What is an Agile Coach?

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This article was updated on August 19, 2020 to include the newest version of the The Agile Coach image, shown below.

Agile is an iterative and incremental approach for the development and delivery of products and services, and organizations are increasingly embracing it to best meet their business needs. An agile coach can increase the chances of a successful agile adoption or improvement. [1] [2]

Some define the agile coach role as “an individual who coaches agile teams” or a similar self-descriptive representation. A more detailed definition along with examples are presented in this article.

Scott M. Graffius defines the agile coach as:

"The individual is an agile expert who provides guidance for new agile implementations as well as existing agile teams. The agile coach is experienced in employing agile techniques in different environments and has successfully run diverse agile projects. The individual builds and maintains relationships with everyone involved, coaches individuals, trains groups, and facilitates interactive workshops. The agile coach is typically from outside the organization, and the role may be temporary or permanent."
[3]

The following Agile Coach illustration from Exceptional PPM and PMO Solutions
provides additional information such as values, guiding principles, focus areas, tools, and activities for agile coaches.

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Values
include respect, courage, focus, openness, and commitment.

Principles
include collaboration, technical excellence, transparency, continuous improvement, simplicity, fast and frequent delivery, and high satisfaction.

Focus areas include company; division or segment; product; tribe, squad, or team; and individuals.

Tools include data collection, visualization, best techniques, feedback, and agile process tools.

Activities include coaching, teaching, facilitating, and mentoring.

If you'd like to learn more about what an agile coach does, you may be interested in the new book —
Agile Transformation: A Brief Story of How an Entertainment Company Developed New Capabilities and Unlocked Business Agility to Thrive in an Era of Rapid Change. The trailer is below.



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About Agile Transformation: A Brief Story of How an Entertainment Company Developed New Capabilities and Unlocked Business Agility to Thrive in an Era of Rapid Change

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Thriving in today's marketplace frequently depends on making a transformation to become more agile. Those successful in the transition enjoy faster delivery speed and ROI, higher satisfaction, continuous improvement, and additional benefits.
Agile Transformation: A Brief Story of How an Entertainment Company Developed New Capabilities and Unlocked Business Agility to Thrive in an Era of Rapid Change (ISBN-13: 978-1072447962) provides a revealing behind-the-scenes story about an actual successful agile implementation at a global entertainment company.

The award-winning book — a quick (60-90 minute) read — is available in paperback and ebook/Kindle formats in the
United States and around the world. Some links by country follow.



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Sources:

[1] Dikert, K., Paasivaara, M. & Lassenius, C. (2016). Challenges and Success Factors for Large-Scale Agile Transformations: A Systematic Literature Review. Journal of Systems and Software, 119, 87-108. DOI: 10.1016/j.jss.2016.06.013.

[2] Sureshchandra, K. & Shrinivasavadhani, J. (2008). Moving from Waterfall to Agile. Proceedings from Agile, 2008: AGILE ’08 Conference. Toronto, ON, Canada. DOI: 10.1109/Agile.2008.49.

[3] Graffius, S. M. (2019): Agile Transformation: A Brief Story of How an Entertainment Company Developed New Capabilities and Unlocked Business Agility to Thrive in an Era of Rapid Change. Seattle, WA: Amazon Digital Services. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.2652976.

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About Exceptional PPM and PMO Solutions

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Exceptional PPM and PMO Solutions™ helps clients strengthen their project management capabilities and realize their strategic objectives and business initiatives. The firm provides advisory, training, and facilitative consulting services related to project, program, portfolio, and PMO management. While every engagement is unique, outcomes typically include getting more projects done, faster delivery time, improved on-budget performance, improved customer and stakeholder satisfaction, and more consistent realization of business results. Exceptional PPM and PMO Solutions™ confidently backs its services with a
Delighted Client Guarantee™.

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Let's Connect

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Connect with us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

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© Copyright 2019 Scott M. Graffius, Exceptional PPM and PMO Solutions™. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the express written permission of Scott M. Graffius/Exceptional PPM and PMO Solutions™.













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Scott M. Graffius Speaking at Frug'Agile Conference


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Scott M. Graffius will speak at October 2021 edition of Frug'Agile Conference (Photo of Khor Virap monastery in the shadow of Mount Ararat by Andrew Behesnilian; used under license, CC BY-SA 3.0)


🔥 Update: The Frug'Agile Armenia 2021 Conference recorded sessions and made the videos available to the public. The video of Scott M. Graffius's session is included at the end of this post.

Scott M. Graffius, CEO of Exceptional PPM and PMO Solutions, will present “The Journey to Happier and More Productive Agile Teams” at the Frug’Agile Conference on October 15, 2021, from 7:00-8:00 p.m. Armenia Time.

The conference will take place in Armenia and France, attendees can participate in-person or virtually, and sessions will be delivered in French or English (Scott's will be in English).

Attendees may be eligible to receive continuing education unit (CEU) credit, equivalent to 1.00 Professional Development Hour (PDH). For reporting with the Project Management Institute (PMI), it's 1.00 Professional Development Unit (PDU), under the Leadership category. For reporting with the Scrum Alliance, it's 1.00 Scrum Educational Unit (SEU), under either the Learning category or the Events category. For reporting with other organizations, refer to their respective instructions.

To learn more and to secure tickets for the conference, visit
https://www.frugagile.org.

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Scott M. Graffius will speak at October 2021 edition of Frug'Agile Conference (Photo of Khor Virap monastery in the shadow of Mount Ararat by Andrew Behesnilian; used under license, CC BY-SA 3.0)

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About Scott M. Graffius

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Scott M. Graffius is an agile project management practitioner, consultant, award-winning author, and international speaker. He has generated over one billion dollars of business value in aggregate for the organizations he has served. Graffius is the founder, CEO, and principal consultant at Exceptional PPM and PMO Solutions™ and subsidiary Exceptional Agility™, based in Los Angeles, California. His expertise spans project, program, portfolio, and PMO leadership inclusive of agile, traditional, and hybrid approaches. Content from his books (
Agile Scrum: Your Quick Start Guide with Step-by-Step Instructions and Agile Transformation: A Brief Story of How an Entertainment Company Developed New Capabilities and Unlocked Business Agility to Thrive in an Era of Rapid Change), workshops, speaking engagements, and more have been featured and used by businesses, governments, and universities including Gartner, Microsoft, Deloitte, Oracle, Cisco, Ford, Qantas, Atlassian, Bayer, the National Academy of Sciences, the United States Department of Energy, the United States Army, Project Management Institute, the IEEE, the New Zealand Ministry of Education, Tufts University, Texas A&M University, Virginia Tech, Penn State, Warsaw University of Technology, University of Waterloo, Loughborough University London, and others. Graffius has spoken at conferences and other events around the world, including Armenia, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, India, Ireland, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, United Kingdom, and the United States. Thinkers360 named Graffius a global top thought leader and influencer in four domains: Agile, Change Management, Digital Transformation, and GovTech.

His full bio is available at
https://www.exceptional-pmo.com.

Connect with Scott on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

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About Agile Scrum: Your Quick Start Guide with Step-by-Step Instructions

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Shifting customer needs are common in today's marketplace. Businesses must be adaptive and responsive to change while delivering an exceptional customer experience to be competitive.

There are a variety of frameworks supporting the development of products and services, and most approaches fall into one of two broad categories: traditional or agile. Traditional practices such as waterfall engage sequential development, while agile involves iterative and incremental deliverables. Organizations are increasingly embracing agile to manage projects, and best meet their business needs of rapid response to change, fast delivery speed, and more.

With clear and easy to follow step-by-step instructions,
Scott M. Graffius's award-winning Agile Scrum: Your Quick Start Guide with Step-by-Step Instructions helps the reader:

  • Implement and use the most popular agile framework―Scrum;
  • Deliver products in short cycles with rapid adaptation to change, fast time-to-market, and continuous improvement; and
  • Support innovation and drive competitive advantage.

Hailed by Literary Titan as “the book highlights the versatility of Scrum beautifully.”

Winner of 17 first place awards.

Agile Scrum: Your Quick Start Guide with Step-by-Step Instructions is available in paperback and ebook/Kindle worldwide. Some links by country follow.


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About
Agile Transformation: A Brief Story of How an Entertainment Company Developed New Capabilities and Unlocked Business Agility to Thrive in an Era of Rapid Change

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Thriving in today's marketplace frequently depends on making a transformation to become more agile. Those successful in the transition enjoy faster delivery speed and ROI, higher satisfaction, continuous improvement, and additional benefits.

Based on actual events,
Agile Transformation: A Brief Story of How an Entertainment Company Developed New Capabilities and Unlocked Business Agility to Thrive in an Era of Rapid Change provides a quick (60-90 minute) read about a successful agile transformation at a multinational entertainment and media company, told from the author's perspective as an agile coach.

The award-winning book by
Scott M. Graffius is available in paperback and ebook/Kindle worldwide. Some links by country follow.


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About Exceptional PPM and PMO Solutions


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Exceptional PPM and PMO Solutions provides client organizations with advisory, training, speaking, embedded talent, and facilitative consulting services to help them advance their agile project, program, portfolio, and PMO management capabilities to best realize their strategic objectives and business initiatives, making them more competitive and valuable. Our seven core values are integrity, objectivity, collaboration, persistence, innovation, continuous learning and improvement, and exceptional results. We confidently provide a Delighted Client Guarantee™. For details, visit https://www.Exceptional-PMO.com.

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About Frug’Agile Conference


Frug’Agile 2021 is a global conference on agile. The theme for this edition is "back to basics," and it runs from October 14-15. The conference features speakers from Armenia, France, and around the world. Sessions will be presented in either French or English, and attendees may participate in-person — from venues in Armenia or France — or virtually.

To learn more about Frug’Agile, visit
https://www.frugagile.org.

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Let's Connect

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Connect with us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

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Update on November 13, 2021

If you missed the event, recordings of sessions are now available on YouTube. Scott's talk is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewokhrpMCIE. The video also appears below.


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The short link for this blog post is:
https://bit.ly/frug-21
The short link for a related post on LinkedIn is:
https://bit.ly/frug-in



© Copyright 2021 Scott M. Graffius, Exceptional PPM and PMO Solutions™. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the express written permission of Scott M. Graffius/Exceptional PPM and PMO Solutions™.













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