What Are Agile Methods, Agile Coaching and Lean Management?
Agile Coaching – Helping People Help Themselves
Agile coaching describes the process of implementing and supporting agile methods, principles and values – from individual teams to the entire company. This means that an agile coach works closely with you and helps you make your processes more productive, effective and flexible to meet changing requirements. In addition, agile methods can help you increase employee satisfaction, as they can work more independently with greater freedom to make decisions.
Agile Methods – Tools for Agile Working
Agile methods and agile working refer to a collaborative and effectiveness-oriented working model within an organisation. Agile methods promote the self-organisation of teams as well as their ability to adapt and learn. You can optimise communication within your teams, development cycles and products with agile methods such as Scrum, Kanban and extreme programming.
Lean Management – Lean Organisational Structures
Lean management comprises all mindsets, methods and processes aimed at building an organisation with lean workflows. This maximises added value for customers and minimises waste. The focus is on continuous improvement involving employees, flat hierarchies and customer-oriented processes.
Benefits of Agile Coaching
You maintain short iteration loops for accelerated and better releases as well as a faster time to market.
You collectively improve productivity, collaboration and transparency.
You meet your customers' requirements and expectations despite short-term trends and uncertainties.
You work flexibly in a fast-paced environment that experiences frequent changes and requires short response times.
You respond effectively to complex problems and challenges.
You meet the requirements and expectations of your customers despite the fast-paced market and other uncertainties.
Agile Coaching: Have You Experienced the Following Pain Points?
- Restrictive project management inhibits your employees' productivity
- Your team is faced with constantly changing requirements
- Efficiency does not increase despite specific improvement measures
- Fixed budgets and deadlines lead to constant rescheduling, renegotiation and postponement of launches and releases
Agile coaching prepares you for optimal releases, user-centric features and faster development of minimum viable products.
Agile Coaching – For a Satisfied and High-Performing Team
If you want to aim high and stay ahead of the competition, you need to have in-house talent and expertise. But how can they be retained? This can be achieved through a modern corporate culture, which is promoted by agile approaches such as mindful leadership, lean-agile leadership or New Work.
Improve your corporate culture by
- assembling self-organised teams
- clearly separating hierarchies and professional management
- applying agile working methods
Our coaches assist you in identifying useful steps to make your corporate culture ready for the future.
The Principles Our Agile Coaches Follow
- We believe in the driving force of agile methods and actively embrace them
- We believe in employees who want to maximise their professional potential and find fulfilment in it
- We are committed to great visions that are successfully implemented in networked organisations
- We are enthusiastic about modern business models that are developed in a customer-centric way
Agile Coaching – Trusted Collaboration with dotSource
As part of our digital consulting services, we go beyond analysing the current situation and creating concepts. In close collaboration with you, our agile coaches provide assistance in the implementation of agile concepts.
Our agile coaches immerse themselves in the everyday work of your employees, establish contacts and create safe spaces. They offer valuable expertise in various frameworks, such as Scrum, Scaled Agile Framework and DevOps.
The coaches aim to provide you with the skills to embrace agility in all its facets. In addition, we advise you on scaled agility. Together with you, we develop a framework that is suitable for your company.
Agile Transformation Thanks to MSPM – IT Consulting, Coaching and Tooling from One Source
Many companies are looking for expertise in software development, agile coaching and introductory training for software tools. We provide a combined solution for these different demands in our self-developed and holistic multi-stream project management (MSPM) framework.
With the MSPM framework, we enable close collaboration between delivery teams to effectively organise your projects across different dotSource teams. This guarantees synergistic work spanning several projects, including regular joint evaluation workshops.
Thanks to the MSPM framework, you can
- ensure information flow across projects and teams
- identify dependencies between individual projects (streams)
- align your employees towards a common goal
- facilitate value-based work
Agile Coaching Services – Accompanying the Entire Transformation
Coaching for Agile Teams
- Building agile teams
- Supporting agile teams, for example as a Scrum Master or an agile coach
- Workshops for product owners
- Coaching agile teams in continuous improvement and innovation
- Assembling self-managing teams
Processes and Organisational Structures
- Scaling of agile structural and process organisation
- Transformation of the organisation into a value-stream-based network
- Implementation of agile requirements management
- Building a data-driven organisation based on measurable aspects and key performance indicators (KPIs)
- Support with stakeholder management
Leadership Coaching
- Lean-agile leadership coaching for executives and internal changemakers
- Coaching in agile mindset and culture change
- Promotion of your change management
- Implementation of the »inspect and adapt« principle
- Establishment and support of efficient communication channels
Customised Models of Collaboration
- Long-term collaboration with our coaches, for example as a Scrum Master
- Workshops and coaching (as required)
- One-on-one coaching, mentoring and mediation
- Advice on different frameworks and scaled agility
- Establishing collaborative communities of practice
Tools
- Support with the implementation and use of agile tools, such as Jira and Confluence
- Advice on Azure DevOps
- Implementation of collaborative tools, technologies and working models
Other Digital Consulting Services at a Glance
FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions About Agile Coaching
What do agile coaches do?
Agile coaches provide advice, mediate, guide and give feedback. Besides improving social skills and corporate culture, our agile coaches with their IT expertise can also act as Scrum Masters and process optimisers. Agile coaches work in a highly methodical and solution-oriented manner to help establish an agile corporate culture. For example, they prepare effective one-on-one coaching sessions and meetings to obtain tangible results.
What are agile methods?
»Agile methods« is a collective term for short-cycle and iterative work. Instead of creating finished products through tedious processes, agile methods concentrate on the small-scale development of independent features. These are product modules that are presented, reviewed and further developed in short cycles, for example every 14 days.
What is an agile framework?
A framework specifies different models of collaboration, bringing together various types of roles, processes and agile solutions for budgeting and portfolio management. There are numerous well-known frameworks such as Scrum and SAFe. It is important to choose the right one for your business. Our team is at your disposal to provide expert advice.
What is change management?
Change management refers to working on the holistic transformation of a company. For example, change can mean the simultaneous updating of technologies, workflows and corporate culture. Our agile coaches accompany you as »change agents« throughout the entire process on the path towards digital transformation. They help consolidate the new team structure and provide support in learning new skills. As a result, you benefit from an improved working atmosphere and better trained employees.
What is mindfulness?
Mindfulness means directing attention consciously and without judgement to the present situation. Thanks to benefits such as increased creativity, stress resistance and empathy as well as better health in general, the practice of mindfulness is increasingly finding its way into modern companies as a way of being able to adequately respond to everyday challenges. For mindfulness to take effect, regular practice and support from our agile coaches is essential.
Do you want to learn more? I'm looking forward to hearing from you!
