Questions an Agile Coach Might Ask

Here are questions that an agile coach might ask before working with you and your organization:

  • Tell me about your company.

  • Tell me about your role.

  • How does your company make money?

  • How does your company develop software today?

  • How does your company implement new training programs?

  • What is the decision process for selecting a coach?

  • Why are you planning to adopt Scrum?

  • If you do not successfully adopt Scrum, what might the negative consequences be?

  • What benefits do you expect to experience from transitioning to Scrum?

  • On a scale of 1 to 5, how urgent is your need to transition to Scrum?

  • What problems are there with your current development process?

  • When do you plan to launch your first Scrum team? What are you doing to ensure that the launch will be successful?

  • What is your ideal future state?

  • What differences are there between your current state and your ideal future state?

Michael de la Maza

I am an agile coach and an angel investor. As an agile coach, I have consulted and trained at dozens of companies. Major agile coaching engagements have been with Paypal, State Street, edX, Carbonite, and Symantec. I typically begin with culture first and then proceed to process improvement and business results. I believe in a non-confrontational, non-coercive approach to change in which people are invited to be and act in a new way. This takes the pain out of agile transformations.

With Rob Rubin, an online education pioneer and the Founding VP of Engineering at edX, I recently created DemingWay.com, an online agile education portal that we plan to grow until it has the best agile content and the best learning platform.