Taking a course does not a master make.

Coaching involves working with the team members on their tasks and adapting the capabilities they learned to their daily work.

Product managers build product portfolios and backlogs, with proper tools to track the work, and predictability to what they get. They collaborate with the developers and testers to see how their vision comes alive, and in turn prioritize the next features.

Developers start writing tests for their code, either new or legacy. They do code reviews, design reviews, and document just enough so the knowledge about their system can be passed on to others. They set guidelines to how they are going to write code in the organization.

Testers start by defining a testing strategy for the product. They evaluate the risks, the available skills and resources, and manage the testing effort accordingly. They apply automation principles where needed and manual where it is more effective.

Dev-ops people start implementing continuous integration to compile code and run unit tests automatically. They automate the process of deploying products to staging environments, run automatic integration and system tests and report the results. They collaborate with the product people to collect actual usage information for better product decisions.

Team leads start to manage their teams better, getting insight to the team’s strengths  and weakness through visibility mechanisms like kanban boards and retrospectives. They are able to make decisions based on data, rather than gut feelings.

Management teams can see where value is created, and where waste accumulates. They can now remove bottlenecks, set improvement plans in motion and track their results. The organization moves toward alignment with its objective, moving faster and in the same direction.

Transparency into the coaching is essential. We review the improvements results periodically, to see if we need to do more, or change direction based on the team’s progress.