Coaching Beyond The Team

This post is a re-print of my article originally appearing on the Scrum Alliance website on 3 March 2011.

As an external coach, I am often brought in to teach a new team the Scrum framework and to personally coach the ScrumMaster, Product Owner and Scrum Development Team Members in their new roles. However, the coaching does not stop with the Scrum Team. Scrum does not limit its organizational impact to just the Scrum Team. Therefore, coaching must also extend beyond the team. To explore this extension, let’s look at an example of a traditional role often shaken up by the introduction of Scrum, the Resource Manager, and how coaching might impact this individual’s development path.

In organizations that use a matrix or pool for staffing, the Resource Manager allocates people to projects, while balancing capacity, availability, and demand. Resource Managers are often faced with more demand than supply. This imbalance results in the Resource Manager assigning individuals to 2 or more initiatives simultaneously. The pressure to spread people across multiple projects is increased further in organizations that reward high “utilization.” Since the individual projects start and stop on various dates, the Resource Manager has a busy job planning who is to be working on what projects at what time. The work is complex and the job thankless, but that is why the Resource Manager is paid the big bucks.

Enter Scrum. Scrum initiatives are often staffed with dedicated teams. In other words, the individuals on the core team are fully allocated to the team. If the Scrum adoption starts with a single pilot project, this dedicated team usually has a limited impact on the staffing pool and the project portfolio. Some other projects may be delayed and some people outside the Scrum pilot may take on more work — inconvenient, yes, but workable.

The problem for the Resource Manager arises when the pilot is successful and more initiatives are launched using Scrum. Each of these new efforts demands its own dedicated team. As the number of dedicated teams grows, the complexity of the Resource Manager’s high paying job dwindles to the point of becoming trivial. The role of Resource Manager as master of a staffing shell game is no more. The Resource Manager’s problem now is how to remain relevant to the organization.

For the Resource Manager, this shift can be scary. What does a Resource Manager do when the job becomes trivial? How long will the organization continue to pay big bucks for this job? At this point, the Resource Manager may be thinking only of how to preserve his or her job. The job of the coach is to help this individual work through this problem. For one Resource Manager, who we will call Paul, here is how the coaching process played out.

In a conversation with Paul, he revealed that he actually hated his job. Paul had been promoted into a management position only because he had hit the top of his pay scale and the organization was afraid that they might lose him to the competition. Paul’s real passion was in technology. He found no satisfaction in moving assignments around in a spreadsheet. Paul’s only contact with the technology now was from a distance. Dealing with the politics of too much demand for too little supply took most of his attention. The only part of the job Paul liked was getting to know the people in his staffing pool and helping them develop professionally.

With some encouragement, Paul described his ideal job. What he really wanted to do was to mentor technical employees and create a learning environment where employees could develop and share technical skills and knowledge. Paul wanted to combine his technical knowledge and his people skills to improve the technical competence of the entire organization by encouraging learning and sharing across teams.

Following our conversation, Paul proposed a new position to his manager. Noting that the creation of dedicated cross-functional teams had broken down the traditional organizational silos based on job function, he argued there was now a need for a position to support technical cohesion and collaboration across the organization. This new position would focus on individual and team professional development and organizational learning. The new role would be a sort of internal consultant who would ensure cross-pollination of technical ideas and competencies across teams. Ultimately, Paul got his new position and helped establish a new non-management promotion path for technical workers in his organization.

Paul was successful in figuring out how to navigate the changing organizational landscape. Coaching didn’t solve Paul’s problem. Rather, coaching helped Paul figure it out for himself.

It is easy to underestimate the seismic shift people throughout an organization experience as the development processes and underlying organizational structures react to changes made in response to Scrum’s inspect and adapt cycle. Paul, our Resource Manager, is but one example. People in leadership, portfolio management, operations, finance, customer support, audit, marketing, sales, and so forth all feel the impact. Coaching doesn’t stop at the Scrum Team boundary — organizational change requires coaching beyond the team.