For those that advocate for Agile within their organization
or help organizations adopt Agile, often times your career path is
opportunistic based on what opportunities appear before you. This helps the Agile advocate at one
level gain experience but can prevent the more methodical thinking of where you want your career to go. At some point, isn’t it good to be in the
driver’s seat of your own growth?
For example, if the Agile advocate (e.g., Agile Coach) only
has team level coaching opportunities, they will never gain the experience and
skills needed to coach at a management or organization level. If the Agile advocate only has Scrum based
opportunities, they will not gain the experience of working with Kanban, Lean
Development, or scaled frameworks.
Instead a methodical aspect to their career must be
incorporated. This is where the Agile
Career Palette can be useful.
The Agile Career Palette provides a colorful approach to
better understand what Agile capabilities and experience an Agile advocate currently
has and then provides an incremental approach to explore, learn, experience opportunities
in the future based on gaps and interest. An Agile Career Palette provides
the Agile advocate with what is artistically known as the colors they bring to
their work.
These colors represent several key facets (IMHO) of what it
means to be an Agile advocate of any type.
The key facets include the agile experience acquired, levels coached, agile roles
played, fields where you apply agile, agile processes implemented, business and technical practices applied, agile
training delivered, agile change management and soft skills applied, agile
certifications acquired, and giving back to the agile community in the form of
articles and seminars. While there
may be other areas of focus, I have found that these tend to cover most of the
important Agile areas.
Those who benefit most from the Agile Coaching Palette are
the Agile advocates who play a role as Agile Coach, Agile Champion, Agile
Sponsor, Team level advocates (e.g., ScrumMasters, Product Owner, etc), and
Agile leaders of any kind who are looking to advance in their Agile journey.
The Palette approach reminds those on their agile journey of the many areas
they may desire to experience, learn, and play along the way.
Based on real experience, the Agile Career Palette is a methodical
and incremental approach in helping you consider what you may want to do next, depending
on where you’ve been and more importantly where you would like to go. The “where you would like to go” is meant to
be applied in an incremental manner.
Usually about 6 months gives you enough time to make
progress but short enough to reflect on where you’ve been and where they want
to go next.
If you are an Agile advocate, consider trying an Agile
Career Palette approach to help you better shape and color your future. First start by establishing your current
state of the key facets mentioned about.
Then, commit to an increment of improvement based on your interests or
gaps. It will help you be more laser-focused on building your future!
