I recently completed a 12 -week training and mentoring program that included 40 hours of face-to-face instruction, 4 hours of one-on-one mentoring and 10 hours of on-the-job learning experiments.
The course is recommended for agile coaches with a good foundation of agile knowledge, and agile work experience.
It covered a broad range of topics, including ceremony facilitation, designing and delivering workshops, the coaching mindset, professional coaching including the GROW model, the coach as a mentor, the coach as a teacher and much more.
The 3 best things of the course
In my opinion, the Responsive Agile Coaching Model was probably the main attraction of this course for me. It is based on the book by Niall McShane, who also co-facilitated the course. The book really struck a chord with me when I first read it.
In a nutshell, it is about how as an Agile Coach you need to sense then respond, in the moment, whether to 'Tell & Show', 'Open & Hold' for deeper conversations, 'Await', and/or 'Co-create' to ultimately embed more agile ways of working.
To be effective as an agile coach, you should know when to stand on the 'soapbox', and when to work towards a solution with the client.
A close second was the 4 hours of one-on-one mentoring that was part of the course. I was fortunate enough to be paired with Ross MacIntyre. Being able to run through scenarios, have a sounding board, and to get sound advice is invaluable for any developing coach. This is something I'm looking to continue in the future.
Finally, spending time with other agile coaches at different stages, in different organisations, and different countries was fantastic. We spend plenty of time sharing experiences, and tips & tricks, and had a lot of fun along the way.
ICAgile Certification
At the end of the course I received ICAgile's Agile Coaching (ICP-ACC) and Agile Team Facilitation (ICP-ATF) certification. ICAgile stands for the International Consortium for Agile, and their approach is not tied to any specific Agile methodology, thus giving people the flexibility to blend flavors in a way that make sense for their reality.
If you want to know more about the course, have a look here. The next course starts in August 2022.