This book was mentioned to me many times during my work and so time is come to review it.
Author Mrs. Adkins is one of the best-known guru of the Scrum and Agile team coaching.
The author of this book speaks about interactions between people and how agile coach can influence it.
Mrs. Adkins believes that good agile coach can adapt quickly and can easily see what is wrong with a given team.
Agile coach is not about command and control and i agree with this statement fully.
“Being detached from outcome and help people!“
This is pretty good and big statement, but it is the truth, many times you as agile coach responsible for mitigating internal team conflicts and that’s it.
Having respect as agile coach in the team is important as maintaining the relations between each team member.
This books speaks about meditations as tool of controlling emotions and thinking process.
With that I agree too, sometimes spending time not being connected to online is very good , calm mind above anything , this allow to see bigger picture. Ideas of agile coach influencing team indirectly is great, different ways how to reach success , this eventually make the most out of it!
Team agreements, nice! This idea of the book author , which allow team to have a common ground so that they never argue one or many particular topics.
Agile coach, do coaching in the way which is not intrusive, it allow people to make mistakes and acknowledge it.
Author speaks about starting new projects and how to do it agile style.
I like the chapter where Mrs. Adkins describes how interaction between team members should evolve and what exact role of Agile coach during that process.
Discussing conflict situation in team make sense to me too, dealing with conflicts of interests is hard , but it its possible and this book provides answers.
At the end of this book author present some interesting stories of Scrum implementation in practice.
Summary: Overall not bad book, but it’s not about following direct workflow its more about the mindset and what to do and not to do as agile coach, basically as agile coach you whole goal is to drive your team to success , but achieve this not with direct participation and own force of will , but rather indirect trough speaking with each of team members and understand theirs needs and the believes and conflicts. Some teams need time to adapt Scrum and some teams must get “refactored” in order to become agile.
Whom i can recommend this book? Scrummasters and product owners , tech leads only if they wish to understand more about the role of agile coach.
This book is a must have for anyone who is serious about coaching of the teams!