Agile Coaching Contracts
Agile coaching helps the people who work in changing environments become more effective and successful. It encompasses coaching, facilitating, teaching, mentoring, consultancy and client service, all applied with an open and deliberate selection of agile principles and techniques to address the client’s needs.
Not about installing a framework, or implementing ‘best practices’, but using project and product delivery as both the vehicle and beneficiary of improvement, the Agile Coach will:
- Leverage a wide range of agile and lean principles for better delivery
- Coach teams, individuals, leaders and entire systems
- Use professional coaching techniques for lasting empowerment
- Provide facilitation – an event, a workflow, an agile framework adoption
- Guide learning through teaching and mentoring
- Take a partnership stance by crafting a working agreement to identify goals, boundaries and outcomes
- Create accountability and awareness
- Provide consultancy and advice when appropriate
A typical Agile Coaching engagement....
… starts with high contact time to observe, orient, understand – and only then start to recommend and empathically guide improvement and adjustment to ways of working. Once the paths to the next target state are identified, a good Agile Coach can fade back somewhat, making space for the growth they are hired to create. This takes time. As a contract engagement, this is ideal for the client as budget can be spread out over a much longer period allowing the hired coach to be a partner over the whole arc of change.
My approach to Agile Coaching is not to be a permanent presence or to roll out standardised ways of working, tooling templates or lead ‘fun’ initiatives in pursuit of a culture change. It’s more substantial than that, and needs to be tied to outcomes – so we will agree those early.
Agile coaching needs licence to operate at individual, team, leadership and systemic levels to be effective.
In 2025 the role is changing; a move away from agile coaches to work on a ‘trance formation’ and more to skills based hiring. The skills of a good agile leader are dispersing into additional roles and this is a good thing. A strong independent agile coach will help deepen this adoption and help where the problems have not yet gone away.
I’ve been working over several years to help professionalise the world of agile coaching, through contribution to the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel. This is a tool that helps agile practitioners manage their own skills development, and which clients can use to think about what competencies to seek in their Agile Coach.
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