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What is an Enterprise Agile Coach?

What is an Enterprise-level Agile Coach? There are very different Agile Coach roles and when people use the term “Agile Coach” it is often not exactly clear what role that they are referring to.

Enterprise Agile Coach

Typical Team-level Agile Coach Role

Most often, what they’re talking about as an “Agile Coach” is what I would call a team-level Agile Coach. Someone in that role works at a tactical level with individual members of an Agile team to help them become more proficient in executing a Scrum process.

What Is an Enterprise Agile Coach?

The role of an Agile Coach at an enterprise-level needs to be better-defined and differentiated from a normal team-level “Agile Coach” role. Beyond the team-level Agile Coach role, an enterprise-level Agile Coach:

  • Helps companies design and implement an effective Agile transformation for their business
  • Works at a more strategic level to integrate an Agile development process with a company’s business. (See diagram above)

An enterprise-level Agile Coach should be able to see the need for an Agile transformation from a broader business perspective. Check out this article for more on that:

The Impact of the Business Environment

The problem is that there is a big difference between companies whose primary business is focused on product development and other types of businesses.

Product Development Companies

  • Agile works very well in companies that are in the primary business of developing products (particularly software products). Intuit is an example that develops TurboTax, Quicken, and QuickBooks).
  • In those companies, there is a strong and natural alignment between an Agile development process and the overall business goals of the company
  • It is very easy to apply an Agile development process in that environment.

Non-Product Development Companies

It is much more difficult to apply an Agile development process in a company that is not in the primary business of developing products. In that kind of business, the relationship of an Agile development process to the company’s overall business strategy is much more indirect.

In companies that are not in the primary business of developing products:

  • You can’t just force the company to be “Agile” in order to make the company more amenable to an Agile development process
  • The company’s overall culture and business strategy needs to be optimized around the critical success factors for that business

Fitting the Approach to the Business

An enterprise-level Agile Coach role can be very challenging. It’s important to fit the approach to the business rather than force-fitting the business to some arbitrary approach, Here’s an example:

  • If a company is in a business that requires operational excellence, it needs to focus its overall culture and business strategy primarily on efficiency of operations and reducing costs and
  • That doesn’t necessarily align completely with just becoming more “Agile”.
  • In that kind of environment, you have to develop a strategy that considers both the company’s business strategy and the requirements of an Agile development process to develop a well-integrated approach
  • The implementation of that strategy often requires fitting the approach to the company’s business environment rather than simply trying to force-fit the company to some kind of overall Agile approach

Blending Agile and Plan-Driven Project Management

The solution in that kind of environment could be a blend of Agile and traditional plan-driven management principles and practices. That is a lot more difficult thing to do and requires a lot more skill than a typical team-level Agile coach would normally have. It requires an understanding of:

  • Agile principles and practices; as well as
  • Traditional project management principles and practices
  • And a deeper understanding of the principles behind both of them to know how to blend them together as necessary to fit a given situation

Business Perspective

An enterprise Agile Coach should have the ability to look at a very complex, broad-based, enterprise-level business from both:

  • A more strategic high-level business management perspective as well as
  • A more tactical product development process perspective to develop a strategy for integrating the two.

Overall Summary

An Enterprise Agile Coach is a different kind of Agile Coach role:

  • Instead of working at a team-level on improving team performance,
  • He/she needs to work at a much higher strategic level to help a company fit an Agile approach to their business

Related Articles

Check out the following related articles on “Enterprise-level Agile”:

Additional Resources

Resources for Agile Project Management Online Training.

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