The Agile Coach Role: Coaching for Agile Performance Impact
This addresses the lack of research on agile coaching practices for companies adopting agile methods, but it is incremental as it primarily describes existing roles without introducing new methods.
The paper investigated the role of agile coaches in companies by analyzing 19 interviews to describe their tasks, traits, and impact on teams, finding they operate at team and organizational levels to influence effort, strategies, and skills.
It is increasingly common to introduce agile coaches to help gain speed and advantage in agile companies. Following the success of Spotify, the role of the agile coach has branched out in terms of tasks and responsibilities, but little research has been conducted to examine how this role is practiced. This paper examines the role of the agile coach through 19 semistructured interviews with agile coaches from ten different companies. We describe the role in terms of the tasks the coach has in agile projects, valuable traits, skills, tools, and the enablers of agile coaching. Our findings indicate that agile coaches perform at the team and organizational levels. They affect effort, strategies, knowledge, and skills of the agile teams. The most essential traits of an agile coach are being emphatic, people-oriented, able to listen, diplomatic, and persistent. We suggest empirically based advice for agile coaching, for example companies giving their agile coaches the authority to implement the required organizational changes within and outside the teams.