As an agile coach, do I need to be strategic?

Yes.

The ultimate goal for Agile coach is to help the company move from a status “A” (where you are) into a preferred one “B” (where you aspire to be).

It could be through Agile transformation or any other approach that could help the company reach its goals.

Agile transformations should follow a strategy aligned with the company strategy.

The good Agile coach is the one able to establish a clear strategy to drive the transformation.

What is strategy?

A strategy is a set of actions and choices designed to achieve a particular objective or overcome a specific problem or challenge. It’s like a route designed to get you from Point “A” to Point “B”.

Why do I need a strategy?

To keep focus on a one direction. To keep ressrouces synchronised in achiveing the same goal. To keep actions coaherent and to help the company make the difference.

if you don’t have a strategy, it is very difficult to reach your goals.

Below the steps that I recommend to build a strategy.

The first step is to make it clear for all stakholders what success looks likes (B).

As an Agile coach you should try to create the alignement on the objectives and goals for the company and teams. It should be cristal clear what success looks like and understandable by all the involved parts..

Then as a second step, you should try to drive diagnosis, observce and understand problems and challenges that we need to tackle in order to reach our success.

It should be specific for which group of people are you trying to solve these problems.

The third step is to prioritise and cut. No one can solve everthing at once.

A good strategy is a focused one.

We need to focus on the problem that could bring the biggest impact for our company, teams in achieving the goals, mission and vision.

The fourth step is to list the actions that could overcome these problems.

It should be concrete , doable and coherent.

The last step is to execute, learn and adapt keeping in mind your goals, mission and vision.

All these steps should be done in a coordination with different stakholders in the comapny, it could be teams, management, C-Level management etc …

A strategy is a design act, so we should keep it flexible, start by prototyping it , test it and inspect and adapt based on the learnings on the way.

An Agile coach should wear the hat of a strategy designer so that he can provide the thinking framework to others to think about the strategy.