How Many Coaches to Form a Team?

Last December at the quarterly Rally coaches gathering in Boulder CO, four coaches (Isaac Montgomery, Steve Adolph, Scott Dunn and myself) resolved to form a team to write a book about Agile aimed at a general business audience. And we resolved to write it in an Agile fashion – eating our own dog food as they say.

Today marks the acceptance of our third iteration plan and I think we are finally getting somewhere. Along the way we’ve learned that Agile is not as easy as we sometimes make it out to be. Here are a few specific lessons.

BEGINNING: It takes time and commitment to form a team. As coaches who travel a lot and are focused on delivering in-person trainings 2-4 weeks each month finding the time to commit to work was challenging at first. We found that we had to first commit to a few meetings to shape the project before we could find the time (e.g. motivation) to commit to working on the actual writing.

DO SOMETHING: Early in the project we had a vision and a team and not much else. This lack of clarity early on nearly overwhelmed our enthusiasm and it was only by focusing on the small chunks, that we could do, that the project began to take shape.

CREATE SOMETHING TO KILL: We began, logically, with the introductory chapter only to realize that this was best written last. This chapter is sitting in our repository unfinished – we may never use it but it was an important step nonetheless.

DECLARATIONS ARE IMPORTANT: Early on we formed a product team – stakeholders from each part of Rally – that we would demo our work to (at the end of each two-week iteration). Without assembling this group, and declaring to them what we are working on, we might never have made it through the early stages of the project and developed the momentum it now appears we have.

IT’S EASY TO FORGET TO INSPECT & ADAPT: We are coaches, we advise and train teams for a living frequently admonish them that the Retrospective is perhaps the most important meeting in any Agile cadence. Yet it wasn’t until this morning that it occurred to us that we should schedule a retrospective as part of OUR cadence (doh!).

This has been a humbling and educational experience for us all and we’re beginning to realize that the story of creating this book may be more interesting than the story itself. Stay tuned for future updates.

What would you like to know about the project?

2 Comments to How Many Coaches to Form a Team?

1. 

   What kind of value did you deliver, when, and how often?
   What did you learn in this regard?

   Thanks!

   - Bob (@FlowchainSensei)
Bob Marshall on March 15th, 2011
2. 

   Our first level of “done” is what we call Blog Deployable.

   This means that a section has been written to have stand-along value and is the author would be willing to post it to their personal blog (e.g. personally fact and spell checked etc).

   We are still in debate as to when we will release these segments. It’s quite possible we will decide to simply post them to a shared blog as we complete them so we can test the ideas and improve based on market feedback.
Bob Gower on March 15th, 2011