these principles carries repercussions, typically resulting in wastage and missed prospects. They can serve as guiding principles for individuals, teams, and organizations, indicating what actions to embrace and what to avoid.

These fundamental principles serve as the basis for delineating the constituents of productive value streams. Utilize these elements to fathom the sources of challenges within your team and devise appropriate remedies. They also aid in selecting the most suitable optional practices for your particular context. Additionally, gain the following knowledge:

• Learn to eschew the practice of “follow until you understand,” and instead tap into the latent knowledge of your colleagues. This approach minimizes resistance and fosters alignment.
• Master the art of communicating the insights gleaned from this workshop, especially when dealing with managerial stakeholders.
• Discover techniques to discern the educational needs of individuals struggling to grasp the concepts and to adeptly convey these concepts to them.
• Determine whether your team should opt for timeboxing or flow as their operational framework.
• Equip yourself with the skills to synchronize the understanding of managers, product owners, and teams.
• Engage in various levels of learning – single, double, and triple-loop learning – to enhance your capacity for acquiring new knowledge.
• Enhance the efficacy of your daily huddles, while also knowing when to skip them if unnecessary. Elevate the quality of your demos and retrospectives.
• Develop proficiency in resolving the prevalent challenges encountered by Scrum teams.
• Explore a more efficient and effective alternative to Planning Poker for estimation purposes.

What being an effective coach entails

This workshop does not presume that attendees are using any particular approach. However, it is presumed that many will be trained just in Scrum and will therefore be missing many key concepts not taught in Scrum. To be a great Agile coach one must understand what are called the first principles of knowledge work and methods to fill in the gaps in what you know. A quality coach must have a proper attitude as well as having a core set of capabilities.

The following describes the attitude of an effective coach: 

1. Visionary. A visionary sees a potentially better situation and works to achieve it. This includes helping those they are coaching and becoming better at coaching themselves. This also means not giving up even in the face of no agreement.
2. Taking responsibility. Responsibility is not blaming yourself or others. It is where you come from. When what a Coach has said is not understood, they take responsibility for the lack of communication. They are committed to achieving a better understanding. Instead of blaming others for the miscommunication, they look to see how to be more precise in what they are trying to say. Being a visionary without commitment and a way to effectively communicate will not make a difference. Commitment and being a visionary means that no matter what occurs, you do not give up on that vision.  
3. Rational optimism. Knowledge work is complex. There is no claim we can see forward with a crystal ball. Discovering what is needed, responding to surprises by the outside world, and the unpredictability of how people will react to change will always keep us needing to validate how we are being and our actions. But when it comes to moving forward with how we are working, we should have an attitude that we don’t have to just run experiments; we can create a model of understanding that we convey to those we’re coaching and leading.
4. Humility. Humility is an acknowledgment that everyone has value. We may be experts in one area, but no one is the best at everything. People with humility can still have self-confidence and know they are good at accomplishing things. Humility is not a put down of oneself but more of an uplifting of others. People with humility know they do not have all the answers and must work with others to achieve them. People with humility can put their egos aside for the greater good. This is particularly important in recognizing that unless the Coach is already an expert in the domain being worked in, they will have to accept the judgment of those with more expertise in that domain. It also means that if you are leading an Agile Transformation, regardless of your experience, you remain open to other coaches and are willing to acknowledge when their idea is better than yours. Having humility enables a Coach to continue to learn and embrace the value of others.
5. Empathy and compassion. Empathy is walking in someone else’s shoes and seeing the world from their perspective. To understand their emotional sense of being.  It is critical to all the roles we have specified for a Coach. Empathy facilitates excellent communication. Compassion goes beyond empathy. It’s the feeling of deep sympathy and concern for the suffering or well-being of others. Compassion involves understanding and sharing emotions and taking committed action to alleviate the suffering or promote the well-being of the person in need. It’s an active response that involves kindness, support, and a desire to make a positive difference. 
6. Congruence, integrity, and authenticity. Good leaders must “walk their talk.” This means that your words and actions are consistent. Coaches influence people by modeling behavior. This requires integrity – focusing on helping your clients more than easing your ego. It often takes courage. Being authentic means being honest about how things are. In particular, admitting when you don’t know something or are dealing with something. This creates the space for others to be authentic.
7. Systems thinking.  Coaches know that most challenges occur due to the system people are in. In fact, the system itself can cause interpersonal and communication issues. A good coach looks at the system first. This perspective gives them empathy. This also has them look for patterns both where they are working and in organizations similar to where they are working.

The capabilities of an effective coach: 

1. Knowing how to get clarity on what success means.Amplio defines an improvement initiative’s success as the increased speed of cost-effective value delivery to stakeholders. The success of an organization requires that we understand who the stakeholders are, their influence, the impact of an improvement on them, their values, their underlying commitments, and what is valuable to them. We also say that stakeholders include employees. If you do not consider them in the picture, it will show up in turnover, not being able to recruit talent, and eventually impact your value delivery. Just having a survey doesn’t do it. Leaders need to communicate what they are improving, when, and how based on the results of those surveys.
2. A deep understanding of what makes workflows effective and how to adjust for the context the team is in. Deming said, “Experience teaches nothing. There is no experience to record without theory. Without theory, there is no learning, and that is their downfall. People copy examples and then wonder what the trouble is. They look at examples, and without theory, they learn nothing.” When a coach understands why things work, they can provide that understanding both to the people doing the work and those accountable for the work. The use of theory helps get everyone on the same page. They can also adjust the practices required for the context they are in.
3. An understanding of how people learn and what impacts their thinking. People are complex beings. They have limitations on how they can learn and how much they can know at any one time. Understanding these limitations can avoid a lot of wasted effort. Understanding how people learn can avoid creating resistance and empower them to implement their new knowledge. People often operate from cognitive biases. Understanding what these are allows you to proactively address them.
4. Being able to convey necessary concepts to different roles such that new actions and behaviors arise. For example, using Agile technical words with some leaders or the business does not work. You will get further by understanding the domain of the people you are talking to and speaking to them using their language. 
5. Effectively interacting with learners to enhance their effectiveness. Impactful coaches are respectful, effective communicators, have high integrity, and are committed to whom they are coaching. In other words, they demonstrate high emotional intelligence. 
6. Have appropriate tools and methods to help people work together effectively. Teams are often not co-located yet still need to work together. Various technologies and approaches are essential. Technologies include virtual boards, chat rooms, tools for making work visible, tools that simplify remote planning, including virtual conference rooms, and actionable insights through metrics.

Coaches use a variety of coaching, mentoring, facilitation approaches, and associated technologies to make the most impact and ensure everyone is heard, not just the loudest voice in the room. This includes virtual conference rooms, virtual boards, games, surveys, experiential training, and story-telling using objective analytics to work with other leaders and coaches and make the most impact. Agile Transformation teams often are run as hierarchies and silos instead of learning organizations. They have an opportunity to model new ways of working.  The Agile transformation team itself can use objective and qualitative analytics to evolve and reflect on every step of the overall transformation.

Rational optimism and systems thinking require understanding some basics of knowledge work. Therefore, this workshop, while focusing on the coaching role, will cover some basic science of knowledge work.

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Workshop uses collaboration boards (Miro virtual boards) to present and learn concepts

One or more boards are used each session. Each board is oriented toward identifying challenges and showing how to solve challenges. Here are 4 virtual collaboration board examples: