Training is a good start, but sometimes teams and organizations want someone to guide them through the process of adopting an agile process like Scrum. They want someone who can help them solve the specific challenges they are facing on their way to succeeding with agile. That's why, in addition to our popular training courses, Mountain Goat Software offers coaching and consulting services. These engagements provide you with the opportunity to have agile expert and industry veteran Mike Cohn work with you to overcome the obstacles faced by your organization.
The type of help we provide can be customized to fit your situation. We can come in for one day, one week, or even longer depending on your needs. We can also schedule follow-up visits to make sure that things continue to run smoothly. The following list includes some of our recent engagements, but is by no means inclusive of all we can do. Tell us what you are struggling with and we'll work with you to help you solve it.
Sample Coaching Engagements
- Conduct a user story–writing workshop
Have you read about or been trained on user stories but when faced with your own backlog are having trouble turning ideas into estimatable stories? We can conduct a workshop that will take you from zero to a usable product backlog.
- Work with you to create a reliable release plan
Release planning is one of the most important, and least understood, elements of a successful agile implementation. Let us show you how to take your prioritized backlog and estimated velocity and turn that into a release plan you can count on.
- Facilitate a sprint planning meeting, helping coach team members to plan a sprint at the right level of detail
Anyone who has ever worked on a new Scrum team knows that the first planning meetings can be painful, as team members learn to work together in a new way. Let us help make your first meetings run more smoothly so that team members' first introduction to Scrum is a positive one.
- Facilitate end of iteration reviews and retrospectives
Retrospectives and reviews. You know you should have them and you can see their value, but you cannot quite figure out how to make the most of the time you have. Or maybe your reviews and retrospectives have stopped being effective tools for generating improvement ideas. Whatever the case, we can help facilitate a review and retrospective that will help move your team toward continued success with Scrum and agile.
- Attend daily scrum meetings and provide advice on how to get the most value from them
Many new ScrumMasters and teams struggle with the initial daily scrum meetings. Too often they degenerate into deep dives that last way too long or surface-level status reports. Let us work with you to keep your daily scrums running as they were intended.
- Help initiate an agile transition effort using the iterative ADAPT approach outlined in Mike Cohn's Succeeding with Agile book.
One of the toughest things to do with a new process is launch it. Second only to getting started is staying the course when things get tough. We can give you a foundation that will help your team and organization ADAPT to the practices and principles of Scrum and agile in a way that will lead to long-term success.
- Meet with and educate executives and key stakeholders about agile and their role in its successful adoption.
The team is trained and onboard. The ScrumMaster and Product Owner are comfortable in their roles. But to be successful, the entire organization must understand how to work inside the new process and practices. We can speak to executives and other key stakeholders in a language that they understand about the way in which business must adapt to the changes Scrum and agile will bring.
- Help convince reluctant agile team members to give agile a try.
There are as many reasons why people might resist change as there are ways to overcome that resistance. We can help you meet the unique challenges that reluctant team members present in your agile adoption.
At Mountain Goat Software we understand what it takes to be successful with agile. If you'd like us to help your team and organization get off on the right start, move to the next level, or reenergize a stalled transition, email Mike Cohn at mike@mountaingoatsoftware.com or call our office at 1-888-61-AGILE (24453).