Agile Coach to Chief Agility Officer

Placing the agile coach on the leadership team

De: Steve Peacocke

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Agile transformations are hard; they express "change" so no one wants them; they can be hugely expensive, take months, sometimes years to implement, and even then, may not stick.
I start this book by saying, "It is not Command and Control, it is Authority" - but it is much, much more. Agile should not be a transformation or a new way of working - agile should be the default way we all work.
Throwing an agile coach at the teams might help in the short run, even though, without any true authority, it is sometimes hard to get anyone to even pay attention to them. But it will not solve anything in the long run without true authority.
You might embark on a huge framework implementation with massive, coloured posters of complex roadmaps and hire badged consultants up the wahzoo, but that will only cost you money and probably even slow down productivity.
What I am proposing in this book is that agile should be the standard way that your teams work. Simple. One of my original test titles for the book was "Agile by Default".
I propose a different take. Don't implement an "Agile Transformation"; instead, have agile ways of working as a default.
This book expresses how this can happen and gives one example of the well-overdue introduction of the CAO or Chief Agility Officer to your organisation - plus a few other changes.
Assigned Authority is not enough, but the Agile Coach doesn't need "Command and Control", they need some authority, but even then, that's not enough to allow people to take agile as a standard way of working.
The right agile coach can make a big difference, but it will take time; from the moment they are gone, things will drift back into comfort.
Let me put it this way: In all the organisations I have worked in, when I was in a position of authority, I could implement faster and better agility than when I was a coach. While some teams look to the coach for guidance, others see the coach as an intrusion and one that will disrupt their work. A coach can sometimes take months before some teams will even listen to them. It is time that the right agile coach is placed in the leadership team where they can do some real good. It takes a special kind of coach to take up that mantle, just like not every technical person can step into a CIO role - but they are out there.
Here's the crux - telling the CIO or CDO to take on a Chief Agility Officer role because they will "know agile" is like telling a CEO they don't need a Chief Information Officer because they "know about computers". Organisations need to understand that their people are their greatest assets, and they need a genuine, scarred and bloodied agile coach who can work at the executive level.
I heard something great recently. This person was an experienced Agile Coach and had seen posts about this book, but because of the title, he didn't think it was worth reading. The Executive he reports to gave him the book and told him to read it. He did.
He tells me it must be the quickest book he's read as he had to finish it. From the very first chapter, he was caught, and each successive chapter answered his questions and, in the end, he just "Had to call me to tell me about it". He felt that he agreed with everything, related to his experiences. Now he's giving the book away to others who might benefit from reading it.