Mike Lyons recounts a coaching engagement where a team struggled to balance strict scrum mechanics with practical delivery needs. He contrasts two coaches’ approaches—one focused on ceremony/mechanics (novice-in-practice) and his own focus on delivering customer value (experienced)—and describes how they moved to a mentor–mentee partnership. When the team was given freedom to self-manage around delivery, performance improved.
I worked with a team recently that was struggling with balancing the sort of mechanics of scrum with the realities of delivery. I was part of a coaching team on contract and I joined this team already in flight and there was another coach who was sort of directing this mechanical approach to scrum. I was focused on helping to sort of grow the team towards improving how we're delivering value for our customers customer. And the other coach was more focused on the conduct of the Agile ceremony, sort of how should we do them? The reality was just that my experience and the other coach's experience were different. I had a couple decades of agile coaching and delivery experience and the other coach was in their second year of applying agile. I just have been exposed more to how the agile mindset runs up against the realities of agile delivery. From my perspective, I was operating with the team more in the RE stage. They understood the agile mindset and were just focused on how to improve our ability to deliver. The other coach really was operating in the more shoe state, focused on the mechanics of scrum. Scrum is the answer regardless of the realities on the ground. I took a step back from the situation. I recognized that the other coach was just applying what she already knew and that our experience level was different. Her position was like me 15 years ago and at that time I kind of was stuck in the mechanics too. There's a balance here. Agile, or scrum in particular, can't really be agile if you don't adjust how you work as a team. However, in the beginning, you need your team to understand the why behind what we're doing. They need to not lose sight on the goal, which is delivery. Well, the end result in this situation was that we partnered together as coaches and we entered into something closer to mentor, mentee relationship. And we've remained friends ever since. And when the team was given freedom to manage themselves in a way that worked best for them, that focused on delivery, the team got better as well.
