On September 7th, 2013, Seedbox Technologies hosted the very first First Agile Coach Retreat event in North America! For this event, we invited members of the Montreal Agile community to join us in our offices, with special guest Oana Juncu, Agile coach from Paris, France. The Coach Retreat is a one-day workshop to experience several coaching techniques. During this Coach Retreat the participants practiced and observed different coaching postures and techniques to solve a given set of situations (as the "game of life" is the popular exercise for Code Retreats). Each coaching session took place under a Coaching DoJo format. Sequencing the coaching dojos under a code retreat format gives a "natural" mix of words: Coach Retreat = Code Retreat + Coaching Dojo.

1. Coach Retreat Montreal 2013

2. Oana Juncu
cOemerge
@ojuncu
oanajuncu@coemerge.com
Your facilitators today
Omar Bermudez
www.agilecafe.org
@ocbermudez
ocbermudez@agilecafe.org

3. Event Sponsors
Agile Open Space Meetup group
www.agileopenspace.org
@SeedBoxTech: Follow us for a live feed ofyour #CoachRetreat on Twitter! #sbAgile

4. What is a Coach Retreat?

5. CodeRetreatCoachingDOJOCoachRetreat

7. “Who Dropped The Bomb?
You have 8 minutes!
Try Again!”
What is it about?

8. Coach Retreat Rules

9. Prime Directive
Regardless of what we discover, we
understand and truly believe that
everyone does the best job they can,
given what they know at the time,
their skills and abilities, the people
and resources available, and the
situation at hand.
At the end of today everyone will know so much more.
Naturally we will discover decisions and actions we wish we
could do over. This is wisdom to be celebrated, not
judgment used to embarrass.

10. Pictures?

11. Aha wall

12. Check in

13. Coach Retreat Rules
“Who Dropped The Bomb?
You have 8 minutes!
Try Again!”
• Sessions 60 min
–Form groups of around 6 to 8
–5 min explanation of technique
–Repeat Always the same coaching problem
–40 min Coaching Dojo Sessions
–10 min of Team Retrospective
–5 min of General Retrospective

14. Observers
Coaching Dojo
by Rachel Davies
Seeker
CoachesCoaches

15. Standing Retrospectives
• All groups together

16. Agenda
09:00 Welcome & Networking
09:15 start with introductions
09:25 Selection of the situation
09:45 ”Free style & Click-rewind”
10:45 10-min - Break
10:55 “Yes/and”
12:00 Lunch
13:00 “Appreciative Inquiry”
14:00 “Solution Focused”
15:00 10-min - Break
15:10 “Crucial confrontations & Difficult conversation”
16:10 “Real-Options”
17:10 Retrospective – Circle of Questions

17. You work with 4 persons on a project
which is behind schedule and over budget.
You were brought in 2 weeks ago by your
manager as a technical leader, to help with
the project completion. The quality level
of the code is quite low. The requirement
was: “take this legacy system and port it to
this new environment, iso-functional”.
Explanations about what the system is
expected to do are coming under the form
of 200 bug reports.
On day 1, you proposed that all debugging,
testing and programming be done in pairs.
The team agreed and have been enjoying
some (modest) results as of today.
On day 3, the manager privately asked you
to stop the pair programming stuff, as the
project schedule is already very late. You
tried to convince him that PP was good for
the team, to no avail.
You and the team observed that pair
programming gets you better results than
solo programming, and were until today
decided to keep doing it most of the time.
Last week You had a second discussion
with the manager about the very same
subject, without success.
Yesterday, your manager had a 1 to 1
meeting with every one of you. Debriefing
with the team members today, you learn
that he told them as he told you: “stop
pair programming, or else I will get you off
the team and retrograde you”. Every team
member approves of pair programming,
but is unwilling to take risk with his/her
position fighting against management.

18. Situation 1
You work with 4 persons on a project
which is behind schedule and over budget.
You were brought in 2 weeks ago by your
manager as a technical leader, to help with
the project completion. The quality level
of the code is quite low. The requirement
was: “take this legacy system and port it to
this new environment, iso-functional”.
Explanations about what the system is
expected to do are coming under the form
of 200 bug reports.
On day 1, you proposed that all debugging,
testing and programming be done in pairs.
The team agreed and have been enjoying
some (modest) results as of today.
On day 3, the manager privately asked you
to stop the pair programming stuff, as the
project schedule is already very late. You
tried to convince him that PP was good for
the team, to no avail.
You and the team observed that pair
programming gets you better results than
solo programming, and were until today
decided to keep doing it most of the time.
Last week You had a second discussion
with the manager about the very same
subject, without success.
Yesterday, your manager had a 1 to 1
meeting with every one of you. Debriefing
with the team members today, you learn
that he told them as he told you: “stop
pair programming, or else I will get you off
the team and retrograde you”. Every team
member approves of pair programming,
but is unwilling to take risk with his/her
position fighting against management.

19. Situation 2
In a large company, Jean-Louis, a young
manager is appreciated for his efficiency.
He has led projects to completion on time
and well communicated with the top
management. He was given a team of
developers who must work in Agile. The
Agile approach is viewed with interest by
the CIO, the internal customer (marketing)
is the main promoter, because Agile brings
quick results cheaper.
Jean-Louis gives a lot of value to the
quality of reporting, he read that Scrum
provides indicators for team performance
(velocity).
Team members have to provide priority
indicators of progress daily to update the
burn-down charts. The Louise, the PO
challenges the estimates in story points.
The team concluded that Scrum is a
constrictive-control method.
You arrive in this context to coach the the
team for “high performance”. Objectives
Jean-Louis’s goal is to have visibility. He
expects you o enable increased visibility .
Louise still sees little future ...

20. Situation 3
Marc manages a study department
composed of several development teams.
One of these teams working in Agile
mode, which "moved" itself in this
process. They say they are self-organized
in advance iterations, but nobody outside
team seems to know wha’s happening,
how it works, what is done, etc.. Arnaud,
head of customer service platform, which
represents the business in the project,
seems happy. At least, there are no special
alerts from him window. However, he does
not seem to know exactly where we are in
the development of the tool.
You are responsible for coaching the team
at Marc’s request. His goal is to whose
objective is to verify where all this stuff
goes. For him, Agile is seem to be the open
bar black box method, with no
organization.

21. Situation 4
Alain is an IT person who is very
enthusiastic about Agility; He decided to
go for Agile for all projects.
Its development teams are also on board
and motivated to do Scrum. They had
previously experience in Agile. To
implement the project, the identified PO is
Mireille. She is a Business Analyst. It has
been said that Agile must provide
specifications as simple user stories. That
could work for Alain, but actually it is not
very clear: what does "simple“ mean?
Mireille has other responsibilities outside
of her role as PO. She does not understand
how to manage the scope of the
application and she cannot give priorities
without prior notice from business
managers; most of the time, everything is
a priority.
The development team believes that User
Stories are not written well enough, and
Mireille is frustrated because what is
demos work only partly; the development
team blame that the acceptance test are
not provided, user stories are unclear and
puts the sprints at risk...

22. Situation 5
An audit of The Regulation Office has
identified that CRM applications were not
properly tested. Following this audit,
performing tests was reported as a high
priority by the top management of IT.
Management asked for KPIs for tests, so
they can show progress to the order to
present them to the REO (Regulation
Executive Officer). Nothing happens. Ron,
a project management don’t really support
this initiative, their focus is to make teams
deliver fast to meet clients requirements.
Teams don’t see testing as a valuable
activity.
Test are done manually and there is a poor
formalization of tests. They are slow and
inefficient. The lack of test environments
created a bottleneck in the delivery
process. In addition, applications are
delivered late to the Q&A teams. Usually
They have less than a week to test before
the products needs to go in production,
and Muriel, the head of the Q&A team has
more than enough of this situation.
Actually, all teams are passing the buck:
for Ron and his development teams, tests
the test team matter; for Muriel and the
test team it is the responsibility of the
development team to deliver a quality
product of.
Ron’s manager has to report the requested
KPIs. The called you in as an Agile coach to
make all this hell work together.

23. Situation 6
The relationship between Business and IT
are at their lowest.
For Pierre-Antoine, a Senior VP, IT costs a
fortune and produces little. IT is no more,
how can we know what to build?
Obviously, our relationships are strained.
Could Scrum possibly fix things? But how
to tell them that they must be involved in
the development? They have already said
that it does not suit them and we can only
arrange to find a Product Ownerthan a
paperwork machine.
“Just go and see how it works since last
CMMI process improvement: we cannot
take any action without filling a clueless
form in a SW too, so they completely avoid
any responsibility. IT people don’t start
developments until specifications are not
signed off, as if we had the time to read all
that double Dutch! Afterwards
development takes ages! The latest IT
fancy? Agile ! As long as I understood ,
they want my people to do their job
simply They want us to ”involved”! Agile is
like CMMI and ISO 9001, and other IT bla-
bla fashions, it will eventually be
forgotten.”
For Patrick, an IT Services Department
Manager , that struggles to achieve
projects, the Business is simple
unbearable: “We do not know what they
want, they are never happy and they are
completely disorganized. Impossible to
make them follow a process, they are
never ready to validate the specifications
so IT teams can go for development ....
Obviously, our relationships are strained,
could Agile possibly fix things? But how to
tell them that they must be involved in the
development? They have already said that
it does not suit them and we can only
arrange to find a Product Owner in our IT
teams ....”
You are the Agile Coach called in by
Patrick to try Agile as a last chance to get
out of this mess.

24. Free style & Click Rewind

25. Free style & Click Rewind

26. 10 minutes break

27. Yes, and...

28. Lunch

29. Appreciative Inquiry

30. Solution Focused

31. 10 minutes break

32. Crucial Confrontations &
Difficult Conversations

33. Signs that you’re dealing
with the wrong problem
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
• Your solution doesn’t get you you want
• You’re constantly discussing the same issue
• You’re getting increasingly upset

34. Real Options

35. Circle of Questions

36. Keep in touch
• Mailing list : coachretreat@googlegroups.com
• Oana Juncu
– www.coemerge.com
– Twitter: @ojuncu
– E-mail: oanajuncu@coemerge.com
– Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/oanajuncu
• Omar Bermudez
– www.agilecafe.org
– Twitter: @ocbermudez
– E-mail: ocbermudez@agilecafe.org
– Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/ocbermudez

37. http://www.mccarthyshow.com/
Resources
The Power of Appreciative Inquiry: A Practical Guide to Positive Change (BK
Business) [Paperback]
Diana Whitney (Author), Amanda Trosten-Bloom (Author), David Cooperrider
(Foreword)
Team Coaching with the Solutioncircle: A Practical Guide to
Solutions Focused Team Development (Solutions Focus at Work)
Daniel Meier (Author)