Allison Pollard helps people discover their agile instincts and develop their coaching abilities. As an agile coach with Improving in Dallas, Allison enjoys collaborating with coaches and leaders to unlock high performance and become trusted change agents in their organization and the community. In her experience, applying agile methods improves delivery, strengthens relationships, and builds trust between business and IT. Allison is also a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach, a foodie, and proud glasses wearer.
Agile coaches can be squeamish about metrics to evaluate how effective their efforts are because ultimately results are outside of their control. Yet we all like to know that our work adds value and makes a difference; when we feel we are not seeing positive results despite our best efforts, we will look to make a change in that coaching relationship. Metrics could support conversations with the people we coach about how things are going and if coaching should continue with them or not.
“We’re going to invite people from 40 product teams to meet for 2 days. Our goal is to map dependencies between the teams for our enterprise initiatives and determine how we might need to shift priorities for feature delivery across teams.” It was a big ask. Roughly 200 people in a large room. Mapping out future work and dependencies on the walls, tables, and out into the hallway. It can be overwhelming to have so many people in a working session together. The goal was to create smoother delivery plans across so many teams. In my experience, big collaborative work sessions benefit from a very small amount of pre-work by attendees. The session is for work to happen.
Best Agile Articles Virtual Conference is a quarterly gathering where best of the best authors share their thoughts, ideans, and inspirations with teh conference participants. If you would like to subscribe to the soundcast of these talks, head to Soundwise.
Tandem Coaching Academy and Heart Healthy Scrum were honored to host Allison Pollard in July 2020 with the topic “Coaching Winning Agile Teams.”
It’s common for agile coaches to be compared to sports coaches. Coaches fill a well-recognized role in sports, and many people have had some real experience on a sports team with a coach. In fact, I often see Scrum Masters or Agile Coaches being represented in diagrams as the person with a hat and a whistle, suggesting the sports coach metaphor. It’s a great comparison to explain how a Scrum Master or Agile Coach is typically outside the “software development game”—just as a sports coach is not scoring the points, this agile role is not hands-on in creating the product.
Best Agile Articles is a collaborative project of the Agile community to bring you the best of the best publications each year. Our goal in publishing these yearly editions is to cull through the many articles that are published each year and provide you with a curated set of high-quality articles that capture the latest knowledge and experience of the agile community in one compact volume. Our purpose is twofold. First, we understand that it’s hard to figure out where to go when looking for ideas and answers. There are thousands of blogs, videos, books and other resources available at the click of a mouse. But that can be a lot to sort through. So, we thought we could be of some help. Second, we wanted to bring some visibility to many people who are doing outstanding work in this field and are providing helpful resources. We hope that this publication will help them connect to you, the ones they are writing for. Our intention is that this publication is to be by the agile community as a service to the agile community and for the agile community. With that in mind, we pulled together a great group of volunteers to help get this work into your hands.
The articles in this volume were selected by: • A diverse Volunteer Committee of sixteen people with expertise in a variety of areas related to agile. • The agile community. A call for article nominations went out in early 2020 and several dozen 2019 articles were nominated by the community.
The articles themselves cover a wide variety of topics including organizational structure, culture, and agile leadership. There is something for almost everyone here. All editions of the Best Agile Articles publication are available on Amazon and free to download on the Best Agile Article site. We are thankful for the great participation by the agile community at large. If you would like to participate in delivering this publication in future years, we would welcome hearing from you.
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Allison Pollard
Allison Pollard helps people discover their agile instincts and develop their coaching abilities. As an agile coach with Improving in Dallas, Allison enjoys collaborating with coaches and leaders to unlock high performance and become trusted change agents in their organization and the community. In her experience, applying agile methods improves delivery, strengthens relationships, and builds trust between business and IT. Allison is also a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach, a foodie, and proud glasses wearer.
Beginnings of an Agile Coaching Team
By
Agile coaches can be squeamish about metrics to evaluate how effective their efforts are because ultimately results are outside of their control. Yet we all like to know that our work adds value and makes a difference; when we feel we are not seeing positive results despite our best efforts, we will look to make a change in that coaching relationship. Metrics could support conversations with the people we coach about how things are going and if coaching should continue with them or not.
Big Room Planning and Looking at Dependencies Differently
By
“We’re going to invite people from 40 product teams to meet for 2 days. Our goal is to map dependencies between the teams for our enterprise initiatives and determine how we might need to shift priorities for feature delivery across teams.”
It was a big ask. Roughly 200 people in a large room. Mapping out future work and dependencies on the walls, tables, and out into the hallway. It can be overwhelming to have so many people in a working session together. The goal was to create smoother delivery plans across so many teams. In my experience, big collaborative work sessions benefit from a very small amount of pre-work by attendees. The session is for work to happen.
Coaching Winning Agile Teams
By
Best Agile Articles Virtual Conference is a quarterly gathering where best of the best authors share their thoughts, ideans, and inspirations with teh conference participants. If you would like to subscribe to the soundcast of these talks, head to Soundwise.
Tandem Coaching Academy and Heart Healthy Scrum were honored to host Allison Pollard in July 2020 with the topic “Coaching Winning Agile Teams.”
Looking at Agile Coaching and Sports Coaching
By
It’s common for agile coaches to be compared to sports coaches. Coaches fill a well-recognized role in sports, and many people have had some real experience on a sports team with a coach. In fact, I often see Scrum Masters or Agile Coaches being represented in diagrams as the person with a hat and a whistle, suggesting the sports coach metaphor. It’s a great comparison to explain how a Scrum Master or Agile Coach is typically outside the “software development game”—just as a sports coach is not scoring the points, this agile role is not hands-on in creating the product.
About Best Agile Articles Project
Best Agile Articles is a collaborative project of the Agile community to bring you the best of the best publications each year. Our goal in publishing these yearly editions is to cull through the many articles that are published each year and provide you with a curated set of high-quality articles that capture the latest knowledge and experience of the agile community in one compact volume.
Our purpose is twofold. First, we understand that it’s hard to figure out where to go when looking for ideas and answers. There are thousands of blogs, videos, books and other resources available at the click of a mouse. But that can be a lot to sort through. So, we thought we could be of some help. Second, we wanted to bring some visibility to many people who are doing outstanding work in this field and are providing helpful resources. We hope that this publication will help them connect to you, the ones they are writing for.
Our intention is that this publication is to be by the agile community as a service to the agile community and for the agile community. With that in mind, we pulled together a great group of volunteers to help get this work into your hands.
The articles in this volume were selected by:
• A diverse Volunteer Committee of sixteen people with expertise in a variety of areas related to agile.
• The agile community. A call for article nominations went out in early 2020 and several dozen 2019 articles were nominated by the community.
The articles themselves cover a wide variety of topics including organizational structure, culture, and agile leadership. There is something for almost everyone here. All editions of the Best Agile Articles publication are available on Amazon and free to download on the Best Agile Article site.
We are thankful for the great participation by the agile community at large. If you would like to participate in delivering this publication in future years, we would welcome hearing from you.