Agile

Advanced Agile Coaching will complete your journey from scrum master to Agile Coach. Getting started with Agile is easy, driving to higher performance is hard. This course gives you the Agile Coach tools to help your teams achieve!

Advanced Agile Coaching clarifies the role of the agile coach, exploring the relationship between Coach and Team. As an Agile Coach you move beyond being the team's facilitator. You will serve as teacher, mentor, problem solver and understood before undertaking it

Advanced Agile Coaching will enable you to gain deep understanding and practice of professional coaching techniques as applied to Agile. You will learn and practice techniques such as presence; active listening; powerful questioning; silence and feedback. You will learn to identify a team's development stage and adapt your coaching approach accordingly. You'll learn how stress can hinder the relationship and how the application of emotional intelligence will help. You will take these techniques to coaching the immediate team and then also learn about mentoring the wider team such as product owner, agile project manager etc. You will learn how to help a team get started so they get to norming and performing as quickly as possible by practicing powerful team startup exercises such as Market of Skills and Values and designing your own team startup. Learn about characteristics of healthy teams such as trust; shared purpose; shared leadership; self organisation and more, and how to help the team better exhibit these.

The course is aligned with the ICAgile Agile Facilitation and Coaching specialty track, which has been designed by leading international experts to outline the skills and knowledge needed to be an effective Agile Coach.

Advanced Agile Coaching is deeply experiential, immersing the participants in hands-on coaching exercises and using that experience to apply and reinforce the discussions. It will prepare you to effectively undertake the role of Agile Coach in your organisation.

Course Outline

A highly practical hands-on class.

The Mindset and Role of the Agile Coach

• Foster your (the coach) own self-awareness and understanding of team dynamics and the organisational system
• Prepare you to help Agile teams work with these structures to plan and manage Agile adoption
• Teach you to understand the relationship between Agile and coaching in order to coach, facilitate, mentor and teach an Agile team
• Explain the relationship of a coach to a self-organised team

Coaching and Communicating Effectively

• The coach fosters a safe environment for open communication through setting an example and encouraging others to mimic it.
• Explore the value that effective professional coaching and communication brings to the team, including purposeful participation, effective use of silence, how to surface healthy conflict, and conflict management and resolution.

Mentoring and Coaching People

• Mentoring and coaching are decidedly different yet complementary.
• In the Agile context, mentoring and coaching helps people step into their Agile role fully and to transition to the Agile mindset.
• As team members transition to (or become more adept at) their Agile roles, the Agile coach is in a position to mentor their personal and professional growth by sharing the knowledge and insights they have learned.
• Using professional coaching skills, the Agile Coach can help them find their own pathway to agility.

Starting Up Teams

• Effective coaching starts by helping Agile team members see what is occurring within themselves, with others, and around them in their environment.
• The purpose of this topic is to create a level of comfort with exploring individual and team preferences, perform start-up activities such as project and team chartering, self-organisation team constructs, being comfortable in learning through doing, starting before you have all of the answers, creating definition of done and other social contracts, defining roles and responsibilities, etc

Growing and Developing Teams

• An Agile Coach understands how high performing teams are formed and maintained, as well as how to grow and develop teams toward their potential, given each team's specific circumstances.
• The Agile Coach understands the difference between a group and a team, when to build a team, how to facilitate the different stages of team development and how each stage may impact the adoption of certain Agile practices.
• Effective Agile coaching means understanding when to seamlessly alternate between pushing for results and stepping back to focus on the team's development, or dancing between teaching, facilitating, mentoring or coaching.

This training course is accredited by the International Consortium for Agile - ICAgile. The course fulfils the Agile Team Facilitation related learning objectives of the "Agile Coaching" track. Successful completion of the course gives the participant "Certified ICAgile Professional in Agile Team Facilitation" status. The remaining learning objectives in this track are addressed by our ICAgile accredited Agile Coaching class.

Who Should Attend?

• Scrum Masters who want to improve their agile coaching skills
• Agile Team Facilitators who want to take the next step
• Experienced agile team members who aspire to the role of Agile Coach
• Agile Project Managers who want to build their coaching muscles

Completion and Certification

On successfully completing the course, delegates will be certified by the International Consortium of Agile(ICAgile) as an ICAgile Certified Professional in Agile Coaching and you will be listed on the ICAgile website. To become a Certified Agile Expert (within this track), you will need to:

• Be a Certified ICAgile Professional (or be recognised at this level by ICAgile)
• Complete all ICAgile Agile Facilitation and Coaching learning objectives (which can be achieved by successfully completing More Agile's two courses: "Foundations of Agile Coaching" and "Advanced Agile Coaching")
• Have obtained real-life experience in the track discipline
• Complete a knowledge and/or competency evaluation (through ICAgile).

About ICAgile

The goal of the International Consortium for Agile is offering knowledge and competency-based certifications in the diverse disciplines needed to sustain organisational agility. ICAgile has collaborated with Agile experts from around the world to develop over 400 learning objectives that underpin 8 agile disciplines. Have a look at this video to learn what makes ICAgile certification different.

Course fees:

£995 + VAT