Do Organizations Need an Agile Coach?

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Agile  

I’ve seen some discussions around how agile coaches are going to be replaced by artificial intelligence. That strikes me as a really bad idea, because coaching is so much more than simply responding to questions or offering generic advice. I know it is happening in some environments, but I don’t believe that it is something that will gain momentum. In fact, I think (hope?) it’s an idea that will be abandoned fairly rapidly.

But that got me thinking more about agile coaching, and in particular to the idea that we need more of it. I don’t believe that enough organizations commit to dedicated coaches within their project delivery environments, and I also don’t believe that some of the organizations that have committed to it have enough coaches.

But that’s not where my mind went this time. Instead, I thought about how useful it would be to have enterprise-level agile coaches to help organizations embrace enterprise agility.

Enterprise agility coaches
Enterprise agility, also referred to as organizational agility or business agility, is the idea that an entire organization needs to be able to adapt and adjust quickly—and with minimal disruption to changing circumstances.

In project environments, the concept is most commonly focused on how quickly changes can be implemented—or funding and resources can be reallocated at the…

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