Interview with Lyssa Adkins on Agile Coaching

I am someone who spent 15 years in plan driven project management trying to make the big process work, trying to make the change control machine pump out something that would satisfy what the customer really needs versus what they told us 18 months ago. Although I’ve delivered a lot of successful projects, I don’t think I delivered one to a delighted client, so I can’t say that I was successful in that way of working. I didn’t know what I was missing and then Agile came along and I had a rude wakening because there were a lot of things that I needed to change about how I worked in order to really help Agile teams have the space they need to do well. That’s a little bit about my journey from project manager to Agile coach.

I think coaches are an integral part to helping teams get to astonishing results because it’s all in the interactions of human beings where that happens. There is no piece in the Agile framework that’s going to help you with that. Having Agile framework there and working well, it’s certainly going to provide the structure and the container within which that can happen, the boundaries. But there are so much more to do within those boundaries, so many more things to bring to the team, so many more ideas and things from different disciplines – things from conflict management and facilitation and teaching and mentoring and professional coaching and a few more.