Pocket Coach

Have you every wondered what it takes to create a Coaching Practice in your organisation? What will it do, how is it structured, how will people know what services are on offer.  An internal Coaching Practise is like a little business. You have to start with why and understand what your customers needs then create a practice that can provide products and services that helps meet those needs. Where I work my Coaching Practice started with a Service Catalogue, this is our list of all the services our team offers to our customers in the areas of coaching, facilitating, mentoring, teaching as well as technical, transformation or business mastery. Need to rent a Scrum Master for a few days? We got you! Need help to facilitate a user story mapping workshop? We got you! A comprehensive service catalogue is a great way to share with your customers what your coaching team can offer. #servicedesign #coaching #agilecoaching #agility

Teaching teams to change their mindset, to develop iteratively instead of incrementally is hard. I always find examples help. Yes there is the classic Skateboard to Car picture but why not think up some real world examples to share with your teams, something simple that provides the same outcome as a more engineered product. One of them will resonate.  For me it was the Guitar one below. I watched Jack White make a one string electric guitar out of a plank of wood and he played a song with it! Would I need to develop more? Well, that's up to your customers. #agilemindset #productdevelopment #coaching

For years I have collected books, URLs, Blog Posts, YouTube videos, pretty much anything I can to keep learning. 20 years ago I had a very well organized set of Browser Bookmarks that moved to GetPocket & Feedly. I didn’t realize it but for the last 20 years I have been building my “Second Brain”. A collection of my Goals, Projects, Tasks, Resources and Knowledge collected across a set of curated tools. Recently I discovered that Notion.so (one of the tools I have used for the last 5 years) has a template for a Second Brain so I can pull everything together in one place through the power of relational databases.  The image below shows work in progress the consolidation of my second brain, based around the P.A.R.A. Method by Tiago Forte and some lessons from the book Make Time by Jake Knapp. Each Brain Area has a definition and purpose, projects, tasks, resources and a knowledge base, each of which is just a view of the related databases that are filtered for each Brain Area. I ...

Flow Efficiency! Although my Coaching team have used it for a while to gain insights, this year we are working with teams to formally measure it. The goal is to focus our teams on identification of waste in our end to end system, understand team processes better, use Flow Scores as a way to gauge if improvement experiments have moved the needle and contribute to our continuous improvement mindset. #flow #productivity #lean #agilecoaching #mindset

Shameless promotion alert! I did a talk this week with the Agile Auckland meetup that was about increasing analytical thinking in Agile Teams. Agile Auckland kindly filmed the virtual session and its uploaded to YouTube here. If you are passionate about analysis and improving the quality of it in your Agile team, please go and check out the video. A link to the Youtube video is below

I was looking over old slides today and found this one I made from 2015. I have always liked it as it shows the collaborative nature of Agile & Lean practitioners and where the practices, that many of us perform daily, originally came from before the Agile Manifesto even existed. I think I need to update it to include practices from Design Thinking, Lean UX and DevOps. #agile #devops #lean #designthinking