Who Coaches the Coach?

I am sitting in a hotel room avoiding finalizing the abstract for my "Who Coaches the Coach?" Agile 2007 discovery session.  More specifically, I am bemoaning the fact that I can't figure out how to make the clever little story that I used in my proposal part of my abstract.  I am also trying to work out what I want to accomplish with this discovery session.  A moment ago the brilliant idea hit me...a blog!

So here's what I know and here's where I am stuck.

1. Agile is hard.  It is challenging and emotionally draining.
2. Agile is so totally worth it.  I have just enough experience with "other ways of doing things" that I never want to go back.
3. When an agile team gets in the groove - really gets cranking, it's awesome, exciting, powerful, and a whole helluva lot of fun.

I need to get my groove back.

“Trust me.  It will be okay,” Maggie said.  “It is always hard at the beginning.”  How I clung to those words.  It was my first agile project in quite a while and I didn’t remember it being this hard last time.  The client didn’t trust us yet, the team felt like we were stumbling through, and I felt like we were still learning the same lessons over and over again. 

During this uncomfortable and scary time, her words were calm and reassuring.  They kept me from giving up.  It wasn’t until I became an agile coach on a later project that I wondered who was coaching Maggie during this period.  Who was reassuring her and reminding her that it really was worth all of this effort?

A new agile project can be exhausting.  In addition to the stress of dealing with new people and understanding their personalities, as the experienced agile team member I have to help them understand their new world.  In many cases those new to agile look at me like I am asking them to jump off a bridge.  Here’s some of what I heard on a recent project:

·         My development team asked, “What’s the value of unit tests; they're always breaking?”

·         My business partner kept telling me “It's not worth it if I can't have everything,” while the VP with the purse strings kept showing me the fixed budget.

·         My business partner’s boss, one of the key stakeholders declared, "I hate agile, it's stupid.  You're making me make decisions.”

I miss Maggie.

I know what to tell each of them.  “Trust me; it will okay.”  But will it?  Okay, when I sit down, take a deep breath, and THINK about it, I know it will all work out.  I know that unit tests are worth the time and worry that they save.  I know that we can build a useful system and give them everything they need even if we don’t give them everything they want.  I just have to get them to choose where to start.  I also know that business will be happy in the end that they made the hard decisions.  But I do have moments of doubt, the same as everyone else…I worry.  I need to tell myself that it will all be okay.

Some time has passed since the project above.  The project was a success.  Our team member who was resistant to unit tests started to see some of their benefits. The client was happy even though they didn't get everything that they wanted.  They did, however, get everything they needed and were pleased with their hard decisions.

Everything worked out.  Even with my moments of self doubt and my frequent exasperations of "is this really worth it," agile won out it the end.  But, here's the kicker...I am on yet another new project with yet another new team.  With all of my experience and all of my musing on this topic of "Who Coaches the Coach?" my plan for integrating with my new team ended up being, well, to completely lose my shit!  Again!

Stop the madness!  Wait, but that's it.  There is always going to be a little madness.  Agile is hard.  Agile is tumultuous because the process allows us to really shine.  It's not the process all by itself that "saves the day."  I need to remember that.  I need to allow for the craziness so it won't make me so nutty and feeling like giving up.  I know that the agile aspects to new project challenges do have solutions, but that the solutions vary because of the emotional and human factor.

So now what do I do?  I have a funny feeling that I am going to go through this again and again.  I also believe that others go through this turmoil as well.

Let me regroup...

1. I get a lot out of rereading my stories from previous projects, even as I write this blog.
2. Now that I have some agile experience, I find the stories so much more interesting and helpful than re-reading the theory.
3. I like the books that give me lots of real world examples because I have to apply the theory differently in different situations.
4. What's hard to capture in the books, however, is the emotional component - the frustration, the relief, the pride.  That's why stories are even better.
5. No two agile projects are alike - that's why I love it.  Even if I end up getting the team to do all of the same practices, how I get the team to implement these practices can be very different from project to project because the people are different on each project.

I didn't re-read the stories from my last few projects before I started this latest one.  I thought because I was in a slightly different situation (joining an existing project instead of starting with a whole new team, building a product with a removed customer as opposed to a custom application with the actual user sitting right next to me) that my old stories didn't apply.  I was wrong.

Who Coaches the Coach?  I do.  I need to write down my experiences from this project so I will have them for the next project.  Julie past coaches Julie future. 

I think I am ready to update my abstract now. 

This session is for anyone who has pulled out their hair on an agile project and wants to have some hair left at the end of their next one. Agile is hard but worth it.  The goal of this discovery session is to become better prepared to anticipate, recognize, and surmount the inevitable emotional roadblocks plaguing projects.  We will do this by sharing stories and then breaking these stories down into three components: the agile value/principle/practice that is being challenged, the emotional component of this challenge (for both the challenger and the coach), and then how we can get through this the next time we face it.  We'll write a note to self to remind ourselves that we have survived in the past and that it was all worth it.  This will help us build the inner strength necessary to remain appropriately calm and confident in the face of criticism and defeatism.

Now, if I could just remember to go read that note to myself before I start my next project.

Comments

[LindaCook]

Julie, Certainly coaches must remember thier past, use their own experinces to help them with each new client, as you said
"Julie past coaches Julie future". Agreeing with you and adding that coaches should build a network of other coaches that they can rely on and share coaching experiences. When I'm in doubt, I like to call on a trusted colleague and coach for advice and reminders. Linda

[Moti Karmona]

"Agile is hard but worth it…"

I can agree more! – But I think you shouldn't worry about giving up agile since you can't really go back… ;-)

You have been evolved by Natural Selection (“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change”) and you can't go back anymore to heavyweight over planned fantasy Gantt charts that try to capture every feature in advance and predict you will finish the project exactly 666 days from now… Do you?

[Joe Gee]

Julie, you do an amazing job of describing that feeling of jumping off the cliff at the beginning of every agile project conversion. It is nice to know that I'm not the only one having to reprove this stuff to myself every time I go through that early chaos.

[Ilja Preuß]

Good advice!

Additionally, I'd advise to build up your own support group. Just meeting online for an hour every other weekend to talk about current problems or even just give moral support can be a great help, in my experience.