Published Research

Case study of how 16 Agile Coaches at Spotify “enable leadership”.
Enabling leadership is a dimension of Complexity Leadership Theory, along with operational and entrepreneurial leadership.
Coaches practice enabling leadership by increasing the context‐sensitivity of others, supporting other leaders, establishing and reinforcing simple principles, observing group dynamics, surfacing conflict and facilitating and encouraging constructive dialogue.
She found: “coaches support teams by working with them directly, and with the surrounding organization, to create conditions favourable for teams to create value.” Do this by:
– increasing sensitivity to context
– boosting other leaders
– observing and paying attention to how the team is working (and comparing it with their internal model) Coaches’ attention to the team is a unique form of support.
– make the unseen visible and tangible
– surfacing conflict
– encouraging constructive dialogue.
Impact is value of human attention to the comms and quality of interactions.

Reference
Bäcklander, G. (2019). Doing complexity leadership theory: How agile coaches at Spotify practise enabling leadership. Creativity and Innovation Management, 28(1), 42-60.

This study highlights the continued presence of the role of the project manager in agile software projects as a part of the transition from traditional to agile ways of working. The study presents and describe the project manager’s role in agile projects in terms of (a) everyday activities: facilitating, mentoring, negotiating, coordinating, and protecting, performed by the project manager using; (b) three management approaches: hard, moderate, and soft; (c) four traditional project management activities continued to be performed by them, including: tracking project progress, reporting on project status, budgeting and forecasting, and managing personnel; and (d) the influence of the presence of the project manager on the frequency with which agile activities are carried out by the teams. The research is particularly unique as it uses both qualitative and quantitative methods to try and understand the role of the project manager in Agile.

This article was awarded a Distinguished Paper award at the IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2017).
Free preprint link: https://tinyurl.com/hc35utn

Agile adoption is typically understood as a one-off organizational process involving a stage-wise selection of agile development practices. This view of agility fails to explain the differences in the pace and effectiveness of individual teams transitioning to agile development. This article presents a grounded theory of becoming agile as a network of on-going transitions across five dimensions: software development practices, team practices, management approach, reflective practices, and culture. The unique position of a software team through this network, and their pace of progress along the five dimensions, explains why individual agile teams present distinct manifestations of agility and unique transition experiences. The theory expands the current understanding of agility as a holistic and complex network of on-going multi- dimensional transitions, and will help software teams, their managers, and organizations better navigate their individual agile journeys.

Scrum, the most popular agile method and project management framework, is widely reported to be used, adapted, misused, and abused in practice. However, not much is known about how Scrum actually works in practice, and critically, where, when, how and why it diverges from Scrum by the book. Through a Grounded Theory study involving semi-structured interviews of 45 participants from 30 companies and observations of five teams, this article presents findings on how Scrum works in practice as compared to how it is presented in its formative books. Significant variations in these practices were identified, such as work breakdown, estimation, prioritization, assignment, the associated roles and artefacts, and underlying rationales driving the variations are discussed. Critically, the article claims that not all variations are process misuse/abuse and propose a nuanced classification approach to understanding variations as standard, necessary, contextual, and clear deviations for successful Scrum use and adaptation.

The article was published in the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering in 2020. Free access link: https://tinyurl.com/y74kaz4p

This research article provides a historical overview of agile’s main focus areas and a holistic synthesis of its trends, their evolution over the past two decades, and agile’s current status and likely future. It was published in the IEEE Software’s “50th Anniversary of Software Engineering” special edition. IEEE Software is a practitioner focused magazine so this will be perfect for practitioners!
Link to free preprint: https://tinyurl.com/yaqabugh

This research, published in Academic Medicine 2020, describes the results of a randomised control trial. Researchers compared traditional interventions with treating implicit bias recognition and management as a form of transformative learning.
They found that transformative learning had a significantly better outcome.

Sukhera, Javeed MD, PhD, FRCPC; Watling, Christopher J. MD, PhD; Gonzalez, Cristina M. MD, MEd Implicit Bias in Health Professions: From Recognition to Transformation, Academic Medicine: May 2020 – Volume 95 – Issue 5 – p 717-723

This is the first systematic literature review of the popular job title of “agile coach”. Researchers from SINTEF, university of Oslo, Norway, note that “empirical
knowledge about the tasks, responsibilities and skills of an agile coach is lacking.”
They analysed 67 studies, out of a total of 209 found on the topic, finding:

“Agile coaches help in training and developing software development teams and all the stakeholders involved in the agile adoption process. The primary skills of an agile coach identified herein are leadership qualities, project management skills, technical skills, and expertise in agile methods.”

These empirical findings are timely, as the Agile Coaching industry is developing itself along the lines of professional coaching, not leadership or technical skills.