Scrum Master or Agile coach

After seeing yet another "Agile coach bashing" thread on LinkedIn I felt the need to blog my perspective. As a former Scrum Master, I now call myself an Agile coach. Here is my two cents.

Who's bad?

The trend I see is for some Scrum Masters to paint anyone with the title "Agile coach" as greedy, money grabbing consultants that don't know what they are doing. They only exist to suck money from large organisations who don't know any better. They label themselves as "Agile coaches" so they can charge out at a much increased day rate. They are the bad guys, while the paragons of virtue are the scrum masters battling away in the trenches, refusing to sell out & change their job title for the sake of a few extra bucks a day.


Let's start with some basic logic.
  • Bad agile coaches exist. This doesn't mean all agile coaches are bad.
  • Bad scrum masters exist. This doesn't mean all Scrum Masters are bad.

Whats in a title?

Lets start with Scrum Master, this is a well defined Scrum role. I'm not going to go into the role and responsibilities here but needless to say there are many different ways that the role is carried out with varying degrees of success. 

In the "could do better" column, we see Scrum masters who:
  • act like/ are expected to behave as project managers
  • are line managing team leaders
  • are viewed as admin assistants that do no more than book meetings & meeting rooms, raise tickets, chase tickets, manage rally/ jira & the burndown charts.
Is this type of scrum master an agile coach? I would say not. If an SM is performing these duties only and relabels themselves as an agile coach then I think that leads to some of the ire that people tend to feel against the title of "agile coach". Just changing your job title for a few extra bucks or to infer seniority. 

On the plus side, there are many, many awesome Scrum masters who:
  • push themselves and their team(s) to do scrum really well (local optimisation)
  • look beyond their teams to influence other teams (global optimisation)
  • change their wider organisation (global optimisation)
Is this type of scrum master an agile coach? I would say definitely yes.

I don't care if they wish to call themselves a scrum master or an agile coach or a scrum ninja, that's their own business. If you are doing all these awesome things and spreading the good word and trying to improve organisations at a wider level then that is awesome. Please continue to do so.

What organisations want from an agile coach is different to what they want from a scrum master


Generally an org will employ a scrum master to work directly with teams to improve their scrum process. The SM might work with one or two teams at a time, mainly embedded, with little time leftover for changing the dynamics and processes of the organisation outside of the teams.

The focus here is on the internal Scrum workings of the teams with occasional stretching beyond the team boundaries. (Of course there are exceptional Scrum masters who will passionately stretch further and more frequently)

Generally an org will employ an agile coach for different reasons. To coach many teams to improvement and also to improve the organisation as a whole. The focus is higher level when it comes to teams but there is more licence and expectation to improve and influence the org culture, the management (at all levels), reduce organisational impediments to agility like financial/ budgeting models, recruitment models, organisational, department and team structures

I don't expect an agile coach to embed in a single scrum team for any great length of time (and not at all if it can be helped). If the agile coach embeds then what is the scrum master doing? An agile coach should look across multiple/ many teams and provide guidance for improvement, they should coach the Scrum masters & Product owners who in turn should coach their teams.

The title does not infer hierarchy

As an agile coach, I do not assume any hierarchical superiority or seniority over scrum masters due to my job title. My title denotes what i do. If I coach scrum masters that doesn't mean i'm above them in the hierarchy. It only means that its part of the job that I do. That is one of the levels I am usually working on. Enterprise or executive coaching are other levels that  people claim to coach at. I view these as different specialisms, not a hierarchical career path. If I consider myself to be a plain old agile coach I don't assume that an enterprise coach is senior or superior to me. I hope we are pulling in the same direction and that they know what they are doing. Note: The existence of an enterprise coach role doesn't preclude SMs or agile coaches from improving or coaching their enterprise

There's more to this than Scrum

I consider myself to be an agile coach not a scrum coach. For me this means that I need to have more in my locker than an ability to teach teams Scrum.  If I am actively working across a large organisation, coaching people how to adapt XP, Kanban, Scrum, as well as Scaled Agile techniques then I feel it would be wrong to label myself a scrum master. Scrum makes up only a portion of what I do.

What if I move to an organization that doesn't do Scrum at all? I can still call myself an agile coach , could I call myself a scrum master? That would be confusing wouldn't it?

I thought we were supposed to be on the same side?

I don't see the need to generate tension between agile coaches and scrum masters. I see us as all as being very much on the same side. If my understanding of the agile coach role matches what another person feels they do as a Scrum master then that's great. If you are coaching your own team to be awesome at scrum and you still have time & energy to tackle agility issues outside of your team then you are doing a great job. Choose your own label or use the one provided by your company but please don't assume the agile coach label means "glorified BAD, overpaid scrum master"

Thank you


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