In the past years I had the chance to support, train, teach and mentor many teams in adopting Scrum and agile practices. I have seen many organizations, departments, group of people with various point of views regarding agile. Most of the time people around are skeptical and doubtful about bringing more agility in their environment simply because it is different than what they are used to. Thankfully after trying it, a large portion of people, even the more skeptical realize that they can’t come back to where they were before. When people realize this that mean you probably have made an impact.
Outcomes
I consider our job as coaches to impact organizations. When we come somewhere we should assess the current state of things around and measure what is changing weeks after weeks. They open new jobs for Product Owners, they hire an internal coach, the workplace changes, many visible signs you can track. Having teams delivering value to their stakeholders is something but that is not it. If you consider your job done when an increment is in production you probably missed the point. Our job is to bring people together, break silos, activate new channels of communication between people who weren’t talking together, give people autonomy, drive them to the path of mastery and create a supporting environment for all those changes amongst a lot of other things.
The Why
I was and still am a .NET Developer. I did many internships during my scholarship, then worked in small to large projects. I was quite happy and an innocent dev until I became team lead and had to spend my day to break down chunks of work for my team, do PowerPointS to justify changes to my client, report to the project managerS, report to other middle management. Lot of new things that made me realize my job would be boring from this time. Frustration was building up until I resigned because of a bad manager.
Epiphany
One day I was getting out of a job and my community lead decided I will go on an Scrum Training for a week. I came back from holidays and went to it with a vague idea of what it was. After a week I was transformed, literally. I loved my job again.
Since then and after years experiencing terrible and successful agile my first objective is to have people having an epiphany and help them realize they can also change things in better around them or at least try.
Scrum & More 