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The Agile Coach Role: Coaching for Agile Performance Impact

Abstract

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 semi-structured 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.
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Category

Academic article

Language

English

Affiliation

  • SINTEF Digital / Software Engineering, Safety and Security
  • University of Oslo

Year

2021

Published in

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS)

ISSN

1530-1605

Page(s)

6816 - 6825

View this publication at Norwegian Research Information Repository