Hello and welcome to mentoring team members on agile practices. In this lesson, we are going to take a look at what it takes to mentor team members so that agile practices can be implemented successfully.

When an organization decides to begin the transformation to Agile, it will usually bring in one or more agile coaches or mentors. These mentors are brought in to help the organization's teams either adopt agile methods or to improve current methods that are in place. For these coaches and mentors to be effective, they must be real agents of change. By this, I mean that they must really want to help people realize how they are currently working and spending their time. And they must be good at driving adoption of the newer agile methods that they were brought in to develop.

When an agile coach or mentor is brought in, what the coach will typically do is work with multiple teams to implement the new agile methods. A key role of an agile coach or mentor is to remove both internal and external roadblocks that prevent the organization from implementing agile practices. To be effective at this, the agile coach or mentor needs to be good at not just coaching and mentoring, but also at teaching and facilitating. This is because the mentor needs to serve as both a consultant and a trainer.

Putting agile concepts into practice requires buy-in because doing so isn't as simple as learning the concepts through an agile training course. It takes dedication to facilitate change.

Agile coaches and mentors come in many different flavors. For example, some mentors may be technical experts that prefer to teach an organization's team members how to apply specific agile concepts and practices. Such technical oriented coaches and mentors may hold peer sessions with team members.

On the other hand, you may have agile coaches and mentors that focus more on agile processes or on the management of work activities. These types of will often demonstrate how to run standup meetings and review meetings.

Although bringing in external agile coaches and mentors can kickstart the process for moving to agile practices, ultimately, the team members within the organization will need to develop the ability to mentor each other. As team members become skilled at mentoring each other and at learning from one another, the move to agile practices becomes easier. For this to happen, however, teams need to work in a collaborative fashion, the work cannot be done by individuals in a vacuum.

Lectures

• Course Introduction
• Project Metrics and KPIs
• In-Team and Cross-Team Collaboration
• Tools and Processes for Agile Practices
• Creating Organizational Structures for Agile Practices
• Conclusion