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Coaching Coaching Teams
If you work IT long enough, you go meta. That is, at some point you're not doing the thing, you're doing the thing about the thing.
Here's an example I shared with my audience today about what happens when you coach teams that coach.
Many times, the coaching team is brought in under a Statement of Work, or SOW. The whole purpose of a SOW is to describe exactly what the team will be doing. And most every time you will have a contact that will prioritize work and define "done". So you have a backlog, a budget, a Product Owner, and a highly-skilled team (after all, this is a coaching team -- these guys know what the heck they're doing!) What could go wrong?
I think people think that having a great team means having really smart people work on a clear list of things with somebody telling them when they're "done enough" is all they need -- but that's not true. For instance, lots of startups who are funded by VCs do a lot of activity and yet get nothing done. Activity does not equal progress! You can have structural problems with your list of things to do that can't be overcome by any degree of technology or smarts.
Activity does not equal value.
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