Spikes And Stories

I’m a Technical Program Manager. At least, that’s what you’ll find on my business card, but it’s not what I enjoy most. I enjoy coaching. I enjoy helping people find the answers inside themselves instead of offering up my own solutions. After all, my teams are the ones in the trenches. They have the best information to decide what to do next so why wouldn’t their solutions be better than my own? Unfortunately, I spend the bulk of my time as a TPM and only a small portion as a coach.

I posed this dilemma to John Culter over lunch last week, and he offered some excellent advice. Stop talking about coaching. Forget about explaining what problems you might be able to solve in the role. Instead, start more simply:

Start with your beliefs.

See where your beliefs and those of your leaders align and then decide what to do next. To that end, here’s several that fit my context. A few might resonate with your situation:

No one’s perfect, especially me. Or you. Agile isn’t perfect either. Everything and everyone has their shortcomings, and I believe it’s important to acknowledge them.

To be clear, I’m not talking about where a traditional approach is more suited than an agile one. No. Instead, I intend to talk about situations where an agile approach is appropriate and then discuss the shortcomings in those situations. Why? As experts, we must recognize common obstacles and sources of friction. If we can’t name them or don’t think they exist, then we’re not experts. We’re zealots, and I don’t look fondly on those who treat agile as scripture. So let’s get started.

Agile is the long play.

It’s not a rebranding; we don’t simply rename our meetings and claim success. It’s a cultural shift, and that takes time. Years even, and in a world where quarterly earnings are king, that can be a problem. Take Silicon Valley. According to data from 2017, tech companies had some of the highest employee turn over compared to other industries. Many employees were–and likely still are–staying less than 2.5 years at any company. So if both the company and its people are heavily focused on the near term, why would they care about the long play? Maybe Tim has the right approach.

If this agile thing is so great, then why doesn’t it always stick? And if we can get it to stick, why does it require so much upkeep? Why can it sometimes be so fragile? Time and again, I’ve helped teams, people, and organizations with their transformations, and in many cases, I’ve seen it either go sideways or slowly regress. Why though? Shouldn’t it be able to stand on its own? After teams see its benefits, shouldn’t the transformation gain momentum by the better outcomes it creates? Today, let’s talk about why that’s not always true.

Is it us?

Better yet, is it me? Maybe I’m a terrible coach. It’s certainly a possibility, but it would make for a rather bleak blog post. So for the moment, I hope you’re willing to suspend the skepticism. So what about us?