What makes an Agile Coach?

A Scrum Master certification does not make you an Agile Coach by any means. So where do you start and what path can you follow? With this article, we would like to show you ways in which your journey to becoming an Agile Coach can look like. For this, we have interviewed successful coaches as well as considered guidelines from scrum.org's blog. But remember: this guide is not the only way to become a good Agile Coach. Rather, we want to give you a solid foundation for planning your individual journey.

Step 1: Master Agile frameworks, tools and methods

As an Agile coach, you should have a solid understanding of the most important Agile frameworks, tools and methods. Tip: Focus on one agile framework first and then build your knowledge step by step. Scrum is ideal as a starting point because it is the most widely used agile framework.

In order to understand Scrum correctly, the training as Professional Scrum Master and Professional Scrum Product Owner is important. In addition, we recommend the training as Professional Scrum Master II. This is the only way to ensure that you have correctly understood the two crucial Scrum roles (Master and Product Owner) and are able to support agile activities in a targeted manner from both perspectives. You need to understand how Scrum works, what the roles, events, and artifacts are, and how they relate to each other. You also need to know where Scrum may fail. This solid foundation will be the foundation for your later work as an Agile Coach.

In order to be able to coach well, you need not only specialist knowledge, but above all practical experience. Ideally, you have already been actively involved in a Scrum team - as Scrum Master, Product Owner or Developer. We recommend that you have at least gained practical experience as a Scrum Master. The Scrum Master acts as a coach for the team by teaching and guiding the Developers, Product Owner and the organization in effective Scrum. Coaching a Scrum Team will help you gain useful experience to later coach multiple teams as well as Scrum Master, Product Owner and other team members in parallel as an Agile Coach.

To be a good Agile coach, you should also have deep knowledge of Agile in more than one form. For example, when do you recommend Kanban instead of Scrum? When do you endorse PRINCE2® Agile? And what about SAFe®? What is the best approach for highly regulated projects? What do you advise when there are fixed deadlines and scope? You can only answer these questions if you know more than one agile variant.

Step 2: Mastering individual and team-oriented changes

After you have become an expert in agile frameworks, the next step is up to you: Inspiring employees for the agile mindset and guiding them in their transformation.

An Agile coach works with people all the time and is usually a trainer, mentor, and coach at multiple levels: Sometimes you're coaching team members, other times you're training leaders. An Agile coach knows proven ways to help people overcome problems and deal with change. For example, you need to understand how the phases of a coaching process work, how a feedback and no-blame culture works, and how to create solution-oriented behavior. You need tools to resolve conflict situations.

If you know how to coach individuals, the question for you is: How do I get the best out of teams? You need different facilitation and training techniques for this. Liberating Structures, for example, are suitable for this. They quickly promote lively participation in groups of any size and make it possible to involve every individual in the team and motivate them to contribute. Interactive and communication-enhancing training techniques are also part of an Agile Coach's toolbox. SERVIEW, for example, trains without PowerPoint using the edutainment approach. Combined with the Liberating Structures, this is ideal for rapid learning.

With the growing interest in remote work and distributed working, organizations need to create dispersed collaborative teams that are as effective as groups working together in one place. So you need to bring your teams together in the best possible way, even virtually, and adapt innovative training approaches to work well digitally.

Step 3: Address organizational changes

For agile working to work and develop in a company, the entire organization must accept the principles, practices and mindset and adapt them as a new culture. There are many established approaches to change for this, such as John Kotter's publications on organizational change. It's not just about initiating a change - it's about the organization working differently and more agilely in a sustainable way.

SERVIEW Certified Agile Coach Training

Visionary, coach, trainer, change agent, facilitator, mentor and more: Master the multi-layered role as an Agile Coach courageously, confidently and with long-term success!

During the SERVIEW Certified-Agile-Coach training, you will put together your personal toolbox full of best practices, methods and techniques in just a few days. With the help of long-standing experts and coaches, you will actively internalize all the necessary skills in realistic exercise scenarios and thus catapult yourself directly into the fast lane.

You will experience the SERVIEW Certified Agile Coach training in two consecutive sessions, approximately four weeks apart. Each module lasts three days:

• Module 1 - Agile Coach: Skills & Mindset
• Module 2 - Agile Coach: Transformation & Empowerment

The best thing about it: no duplicate content! No one wants to be constantly told what they already know. That's why you don't learn basic theories in the SERVIEW Agile Coach training, but dive straight into the content that is crucial for your success as an Agile Coach.

You are an agile beginner and need basic knowledge? Then we recommend that you first familiarize yourself with the basics of Scrum. This can be done, for example, in our "Scrum Master & Product Owner" training or, of course, in practice. If you already have basic knowledge of Scrum or other agile frameworks, you can start directly with Module 1 of the Certified Agile Coach training. Obtain the Agile Coach certification to match your previous experience.