Jen's Agile Cliff Notes - The Role of the Team Coach

Today, we’ll learn more about the role of the Team Coach. Team Coach? Jen, what are you talking about? Did you know that with SAFe 6.0, they have actually renamed the role of the Scrum Master to a Team Coach?

Yes! Prince, who changed his name to a Symbol, or Snoop Dogg’s identity crisis, where he became Snoop Lion-do you remember that? Thankfully, he’s back to straight Gin and Juice! The Team Coach role is no gimmick.

Seriously though, “ain’t nothin’ but a SAFe thing”. The role of the Team Coach makes 100% sense! Let’s learn more about what makes a great Team Coach!

A Team Coach’s primary role is to help their Agile Team meet their goals for delivering features and enablers. This happens at an iteration (sprint) level as well as for the entire Planning Interval (PI).

The Team Coach must be:

• Empathetic in that they understand the challenges the team is facing and strive to build good, solid relationships with team members and encourage psychological safety. (Feeling comfortable speaking up in retrospectives is a great example of psychological safety).

• They are a master at resolving conflict and navigating team dynamics.

• They are a Servant Leader to their Agile Team. They ensure that the team is held accountable, that key ceremonies are held, and support the team with whatever they need to achieve their goals. The key to being a Servant Leader is to influence the team, to lead, but not overpower. It’s definitely tough to “master”! (OK, that was a bad Scrum pun!)

• They help their team members continue to grow and guide them in solving problems as a team.

• They are always transparent, giving feedback and receiving feedback graciously.

• They also ensure the team is following best practices in SAFe and Scrum or Kanban.

• They manage risks for the team. If there’s a hurdle, they will see it through!

• They are a master at facilitation. They follow all SAFe ceremonies and ensure they happen on time and are productive.

• They protect the team at all costs. A great example of this is a “drive by” from another team (on the ART or a different department), and is the first line of defense. They protect the team’s time!

A good Team Coach has all of these qualities and many more! How do they support the ART and their team?

• They prepare for and facilitate PI Planning for their Agile Team, ensuring best practices are being followed. They walk into PI Planning prepared with velocity metrics to help determine the capacity and load of the team, so the team can set their own deadlines. They assist the team with story writing, iteration planning, writing PI objectives, and helping resolve dependencies with other teams. They also relay the team risks and program risks to the Release Train Engineer.

• They are in constant communication with other Scrum Masters on the ART to manage the team’s risks. Communication is key!

• They coach the team on writing PI Objectives that are used in the business value exercise. PI Objectives are written in SMART format so they are meaningful.

• They maintain the team board, and during team syncs (aka daily scrum meetings), they hold the team accountable for work in progress. Even following work in progress/process limits!

• They maintain team-level metrics. SAFe is all about flow and value. It’s more than measuring velocity. It’s helping the team craft a solid iteration goal, following WIP limits, keeping a close eye on quality metrics, and carryover in the sense that team processes might need to be tweaked to ensure value is flowing. One example could be introducing swarming when the testing column is full (reached WIP limit).

• They have a good relationship with the stakeholders who work with the team. This also comes in handy when needing to protect the team’s time.

• They assist the Release Train Engineer with the Inspect & Adapt session. They ensure their team is ready for the system demo as well as bringing retrospective topics to the problem-solving workshop.

I want to draw attention to what the Team Coach’s role is during each SAFe ceremony. This summarizes the true leadership of their role on an Agile Team. It’s a lot of responsibility!

So as you can see, a Team Coach has a huge responsibility on an Agile Team!

You can read more on SAFe’s website about the role at https://scaledagileframework.com/scrum-master-team-coach/

Thank you for attending my TED Talk…and remember to tip your waitress, but don’t “tip” your waitress!