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Coaching Canvas: Asad Safari

The document discusses challenges faced by an agile coach in a large company with over five development teams. After an initial observation and training period, the coach found that teams reverted to old habits and were not adopting practices as intended. The coach began to doubt their usefulness. However, the document argues that a lack of measurable facts, not coach effectiveness, was likely the real issue. It introduces Coaching Canvas as a tool to help coaches collect and use facts to remain effective.

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0vincent
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50 views

Coaching Canvas: Asad Safari

The document discusses challenges faced by an agile coach in a large company with over five development teams. After an initial observation and training period, the coach found that teams reverted to old habits and were not adopting practices as intended. The coach began to doubt their usefulness. However, the document argues that a lack of measurable facts, not coach effectiveness, was likely the real issue. It introduces Coaching Canvas as a tool to help coaches collect and use facts to remain effective.

Uploaded by

0vincent
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Coaching Canvas

Don’t be worry, be factful :)

Asad Safari
([email protected])

Several years ago, I started my journey as an agile coach in a big company. They hired me to make
them agile. They had more than five development teams. We began our journey with observation
and assessment phase. After that, we did training and different workshops for teams. Everything
looked good for several months; you do training, guys come to you and ask about questions and
recommendations, you have a good feeling, you do tangible things that are appreciated for
everybody…

After some time, teams are doing their business as usual. You need to follow them, and you ask
them to do some practices, but most of the time they are busy with their affairs. I fell to thinking
the question that am I helpful here anymore.

It’s about factfulness. We are helping the organization, but we don’t have enough facts to show
ourselves. Organizations always have some new problems, and it triggers the feeling that the
organization’s performance is worse than the past.

We need to learn to separate fact from fiction when forming our opinions. Coaching Canvas is a
tool for you to be a factful coach.

Learn more here


FactfulAgility.com Coaching Canvas
Title: Team don’t finish their committed works at end of the sprint

Context

At the end of the sprint, most items are not complete, and QA doesn’t have enough time to test everything, because most things are done in the last
days of the sprint. While a lot of work remains, some team members cannot do anything.

Hypotheses: Goal:

We think we can solve this problem with the following: The goal is to make the team able to publish multiple releases during a sprint
and complete the most committed issues at the end of the sprint

1- Team size is too big, We need to decrease team size to 5 people.

2- Better user story breakdown -> Small user stories

3- Better planning meetings and Effective daily standups

4- Visualize release count per sprint on the team’s board

Metrics: Coaching tools :

Leading 1- More than 2 releases to production in each 1- Coin Game for Cycle Time Concept
indicators & sprint 2- Visualization
Lagging 2- Completing ~70% of committed issues 3- User Story writing workshop
indicator 3- Not changing the length of the sprint

FactfulAgility.com Coaching Canvas


Title: Team reports to Scrum Master (Case from Agile42 The Hitchhiker's Guide to Agile)

Context

Team members report to the ScrumMaster in the daily standup. Excepting one or two senior engineers, the others do not ask or volunteer information.
The ScrumMaster takes a very controlling role in the meeting, walking everyone through the three questions. When needed, he tells the team what
the managers are saying, doing and thinking about some issues (“Manager N.N. called the customer yesterday and they will decide . . . so don’t do
anything before you get an e-mail.”). He is quick to delegate work and ends the meeting by asking if everyone has “enough work for today”. The
ScrumMaster is a former ProjectManager and took his CSM around 8 months ago.

Hypotheses: Goal:

 We think that the ScrumMaster has not internalized the


mechanisms that he is expected to use. He may have The goal is to make the team members talk to each other rather than the
difficulties understanding the role and the dynamics ScrumMaster and to plan their Sprints and workdays as a team.
between ScrumMaster and Dev Team.
 The ScrumMaster is used to being the hub of information
between “managers” and “coders” and is afraid of losing
that position.
 The team may be afraid of taking responsibility, and is
happy to hand it to the ScrumMaster.

Metrics:  What percentage of questions in the Coaching tools :


standup are posed by the ScrumMaster
Leading compared to team members?  Teach the ScrumMaster in the role.
indicators &  How often do the team members say “us”  Role-model for the ScrumMaster. Offer to run the daily standups a
Lagging and “we” rather than “me” and “I”? couple of times, then explain to him what you did and why.
indicator  All work items are pulled by team  Gently move the ScrumMaster outside the circle in the daily standup. If
members, not pushed by the team members still turn towards the ScrumMaster, move him all the
ScrumMaster way behind the speaking team member.
 Ask the ScrumMaster to skip a daily  Talk to the ScrumMaster to find out what stakeholders he is reporting
standup. Silently observe the meeting to. Then systematically meet all stakeholders and work with them to
when the ScrumMaster is not present. Do replace the reports with transparency.
the interactions change?
FactfulAgility.com Coaching Canvas
Title: Lots of projects and no delivery (Case from Medium)

Context

There’s a big group that name was Audit & Inspection, because most of their systems were for the bank’s Audit & Inspection department. But over
time, a lot of new projects were being allocated to the group. Projects from different business areas, from “Customer master data management” to
“Open banking platform”. To carry out these projects, new people were added to this group, so the group was growing up. The number is approximately
about 12 to 60 people.

This big group did not have the concept of the team. It was just a number of people trying to finish lots of project at the same time, Lots of dependencies,
redo-works, hand-overs, etc. We were trying to carry out the agile ceremonies on the big group, but events such as Sprint Planning or Review were
completely useless. The problem was it was so boring or ineffective.

Hypotheses: Goal:

 We think that this group is too big one and we need to


break it to smaller cross-functional teams. The goal is to make the real teams that be able to deliver value based on
 We think that creating a team identity will help us to have a market cadence.
better team.
 We think that teams with a specific mission will have better
engagement.

Metrics:  How often do the team members use Coaching tools :


their Identity?
Leading  Measuring Lead time  Train Managers and leader about cross-functional structure
indicators &  Measuring team happiness  Create Identity and symbol workshop
Lagging  Start using the symbols in all internal communication
indicator  Discover missions for teams

FactfulAgility.com Coaching Canvas

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