Why is Agile Coaching required?

It's one thing to read Agile Manifesto, related literature and start following the practices like daily meetings, demonstrations, retrospectives but completely different ball game to be able to understand the reasoning and values behind these practices. Agile adoption or roll-out to a larger base appears to be deceptively simple and that's where lot of organizations make mistakes by taking short-cuts. When the claimed benefits do not appear, then the entire blame is passed over to Agile and many people loose faith in these methodologies which is real pity as the problem was more in the way these methodologies were introduced, understood and adapted rather than the other way round. Based upon our long experience of Agile practicioners in different contexts and roles, we propose following plan :

Verification and Preparation

• Readiness Assesment We start with an organizational / departmental scan to evaluate the readiness. Based upon the scan we provide a clear actionable items report to the management about what structures / practices need to be changed/adopted to leverage the maximum benefits of Agile.


• Training We believe one size doesn't fit all. Based upon the results of the scan, we prepare and execute customized training for different stake-holders. They are typically Project Managers/ Line Managers/ Software Developers/QA Analysts/Testers/Technical Architects/Business Analysts. We ourselves have been practising Agile for more than 4 years. That's the reason, our training program rather than only focusing on theoretical aspects, involves lot of real life scenarios, easy to understand and interactive simulations. Please have a look at our agile training programme for more information

Actual Adoption

Once training of your key people is over, we see broadly two approaches towards Agile Adoption

• Pilot Project Approach You feel that Agile is better suited to your organization than your current set of practices but are not really sure about results / effects it is going to have in short / medium term. You would like to evaluate the results before deciding about the future course of action. There can also be situations where you think certain departments / modules are just not ready or are too critical to be shaken up so severely today.

  In this case, Inphina consultant will start working as full-time member of the newly formed Agile team. He will be coaching, mentoring and helping every stake holder of the project to adapt to the practices through his real-life experiences. Once the team starts delivering value and shows progress consistenly, we decrease our involvement in a phased manner by allowing a smooth transition



• Big Bang Approach You are convinced that Agile is the best or may be the only solution to critical problems your organization is facing at the moment. You also feel that because of the business structure you are in, implementing Agile in an incremental manner will not enable you to reap its rewards in an acceptable time-frame.

  Depending upon the size of your development and business teams, we will form a team of Inphina consultants who would be simultaneously coaching and helping different parts of the organization to adapt to Agile way of working. They will also be helping inter-dependent teams to have effective set of practices like Common Product Backlog, Scrum of Scrums, Release Planning etc.

Would like to know more about our experiences or have a similar problem in hand, we would love to hear from you. Do drop us a line at agile@inphina.com