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Engagement Community Notes

Engagement Community Notes

Sharing my notes here with the intent for those persons who might be interested. I’m experimenting with this technique based on the success of shared community building concepts. Primary purpose is to foster self-identification needs for improvement, build relationship within peers (SM’s), measurable improvement group accountability, and enable the culture of peer-to-peer Agile relationships. If you like it, make it your own!

If anyone has a similar engagement challenge with multiple teams, I’d love to hear how you have engaged to tackle it. Please share with me or the team. 

Problem: Chasing teams and Scrum events to observe and engage. Resulted in too much context switching, potential to miss engagement opportunities and a lot of work activity over focused outcomes.

Coaching engagement contract between coach and PO/SM:
• Coaching Engagement Mechanisms
• Services or Engagement Types
• Team Engagement etiquette.

Coaching Hours:
• Dedicated coaching hours or "Coaches Minute Clinic".
• Communicated and in my signature.
• 1 dedicated hour every Tuesday afternoon and Thursday morning.

Coaching conversation:
• Build a 'mini-community of practice' with a small group of SM's and the coach to focus on continuous improvement for the teams and to build interlocking, partnering relationships.

Weekly (TBD) coaching conversations:
• Small team groupings that make sense. E.g. Value Stream grouping
• Includes Agile coach and 2 to 4 Scrum Masters.
• Coach and SM observations, feedback, and suggestions for continuous improvement.
• SM commits to an outcome, develops measurable results, and determines activities to achieve outcome.
• Review as a group next coaching conversation. (Measurable group accountability.)

Value:
• Scale as a single coach leveraging mini-community of peers.
• SM's helping SM's - scalable, less and less dependency on the coach is the long term goal.
• Increased engagement.
• Focus on measurable, self-directed continuous improvement.

Education needs:
• Standard education (workshops).
• Specific education as identified by coach or requested by the team. E.g. Story Point Estimation