In December 09, a colleague of ours was a tad bit envious of a great initiative leaded by Laurent Cobos.Laurent, through a collaborative effort with the Pyxis developer community created the Pyxis Developer’s Charter.
Seeing the rallying effect of the Developer’s Charter, we attempted to launch a similar initiative for Agile Coaches, but we had limited success. Coaches being in high demand these days, we had less time to invest in developing a strong and honest charter that other coaches could easily identify to.
We did however identify some conditions of success:
-The language must be business compatible
-Must show that the coach is accountable to the client
-Must show that our client is equally accountable to the coach
-Can include specific practices
-What else?
And through our internal wiki and a couple of meetings, we came up with this:
As an Agile Coach, I commit to the team and its organization to…
- Never apply recipes
- Respect your distinct culture
- Help you challenge your current culture, principles and practices
- Let you learn from your mistakes
- Not let you make irrecoverable mistakes
- Put in place an empirical process that allows learning
- Allow you to evolve within that empirical process
- Allow the process itself to evolve
- Have to courage to say No
- Guaranty bug free software
- Telling you what you must hear and not what you would like to hear.
- Not inflict help
- Help you expose the value you create
- Help you expose non-valuable activities
- Help you identify obstacles
- Help you identify solutions
- Help you to communicate efficiently
- Be continuously aware that I can be profoundly influenced by the non-Agile surroundings, immediate context and personalities. (Inspired from The Tipping Point)
- Stay true to the Agile Manifesto
What would you add, change or simply remove?
What makes uncomfortable?
Which statement makes you stand-up and cheer?!
What would be your preferred format?
Would you sign this Charter?
00
The Agile Coach's Charter http://bit.ly/9kNvkG . I hope this will come up at the next #accca
{: The Agile Coach’s Charter http://bit.ly/axviHo
The agile coaches charter http://bit.ly/9ZSkFw – I like it
RT @elarame: The Agile Coach's Charter http://bit.ly/9kNvkG . I hope this will come up at the next #accca
I like the “Never apply recipes”.
I would rephrase “Let you learn from your mistakes” to “MAKE you learn from your mistakes”
It’s missing a focus guidance. There are always more problems than can be solved.. A coach should identify what the team needs to learn NEXT… Not sure how I would phrase that, though.
Question: may I appear in your blogroll?
RT @agilepartnership: The Agile Coach's Charter http://bit.ly/9kNvkG
I would sign this charter! Love it.
Lyssa
Thanks Olivier and Lyssa!
In September, I’ll create an “Agile Coach Charter” section on AgilePartnership.com containing a first draft.
We’ll see what happens from there.
See ya at Agile 2010!
Eric
Would it make sense for you to group together the points that describe the commitment of a coach apart from the points that make this commitment an agile one ?
It does!
Care to give it a try?
Very interesting post Eric.
From my perspective, this seems to be an “Agile Consultant Charter” rather than an “Agile COACH Charter”.
The role of the coach is to get people to achieve an objective that they wouldn’t be able to achieve by themselves or not as quickly. In addition, coaching is the use of Questions to get people to come up with their answer as opposed to telling them how to achieve their goal.
Besides that, I like the charter concept.
Thanks for your comment Martin! I’m writing this on a tiny Android in Macau China so forgive me if my reply is a bit short.
Coach or consultant? Talk about opening a new debate! Are they really mutually exclusive? If as a coach you are limiting to only ask questions, then I guess I am a consultant.
I like to do it all depending on the situation: facilitator, teacher, problem solver, mentor, etc. I can go from Telling to Delegating within the same hour.
Am I a consultant or a coach? Yes I am.
I would sign this. Though my title is Scrum Master
a BIG part of my job is coaching.
Sam,
I’d say Coach and ScrumMaster differ mostly in the type and level of engagement towards the team. I always felt “ScrumCoach” was a more appropriate name.
Thanks for the comment!
Eric