Almost 2 months ago I read an article that was shocking to say the least; it was titled “RIP Agile Coach” it also had this excerpt “the Agile Coach role needs to die in a dumpster fire”. This strong reaction to the role of an Agile Coach gave me reasons to think and has been on my mind for a while. Today, I will write this article in response to not just that article but to throw more light on an apparently confusing notion. Another excerpt from the article reads “… the reason why Agile Coaches are no longer needed is because the Scrum Master is a Coach”.
The article from which I got the above excerpts is a reflection of the very wrong but widely held belief that a Scrum Master and an Agile Coach are one and the same thing. There are many posts and viewpoints that suggest that a Scrum Master and an Agile Coach’s responsibilities are interchangeable. I beg to differ with that reasoning for the reasons below:
1. Scrum is just a subset of Agile, although the most popular.
2. A Scrum Master is someone who presumably knows Scrum and can lead and guide the team to embrace Scrum and understand the expectations of the framework and agility, by extension.
3. While a Scrum Master is also a Scrum Coach, he or she’s knowledge of Agile (along with the requirements of the role of a Scrum Master) very often is limited to the Scrum framework therefore, by extension, a Scrum Master does not need to know other Agile Frameworks.
4. Agile has so many other methodologies or frameworks besides Scrum. Some of these are: Extreme Programming; focuses on software development best practices, Lean Product Development; not Agile in a strict sense but is quite closely aligned with Agile and has contributed the seven forms of waste, pull systems, value stream mapping and work in progress. Lean also happens to be the source of the Kanban methodology, Kanban; has helped with task boards with Work in Progress limits and pull systems, Feature Driven Development; popularized Cumulative Flow Diagrams and Parking Lot Diagrams, these two are useful tracking and diagnostic tools, Dynamic Systems Development Method; impacted the development of Agile by making popular early architectural considerations, Agile suitability filters and Agile contracts, Crystal; family of methods tailored to match the specific requirements of a project. All of these frameworks have contributed in no small measure to what has become the success of the Agile methodology today and they are the reason why Agile, if embraced appropriately, leads to increased business value for the customer. Please note that all of the above methodologies are exclusive to Scrum.
5. An Agile Coach is someone who ideally, understands the different (or at least the most common) Agile methodologies comprehensively so he/she can advise/guide the team/organization on what framework/methodology or hybrid is most suitable for their project(s).
6. Very frequently, a project gets its best results by using/borrowing different practices from different methodologies. For instance, an Agile Coach might encourage a team using Scrum to try using Continuous Integration (borrowed from Extreme Programming) while building code to ensure that all code works together. This is a very important practice because it highlights problems with existing code before more is built on top of defective code thereby creating technical debt. A Scrum Master would most likely not know of this practice as his/her knowledge is limited to Scrum (which puts less emphasis than XP on software development best practices) but an Agile Coach would and should know, so essentially, an Agile Coach knows enough to borrow different best practices from different frameworks to achieve the best results.
7. There is a widely held but faulty notion that the most important difference between a Scrum Master and an Agile Coach is that a Scrum Master works with a single team while an Agile Coach works only at enterprise level; with all teams, and executives alongside other teams/groups. This isn’t always true; an Agile Coach could work with a single team within an organization and his/her responsibility is to ensure that he/she pulls from his/her vast knowledge base to ensure that the team is exposed to and utilizes a wide range of Agile’s best practices.
In summary, the crux of my argument is that the roles of a Scrum Master and an Agile Coach are by no means interchangeable. An Agile Coach’s knowledge is T shaped; broad/comprehensive skills and knowledge and he/she coaches by bringing together different perspectives while covering all or most Agile methodologies while a Scrum Master is I shaped; narrow, his/her knowledge is limited to Scrum, one of the over 12 subsets of the Agile methodology.
Finally, I would recommend that an organization, on deciding to transition to Agile, brings on board an Agile Coach to introduce the team/organization to Agile. Even when an organization decides to use only Scrum, it would never know all the benefits it would lose by limiting itself to Scrum or to a Coach who has limited knowledge in an area where there are limitless possibilities that would invariably add more value to the organization’s business.