As an agile coach, I am often asked why companies should use one. This blog discusses the five most common reasons companies and teams hire an agile coach.
1) To improve collaboration and communication on the team: Many teams that start out successfully using Scrum or another framework will eventually run into challenges collaborating deeply with each other. It is often a lack of awareness that limits their collaboration.
2) To improve the quality of the product being delivered by focusing on testing at all levels: During my experience as an Agile Coach, it became clear to me that many teams lacked a solid foundation of automated tests and test-driven development practices. Teams have been able to deliver working software to production but without the valuable insight that testing provides into what they have built. The result is often a long list of bug fixes and reworks that leaves them wondering where things went wrong.
3) To improve collaboration with customers and business analysts: Some teams that have I worked with felt like they were spinning their wheels by working in isolation from customers and business analysts. They had lost touch with who their customers were and why they were building a particular feature.
4) To improve the identification of technical debt: Technical debt is a term used to describe any code errors or other systemic problems in your software architecture that will need to be addressed at some point in the future when you have time to refactor. Technical debt will make it challenging for a team to add new features and fix existing ones without introducing new bugs requiring more rework.
5) To improve the planning process: Some teams think they are doing Agile planning when in reality they struggle with ad-hoc planning because their planning meetings don't provide them with enough insight into what is really going on.
I hope that these examples help to illustrate just how beneficial an Agile Coach can be. Feel free to contact me if you want to discuss any of these topics further or learn more.