Foreword by Mike Cohn

The buzz at the 2008 Scrum Gathering in Chicago was all about a presenter who was new to that conference. On Monday afternoon she presented a session called “The Road from Project Manager to Agile Coach.” By Tuesday everyone was talking about it.

The reason that the presenter of that session—Lyssa Adkins, whose book you hold in your hands right now—created such a stir was the obvious passion, knowledge, and experience she brought to the critical topic of agile coaching. As a classically trained project manager and director of a large corporate project management office before discovering agile, Lyssa is the perfect guide for becoming a skilled agile coach.

Watching a great agile coach is like watching a magician. No matter how closely you watch, you can’t quite figure out how she does it. In this book, magician/agile coach Lyssa Adkins takes us behind the curtain and shows us the tricks of her trade. What’s even more amazing is that there is no sleight of hand or cards up her sleeve. What you’ll find are simply wonderful techniques for guiding teams toward ever greater success.

Lyssa breaks down the magic of coaching into concrete terms. She not only explains the distinction between teaching, coaching, and advising, but she also shows us when and how to move between them. Lyssa provides guidance on how to choose between coaching one individual or the whole team. She also tells us how to identify coaching opportunities—chances to make a powerful impact on the team.

Guiding us past the white rabbits and black hats, Lyssa reveals how to initiate tough conversations using powerful questions designed to get team members talking constructively about a problem. This is one of my favorite parts of the book. Lyssa shares practical advice about collaboration—a rare find, because so many other books on the subject say merely that collaboration is necessary yet offer no advice on how to make it happen. But as important as all the tools she gives us is Lyssa’s reminder that part of the coach’s job is knowing when to sit back, observe, and let the team work things through.

Because we as agile coaches can fail, too, Lyssa presents a wonderful description of eight failure modes we can fall into. Early in my career I would often fall into the Expert and Hub failure modes. I can honestly say those are safely in my past, but I struggle still with acting in the Opinionator mode. Maybe you are occasionally a Spy, Seagull, or Butterfly, or perhaps you suffer from one of the other failure modes she describes. Fortunately, Lyssa also presents us with eight success modes to model. Read Chapter 11, “Agile Coach Failure, Recovery, and Success Modes,” to see what mode you might be in.

Great agile coaches and ScrumMasters help their teams achieve more than those teams could ever achieve on their own. Becoming a skilled agile coach, like becoming a magician, starts with learning a set of techniques. From there it’s a matter of practice, practice, and more practice. Though the practicing will be up to you, this wonderful book will get you started in the right direction by showing how a master agile coach performs her craft.

—Mike Cohn

Author of Succeeding with Agile

Boulder, Colorado