Coaching

It’s the last day of 2025 and, despite everything that happened work wise for me this year, I am coming out of 2025 very grateful. I have taken some time to write down a few reflections from the year.

• There has been a dwindling number of available roles for Agile practitioners such as Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches. Yet there is still a lot of work to be done, as long as there are teams that struggle to ship software consistently and many more teams operating as a feature factory with little clue about how much value they are delivering. What we need more of are agile practitioners with hands on product delivery experience who can help teams navigate the complexity of their work.

• There are still many practitioners who approach change by documenting “best practices” and then trying to force teams to comply. That is not going to work in the long run. What works better and actually sticks is involving people in co creating the change they want, and creating an environment where that is possible is one of the first steps to long lasting change.

• The marketing “rule of 7” from the 1930s suggests that people have to see an advert seven times before they buy. That principle still applies today. In practice, Product Owners need to share their Product Vision and Goals multiple times – maybe more than seven – before it really sticks, and even then these will eventually need to change. Try different formats: audio, video and text; the teams will get it over time.

• There continues to be widespread misinformation about Scrum and other agile frameworks, and the truth is that our clients do not care about the frameworks themselves. On a recent client engagement, I found that using terms different from Scrum’s official terminology helped us get started. It just means that, as a change agent, you have to define a delivery framework that is explicitly designed for your context.

• Velocity and “Say/Do” continue to be useless metrics. Better alternatives include flow metrics. In large organisations, I have found “Lead Time” – how long it takes from the conception of an idea to releasing features to users – particularly useful. It exposes organisational waste that cuts across multiple areas of the organisation, in ways that leaders might find interesting (or uncomfortable).

Models are useful tools that helps understand our self and the growth process. Learning is a critical part of the growth process and I have always referred to the Shu-Ha-Ri concept as a model that help me with mapping out where i was along the process. It is a a very simple but POWERFUL concept and i am hope you find this useful as much as I have.

Shu:

In this phase, the apprentice follow the rules that have been taught and rarely deviate from the rules. The apprentice learns by repetition of the same techniques that has been learnt, many times over until muscle memory is built.

I have always been one of those people that believed one of the major factors for succeeding with Agile ways of work is physically co-located teams. As far back as 2007, I remember the joys of walking into an open plan office bustling with activity, and colourful post-it notes on white boards within the office. Being the self confessed Agile Evangelist that I was, I would lobby for co-location within the work place as i believed it complimented collaboration; we just preferred the business and technology teams sat next to each other.