Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition

Addison-Wesley Signature Series - Cohn

By: Lyssa Adkins

Narrated by: Lyssa Adkins

Length: 13 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher's summary

The provocative and practical guide to coaching agile teams

As an agile coach, you can help project teams become outstanding at agile, creating products that make them proud and helping organizations reap the powerful benefits of teams that deliver both innovation and excellence.

More and more frequently, ScrumMasters and project managers are being asked to coach agile teams. But it’s a challenging role. It requires new skills - as well as a subtle understanding of when to step in and when to step back. Migrating from “command and control” to agile coaching requires a whole new mind-set.

In Coaching Agile Teams, Lyssa Adkins gives agile coaches the insights they need to adopt this new mind-set and to guide teams to extraordinary performance in a re-energized work environment. You’ll gain a deep view into the role of the agile coach, discover what works and what doesn’t, and learn how to adapt powerful skills from many allied disciplines, including the fields of professional coaching and mentoring.

Coverage includes:

• Understanding what it takes to be a great agile coach
• Mastering all of the agile coach’s roles (teacher, mentor, problem solver, conflict navigator, and performance coach)
• Creating an environment where self-organized, high-performance teams can emerge; coaching teams past cooperation and into full collaboration
• Evolving your leadership style as your team grows and changes
• Staying actively engaged without dominating your team and stunting its growth
• Recognizing failure, recovery, and success modes in your coaching
• Getting the most out of your own personal agile coaching journey.

Whether you’re an agile coach, leader, trainer, mentor, facilitator, ScrumMaster, project manager, product owner, or team member, this book will help you become skilled at helping others become truly great. What could possibly be more rewarding?

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2010 Pearson Education, Inc. (P)2021 Pearson Education, Inc.

Great conversion from book to audiobook

I confess that I am not a big fan of audibooks. I prefer paper books, or at most, e-books. However, as I am experiencing a kind of reading block, I looked for an alternative, since this is a book that taught me so much (I got to read half of the book in electronic format) and that I did no't want to just abandon. And it was a very positive surprise: the book is well narrated, has pauses, informs when the chapters change, as well as the change in topics. The pace that the author gave to reading, also made the audiobook extremely pleasant. I loved it and highly recommend it.

A perfect story

This audio book gives a perfect insight of the complexity and subtlety of one of the key roles in an Agile team.

Very professional!

Great advice and real world examples. Really enjoyed how to handle conflict and in-depth discussion on BART.

A must read for Agilist and Coaches

This collection of stories, insights and suggestions is practical, extremely relatable and engaging. Very well illustrated and transparent. Thank you, Lyssa.

Far exceeded my expectations

I’ve been doing the Agile thing for many years now, and I can’t believe this is the first time I’ve heard of this book. I was blown away by the content. I wish that I had read this years ago!

The audiobook version was phenomenal, and I recommend to anyone, at any point, in their own Agile journey.

This book reminded me to be a Coach and step back

This book reminded me that we're all in a state of maturity and with respect to agile methodologies, the agile coach steps back and steers the team from afar with gentle reminders and techniques to enable the team to sustainably drive themselves.

A+ listen. I've even recommended this to my scrum of scrums team that we read through this together.

Fabulous! Anti-aging advice.

Experienced ScrumMaster here. This was my first time reading it through. Felt all of this. Practical and intimate guidance and voice. I read the hard copy while listening to Lyssa narrate via this Audiobook. I can see how people refer to this as the "Bible" of Agile. I am not a fan of that verbiage but this is definitely a book I have highlighted, made notes, and will reference again and again just as much as the Agile Manifesto, Principles and The Scrum Guide.

Excellent

An excellent overview of how to positively engage teams while using Scrum. Scrum is present but honestly the lessons are applicable no matter what. Each chapter lists out ~5 principles it will focus on related to some topic or issue and then goes in detail thru each of those principles. Very well and orderly structured :).

Hours of Redundancy

The author reiterates the same sentence over and over. The first 2 hours are spent selling you on the authors methodology by giving theoretical examples with no real details. I got frustrated with the lack of content at that point and did not read the rest. I just feel like this whole book could be summarized in a short essay. Such a waste of time.

New Age Mumbo Jumbo

This is one of the most impractical things I have read. It doesn't really specify how to coach.