Agile Coach, Index Exchange, 2019-2022

ByPaul Henman

Overview: coaching multiple software development teams, product management, and related roles.

Experiments and Changes:

  • observed teams’ regular meetings and provided feedback either immediately to the team or afterwards to the manager depending on the situation; this could be in the form of questions, recounting related experience, refresher training, as well as positive feedback
  • created dashboards to support decision-making by teams and management, including DORA and agile-related metrics (e.g. cycle time); mentoring topics included the selection of complementary metrics, avoiding vanity metrics, and finding suitable indicators for experiments
  • coached Product Owners to move towards a single prioritised backlog rather than detailed “resource allocation plans”; supported their use of Story Mapping, forecasting (rather than estimation), and structured experimentation
  • facilitated weekly Coaching Circles and Lean Coffee sessions for Engineering managers; these forums enabled the sharing of discoveries, learnings, and challenges, leading to shared growth and collaborative problem solving
  • facilitated Lift Off sessions for newly reorganised Product Delivery Units; outputs included team working agreements, definitions of ready & done, and creation of scrum boards; the key outcome was that teams moved smoothly from forming to performing
  • encouraged teams to grow beyond Scrum “by the book”; co-created and facilitated kanban training with subsequent coaching for a PDU

In annual satisfaction surveys, our internal customers and stakeholders rated the agile coaches as exceptionally effective and valuable for the past four years.

Reference Letter [PDF]

Corporate website: Index Exchange.