Agile Retroflection of the Day

Eben Halford nominated me to be today’s contributor to Yves Hanoulle’s Agile Retroflection of the Day series. This is quite exciting, scary and a massive honour! Today’s question is this:

“What are the advantages and disadvantages of a coach having practical experience of all the key responsibilities they coach?”

Just to be clear, I am not a coach/trainer or certified in anyway. In fact I sit on the receiving end as a developer. However I do have the pleasure of working with Eben on a daily basis who is an Agile Coach, our CTO and my friend.

I’ve interpreted this question as relating to a coach’s experience performing the day job of one or more of their students. Apologies if I misinterpreted.

The first thought that entered my head was that you don’t need to be good at every discipline within your organisation to be a good CEO. Much in the same way I believe the most important attribute of a coach is their personality, their charisma and a creative approach to problem solving to help you create your own path and guide you down it. Every situation is different so there is no exact science for becoming Agile.

This leads me onto my realm which is within engineering teams. Developers are clearly far more intelligent than their peers. We know more (actually we know everything about everything), our jobs are much more difficult and most people are only here to get in our way and make our lives even harder. We also do not make mistakes.

Joking aside, the feeling that “nobody gets us” is so common in small to medium companies that the them versus us rift that forms between developers and the rest of the company is a tremendous problem and a topic unto itself.

Let’s imagine a team of middle-aged .NET developers. Think sandals, beards, “127.0.0.1 is home” t-shirts and been “doing waterfall” since punch cards were in fashion. You’re either one of them or you’re clearly not. Now if management had sent the following memo:

Dear Team,

Please report to meeting room 167 at 6am next Thursday for your Agile training. Tea, coffee and one biscuit each will be served.

The Management

As a developer my reaction could be to take offence and turn defensive.

In this situation a coach with a background as a jaded software developer will make a much greater impact than any other. The coach’s talent must lie with gaining the respect and support of the team they are training and without understanding them, genuinely convincing them and being part of them I’m afraid you could end up conducting many a failed session.

Levent Ali · 6 January 2010