About Agile Coaching
The main factor about being agile as a company is the human potential. If you want to implement agile development procedures in your software development group, the best way to ensure this investment is to be simultaneously working on developing the talents in your staff - as individuals and as well as a team. A strong tool for doing this is systemic coaching.

Myllerup Consult is specialized in the implementation of agile development methods for software development organizations. The changes are supported by systemic coaching. From this, the concept Agile Coaching arises.

In these years, many companies are implementing methods like Scrum in their development departments. A successful implementation of Scrum gives a number of advantages which strongly improve the competitiveness, transition readiness and profitability of the company. Feedback from companies which have implemented Scrum says that one can typically expect a doubling or even quadrupled of the productivity in the software teams. Correspondents also say that it is hard to implement Scrum. Based on its experience, is the thesis in Myllerup Consult that the challenges lies in a combination of the following:

• Showdown with the traditional management role in the development group
• The transition from groups of individual thinkers into high-performance teams
• Changed responsibilities in relation to the rest of the company

Showdown with the traditional management role
A typical pitfall when implementing Scrum is maintaining the traditional management role. One of the basic foundations of Scrum is facilitating of self, interdisciplinary teams who, in the light of members' detailed knowledge of requirements, domain and technology, is able to plan the team's work and take the right decisions . To support this, we must put an end to the traditional management role. We must move from management through direct supervision, orders, and the hierarchy and command, to leadership through indirect supervision, clarification of the objectives and values, and support for the team's ability to act. These changes can be supported by using coaching as a management tool.

It is also important to maintain this when something goes wrong in the project (because, from time to time this will still happen). Here we should, as leaders, not to fall back to the act from the reptilian brain and throw months of process improvements into the sea. Instead we should deal with what the Scrum process says about changes and obstacles, take wise decisions and let the people who really know what to do (the team) step into character and act.

The transition from group into team
In addition to the leader, the employees also need help in order to act under the new conditions. Many organizations have employees with individual tasks, and thus also individual problems. This can be involuntarily maintain the individual as the expert and hereby bee the bottleneck in certain areas. This makes the company vulnerable in relation to people with leading skills and may have a negative impact on the quality of the product.

Maybe one ore more employees with unused skills and talents are just waiting to be locked up and sent into action. Through team coaching sessions and reflections of the cooperation in the recent period of time (the so-called retrospectives), the team identity and cooperation will be developed, with increased productivity and quality as a result.

Changed responsibilities in relation to the rest of the company
Implementation of Scrum, can challenge the collaboration with other parts of the company. In some cases inappropriate routines or genuine errors which may have occurred elsewhere than in the software group will be uncovered. In particular, the relationship between the development organization and product managers is interesting and should be assessed.

Product managers may have been used to act as users' lawyers, project managers, and the test or quality responsible and may feel they have lost control after Scrum has been introduced. Through an intensive training of product managers as Product Owners, those will be aware of what opportunities the new process is giving them: control over the priority of the functionality to be developed and the ability to take care of the other important things in their jobs.

Let Myllerup Consult be at your assistance
Through the use of Agile Coaching from Myllerup Consult, you can be guided to a successful implementation of Scrum and learn how to act your self in the future in order to have a professional and agile development organization. Please don’t hesitate to email us (the address can be found on the contact page) and obtain the total description of the services offered.