Disciplined Agile

Photo credit: Umanix

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Disciplined Agile (DA) has always recognized that some teams work remotely and now, given the need to respond to the challenges presented by COVID-19, we are applying our own advice with our DA training offerings.  

Starting in early March we reworked our instructor-led training (ILT) offerings so that they can be delivered remotely by qualified instructors. In the picture above we see two Certified Disciplined Agile Instructors (CDAIs) from Umanix delivering the a Disciplined Agile workshop virtually.  As you might expect, the instructors are using video conferencing software to work through the courseware with the students, but there's much more to it.

The DA workshops have many hands-on exercises, both games and case study work, in which students collaborate to learn critical concepts and techniques.  In the bottom left-hand corner you see an exercise in which a group of students are in a breakout room and are working together.  In the face-to-face (F2F) version of this exercise students move cards around on a table and discuss their decisions as they go.  In the virtual version they move images around on the screen.  In both cases the instructor is observing and helping the students where necessary.  Once the group work is over the students then do a "wall walk" by going into each of the breakout rooms to see and discuss how other groups approached the problem.

We've been very lucky in that one of our DA Training Partners has been delivering DA training to globally dispersed teams for years.  They agreed to take the lead and share their experiences and techniques with our other training partners so that we can successfully bring DA training to you remotely.  In short, we've been in a position to apply proven remote training strategies so that your learning experience is the best that it can be.

Don't worry, DA Training Partners will still be offering face-to-face training once it becomes safe to do so again.  And we'll also continue with virtual workshops as well, because my gut tells me that we're going to have a lot more distributed Disciplined Agile teams in the future.

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Please visit Disciplined Agile Training to discover our current workshop offerings.

I was hoping to come up with a pithy, short answer to this question but the only thing that I can come up with is “people.”  The not-so-pithy answer is that there is no sort of agreement around what it means to be a “qualified agile coach”, the people hiring coaches aren’t thinking things through in many cases, and the agile community suffers from a myriad of integrity challenges when it comes to professionalism. In this blog I work through the following ideas:

1. Why is there a dearth of qualified agile coaches?
2. Sports coaches as an example
3. What should we expect from agile coaches?
4. Our solution: Agile Coaching-Focused Certifications
5. Parting thoughts

Why is There A Dearth of Qualified Agile Coaches?

Let’s answer this in two parts: Why is there a dearth of agile coaches and why are there so many unqualified coaches available?  The first question is very easy to answer.  The demand for agile coaches far outstrips the supply.  The adoption rate for agile has been growing steadily since 2001, hence the growing demand.  As you’ll see later in this blog, it takes years to grow good coaches.  As a result there is little hope for the supply to catch up with demand any time soon.

The second question, why are there so many unqualified coaches available, is easy but uncomfortable to answer.  In general we have systemic challenges in the IT industry and in many ways we’ve managed to exacerbate these problems within the agile community. Some of the challenges within the IT community include:

• A person is just as likely to be a self taught programmer, and more likely in fact, than they are to have a computer science or engineering degree
• There is no sort of apprenticeship culture in this industry
• Few people have a personal goal of mastery, and few organizations support the gaining of mastery amongst their staff
• There is a shortage of talented people, so It is very easy to find and retain employment regardless of your level of talent, and the market is still growing
• No country has a licensing body for software professionals that is commonly required by organizations, unlike other professions such as doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects, and many more
• Many people in the IT community believe this normal for a professional, or if they do perceive a problem they are (rightfully) overwhelmed with the challenge of addressing it
• Colleges and universities are endemically years behind the quickly changing IT industry (there are a handful of schools that work closely with industry, so it’s getting better)

Then we have the agile community, with its various certification training scams.  You can become a certified master after staying awake during a two-day workshop and passing an online test that almost nobody fails.  To put this into context, a Starbucks barista, the kid who pours your morning coffee, get’s three days of training before being let loose on customers.  Yet it somehow makes sense that someone with 50% less training becomes the lead of a software development team?  Really?  Another example: Someone can become a scaling program consultant after attending a four-day workshop, and worse yet are now “qualified” to teach a two-day workshop to others so as to impart their vast agile scaling knowledge upon them.  Amazingly, because of the demand by companies desperate to hire agile-skilled people, the demand for these “designations” is incredible (shameful would be a more appropriate word).

In practice many agile designations are little more than “participation ribbons”, yet most organizations take them seriously often either because they don’t realize how trivial they are to earn or because they’ve given up expecting any better from agilists.  Is it any surprise that it’s hard to find qualified coaches when we’ve watered things down so much?

Sports Coaches as an Example

Coaching is very common in sports and with the exception of “pick up” games few sports teams are without a coach.  In fact, serious sports teams tend to have several coaches, typically lead by a head coach. In professional sports coaches are paid significant salaries, sometimes millions of dollars a year, as coaching is perceived to be a critical success factor.  It makes sense to look at sports coaching works to see how agile coaching might work.

Most sports coaches are former players.  They’ve typically played for years, and sometimes decades, having been coached themselves all along the way.  They’ll often start off as children, in Canada it’s common for kids to start learning to skate and play hockey at the age of two, being coached and drilled in basic skills and knowledge for years.  They also gain practical experience playing games.  Most kids drop out eventually, although many still play their sport (be it hockey, football, cricket, baseball, …) well into middle age.  And some decide to stay in the sport, but make the shift from being a player into being a coach.

The transition to becoming a sports coach generally isn’t easy.  There are three common strategies for this:

1. Formal training.  One path is to go to university, get a teaching degree, and become a gym teacher at a middle school or high school and begin coaching children.  These coaches tend to coach a wide range of sports, although in some cases you’ll often see a coach specialize on a single sport, such as high school football or hockey, because that’s what their passion was a child (and often because they hope to move up the ranks at eventually, see point #3 below).
2. Informal apprenticing.  Another path is to apprentice, asking your existing coach to allow you opportunities to coach others under their guidance.  When I trained in karate this was very common, with senior students helping to teach less senior students.  My daughter is currently learning to skate and they follow a similar pattern with senior skating coaches (adults) being helped by assistants (typically teenagers who have been skating for many years) to coach and teach the younger children.  Helping to teach or coach others is recognized as an important part of your own learning process.
3. Formal apprenticing.  Because of the money involved professional sports teams tend to take a more formal approach to coaching.  They will often expect coaches either come up through the coaching ranks – start as a high school coach, then become a college-level coach, then finally a professional coach – or to come up through the professional sports ranks – when your star players are past their peak they sometimes move into coaching roles.  Each time you move up to a new level of coaching, say from high school football to college football, you often start as an assistant coach to first prove yourself.  The head coach at each level recognizes that it’s their responsibility to grow more coaches, so they impart their skills and knowledge on to the junior coaches.

So, what are some important observations we can make out of all of this?  First, sports coaches have deep skills and experience at the sports that they are coaching.  Second, we expect this of them.  Would you pay to have your child to be given skating lessons by a “Certified Skating Master” who had two days of training in the “skating mindset” and how to facilitate a handful of skating meetings?  Of course you wouldn’t.  Instead you’d want someone who had been skating for years, and better yet may have even been a competitor at some point in the past.  Third, it takes years of apprenticing or training to become a good sports coach, not just several days in a certification workshop.

What Should We Expect From Agile Coaches?

Here is what we’ve found to be the critical success factors for agile coaches:

1. They should have years of agile experience, not days of training.  If someone doesn’t have years of experience in something, and more importantly years of varied experience, then why they heck would you hire them as a coach?
2. They should have coaching skills and experience.  Being experienced in agile isn’t enough.  Apprenticing under another good agile coach is a great way to get coaching skill as is getting training in agile coaching (the program at International Coaching Federation (ICF) is very thorough).  The need for experience is a bit of a catch-22 of course – you need to already be an agile coach to be qualified to be an agile coach.  But, if someone has no previous coaching experience then at best I’d put them into a junior coaching role under the guidance of an experienced coach.  This provides them with the opportunity to gain the requisite experience and to prove themselves in practice.
3. They should have robust agile skills and knowledge.  Years of agile experience is a good start, but better yet is a range of experience at all aspects of the lifecycle in which they are coaching.  It’s reasonable to expect a delivery team coach to understand all aspects of agile solution delivery so that they can coach the entire team in the skills they need to succeed.  Furthermore, it’s reasonable to expect an Agile IT coach to have experience in the full agile IT lifecycle, including areas such as Enterprise Architecture, Data Management, Portfolio Management, and many others.
4. They should have experience in a similar context.  Ideally they should have skills in a similar context to what you currently face – someone who only has small team coaching experience will struggle to coach a large programme, someone who only has only coached in startup companies will struggle in a large financial institution, someone who has only coached co-located teams will struggle with globally distributed teams.  Context counts.

All four of these factors are equally important.  Any “coach” who is deficient in one or more of these areas still has some work to do.  Nobody is perfect of course, given the rates that agile coaches demand it’s reasonable to expect these people to be qualified.

Our Solution: Agile Coaching Focused Certifications

A fair question to ask is how do we deal with this in the Disciplined Agile (DA) space. We believe that it’s critical to your success to have qualified coaches so we’ve built a principled certification program based on the martial arts philosophy of Shu-Ha-Ri.  Certifications must be earned and that takes time.  PMI offers three certifications that teach Agile coaching skills and knowledge:

1. Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM). This certification addresses fundamental people and collaboration skills that are critical for anyone in a senior team position, including coaches, team leads, and architects.  More importantly it teaches how to lead agile teams in their process improvement efforts, including both software and non-software teams. Anyone hoping to become an agile team coach or team improvement coach should be interested in this certification. DASSM should be particularly attractive to anyone who is a Scrum or SAFe Coach, which have become commodities these days, as it teaches you how to lead improvements that go far beyond what you learn as a method-specific coach.
2. Disciplined Agile Coach (DAC). This certification is aimed at anyone wanting to become a senior agile coach.  DAC focuses on how to coach across disparate teams. What we mean by this is that we teach how to approach a problem where the team you are currently coaching needs to negotiate a new WoW with another team that is very different than their own. For example, how can you help your team work more effectively with your organization's procurement team, which has a different outlook, priorities, and WoW than your team?  DAC also teams how to coach non-software teams.
3. Disciplined Agile Value Stream Consultant (DAVSC). This certification focuses on how to define and evolve value streams within your organization.  Value streams are how you provide products and services to your customers. This certification is aimed at people wanting to become enterprise agile coaches or value stream coaches.

Parting Thoughts

It isn’t easy to find qualified agile coaches, but then again it isn’t impossible either. Our hope is that this blog has provided you with some insight into what you should be looking for in a good agile coach.  Anyone can put a shingle up and say that they’re an “agile coach”, but anyone who wants to say that they are a Disciplined Agile certified coach needs to have worked through a rigorous process to earn that qualification.  DASSMs, DACs, and DAVSCs have proven knowledge, experience, and give back.  Why settle for less?

Related Reading

• Disciplined Agile Certification
• The Principles Behind Disciplined Agile Certification
• The Limits of Certification

Previously, in Agile Transformation: Being Agile, Doing Agile, and Supporting Agile and Agile Transformation: Comparing Transformation Strategies I discussed the need for your agile transformation efforts to address three factors: People-oriented issues (being agile), process-oriented issues (doing agile), and tooling issues (supporting agile).  I argued that you must focus to a different extent on each of these factors – 80-85%, 10-15%, and 5-10% respectively – and that you need to address all three at once if you’re to successfully transition to agile.  But what is the impetus for becoming more agile in the first place?

The answer is that you want to help people to become more effective so that they can work together to address the success criteria that their stakeholders have set out for them.  The challenge of course is that success criteria varies by team.  Some teams want better time to market, some want better quality, some want improved staff morale, some want improved stakeholder satisfaction with what gets delivered, and some want improved return on investment (ROI) in IT.  Many of course need to deliver on a combination of several of these criteria.

The point is that every team has their own success criteria that they should fulfill.  To do that effectively, agile coaches need to help these teams to “be agile” so that they have the proper mindset and culture to provide a foundation from which they can “do agile”.  To “do agile” teams need to understand, and have the skills to execute, agile practices in such a way that they perform the right practices at the right time to the right extent.  And to do that they need the appropriate tools to support these practices.

Your stakeholders could care less about whether your agile or even about what agile is.  They do care deeply about whether your team is able to meet, and better yet exceed, the criteria set out for them.

Disciplined Agile certification is for agile professionals working in enterprise-class settings such as banks, insurance companies, retailers, and government agencies. You’re not working in ideal situations – you have legacy cultures, legacy systems, and legacy processes to overcome – but that doesn’t mean you can’t make things better. You take pride in your work and you want to create environments where you can be effective, and you can do that by adopting Disciplined Agile strategies.

For organizations the primary value of disciplined agile certifications are that they indicate that people have gained a certain level of knowledge and in some cases expertise in Disciplined Agile methods.  Our principled approach to Disciplined Agile certification results in respected certifications that you can trust.  There are several benefits of Disciplined Agile certification for organizations:

• It is meaningful. Disciplined Agile certification has to be earned. It is an indication that your people have a comprehensive understanding of enterprise-class development, and not just cargo cult agile.
• It forms the basis of measurable skills assessment. Because the certifications build upon each other you can use them as a measure of how well agile skills and knowledge are spreading through your organization.
• It’s trustworthy. Because Disciplined Agile certification is externally managed it is difficult for teams to game the numbers, unlike the self-assessment approach that is becoming all too common.

The Disciplined Agile Certification Program

The Disciplined Agile Certification program has three main certifications for practitioners – Certified Disciplined Agilist (CDA), Certified Disciplined Agile Practitioner (CDAP), and Certified Disciplined Agile Coach (CDAC) – that build upon each other. There is an additional designation, Disciplined Agilist (DA) and a fifth designation for trainers, Certified Disciplined Agile Instructor (CDAI).

Certified Disciplined Agilist (CDA): Shu (Beginner)

This certification indicates that the holder has comprehensive knowledge of how the Disciplined Agile solution delivery process works from beginning to end. To earn this Shu-level certification you need to pass a comprehensive test. It typically takes between 10 and 15 hours of classroom or reading time to prepare for the test. The primary benefits of this certification are that it:

• Indicates that you have an understanding of how agile solution delivery works in enterprise-class settings;
• Is a meaningful certification that sets you apart from the multitude of “certified masters”;
• Shows that you have the desire to go beyond “cargo cult agile”;
• Directs you down a path that reflects the realities faced by agile teams working in enterprise-class settings, enabling you to recognize and avoid the time consuming pitfalls common to Scrum teams.

Certified Disciplined Agile Practitioner (CDAP): Ha (Intermediate)

This certification indicates that the holder has comprehensive knowledge of how the Disciplined Agile solution delivery process works from beginning to end and has experience applying agile strategies in practice. To earn this certification you must have earned the CDA first, have at least two years of agile work experience (you are required to provide references), and you have passed the CDAP test. The primary benefits of this certification are that it shows you’re:

• Proficient at agile development and on the path towards mastery;
• Ready to start helping others learn, potentially in a junior coaching role supervised by someone more experienced, such as a CDAC.

Certified Disciplined Agile Coach (CDAC): Ri (Expert)

This certification indicates that the holder has comprehensive knowledge of how the Disciplined Agile solution delivery process works from beginning to end, has experience applying it in practice, and has proven giveback to the community. To earn this certification you must have earned the CDAP first, have at least five years of agile work experience (you are required to provide references), and have gone through a board-level interview. The primary benefit of this certification is that it shows you’re qualified to coach agile delivery teams. Effective coaches must have deep knowledge in what they are coaching people in, and that requires proven experience.

Retention

To retain your certification you should be dedicated to continuous learning of agile strategies in general, and in Disciplined Agile (DA) strategies in particular. Once someone is certified there are no direct membership dues. For CDA’s to retain their certification level they must take and pass the CDA test every two years. Having said that, at the two year point a practicing CDA is eligible to apply to become a CDAP anyway. Anyone with a CDAP will need to either pass the CDAP test every two years, or if they are qualified to apply for and become a CDAC. CDACs must provide proof of continuing give back to the DA community.

Further Reading

• Apply for certification
• Certification roadmap
• How to pass the certification test
• ShuHaRi
• The principles behind Disciplined  Agile certification
• The value and limits of certification

Are you tired of being embarrassed when you tell people what agile certifications you have? Are you tired of dancing around what little you had to do to “earn” your certification or what little knowledge about agile that effort actually imparted? Are you tired of explaining that you got certified only because it looks good on your resume, when in fact it only looks good to organizations that really don’t know what they’re asking for?  If you answered yes to any of those questions, it’s time to up your game.

Disciplined Agile certification takes a principled approach that provides real value to practitioners. Disciplined Agile certifications are respected because they are earned. There are several benefits of Disciplined Agile certification for practitioners:

• Increase your knowledge.  Disciplined Agile certification requires you to have a comprehensive understanding of Disciplined Agile Delivery, which in turn describes how all aspects of agile principles and practices fit together in an enterprise-class environment.
• Improve your employability.  Disciplined Agile certification indicates to employers that you’re dedicated to improving your knowledge and skills, a clear sign of professionalism.
• Improve your career options.  Disciplined Agile certification can help you gain that new position or role as the result of your increased knowledge base and desire to improve.

Disciplined Agile Certification is for agile professionals working in enterprise-class settings such as banks, insurance companies, retailers, and government agencies. You’re not working in ideal situations – you have legacy cultures, legacy systems, and legacy processes to overcome – but that doesn’t mean you can’t make things better. You take pride in your work and you want to create environments where you can be effective, and you can do that by adopting Disciplined Agile strategies.

The Disciplined Agile Certification Program

The Disciplined Agile Certification program has three main certifications for practitioners – Certified Disciplined Agilist (CDA), Certified Disciplined Agile Practitioner (CDAP), and Certified Disciplined Agile Coach (CDAC) – that build upon each other. There is an additional designation, Disciplined Agilist (DA) and a fifth designation for trainers, Certified Disciplined Agile Instructor (CDAI).

Certified Disciplined Agilist (CDA): Shu (Beginner)

This certification indicates that the holder has comprehensive knowledge of how the Disciplined Agile solution delivery process works from beginning to end. To earn this Shu-level certification you need to pass a comprehensive test. It typically takes between 10 and 15 hours of classroom or reading time to prepare for the test. The primary benefits of this certification are that it:

• Shows that you have an understanding of how agile solution delivery works in enterprise-class settings;
• Is a meaningful certification that sets you apart from the multitude of “certified masters”;
• Indicates that you have the desire to go beyond “cargo cult agile”;
• Directs you down a path that reflects the realities faced by agile teams working in enterprise-class settings, enabling you to recognize and avoid the time consuming pitfalls common to Scrum teams.

Certified Disciplined Agile Practitioner (CDAP): Ha (Intermediate)

This certification indicates that the holder has comprehensive knowledge of how the Disciplined Agile solution delivery process works from beginning to end and has experience applying agile strategies in practice. To earn this certification you must have earned the CDA first, have at least two years of agile work experience (you are required to provide references), and you have passed the CDAP test. The primary benefits of this certification are that it shows you’re:

• Proficient at agile development and on the path towards mastery;
• Ready to start helping others learn, potentially in a junior coaching role supervised by someone more experienced, such as a CDAC.

Certified Disciplined Agile Coach (CDAC): Ri (Expert)

This certification indicates that the holder has comprehensive knowledge of how the Disciplined Agile solution delivery process works from beginning to end, has experience applying it in practice, and has proven giveback to the community. To earn this certification you must have earned the CDAP first, have at least five years of agile work experience (you are required to provide references), and have gone through a board-level interview. The primary benefit of this certification is that it shows you’re qualified to coach agile delivery teams. Effective coaches must have deep knowledge in what they are coaching people in, and that requires proven experience.

Retention

To retain your certification you should be dedicated to continuous learning of agile strategies in general, and in Disciplined Agile (DA) strategies in particular. Once someone is certified there are no direct membership dues. For CDA’s to retain their certification level they must take and pass the CDA test every two years. Having said that, at the two year point a practicing CDA is eligible to apply to become a CDAP anyway. Anyone with a CDAP will need to either pass the CDAP test every two years, or if they are qualified to apply for and become a CDAC. CDACs must provide proof of continuing give back to the DA community.

Further Reading

• Apply for certification
• Certification roadmap
• How to pass the certification test
• ShuHaRi
• The principles behind Disciplined  Agile certification
• The value and limits of certification