#139 – Coaching

In Strip 143, we mention how important mastering Professional Coaching is to successfully overcome challenges on the way to becoming an agile organization. However, what we must also realize is that we’re often called upon not to coach, but use our agile subject matter expertise to help solve a problem, such as the one depicted here.

Therefore, don’t just solve the problem, but remember to teach someone involved how you did it so they won’t be dependent on you in the future. In the case of the constant spill-over of User Stories and the Sprint Goal never being met because of the Scrum Team working with a new technology, teach the Scrum Master about technical Spikes in order to accelerate their familiarity of this new technology, about investing in Social Programming to share the knowledge, and about setting realistic Sprint Goals based on the limited knowledge.