Level Up with an Agile Coach

We work with you to plan a custom Agile transformation strategy that best serves every level of your organization or helps turn around an ongoing transition that’s not delivering the results you need. We begin with an enterprise assessment of your value streams, teams, and structure, then shape a partnership-based approach that preserves what’s working and adapts what isn’t.

It’s one thing to establish a single high performing Agile team. Larger efforts that involve many teams coordinating often require implementing a formalized Agile scaling framework such as LeSS or SAFe. Our coaches have led and improved scaling practices in many complex environments, and can leverage that experience to tailor a scaling approach that helps you deliver enterprise value and nimbly respond to new challenges.

It can take months for a new Agile team to learn the self-organization and continual improvement patterns that lead to high performance. Our experienced Agile coaches accelerate the successful formation of new teams through our “SureStart” methodology, which includes certified training for teams in cohorts, embedded coaching through the team’s first iteration, and continued role-specific coaching for your Product Owners and ScrumMasters for up to six additional sprints.

Our technical coaching staff has the subject matter expertise to help teams optimize and accelerate software development, testing, and delivery practices. Our approach begins with a DevOps Retrospective that maps out the complete value stream of application delivery from development to production, then works with your teams to identify incremental changes to deploy the tools and practices that make their flow faster and safer.

Business Agility is significantly higher when company leaders guide the journey, meaning you must change the culture of leadership to ensure teams reach their full potential. Agile teams are best supported by servant leadership that maintains focus on value delivery while creating an environment for experimentation and learning. Our coaches help leaders from the C-suite to those directly managing teams adopt a mindset that nurtures a culture of Agility.

Agile transitions in the public sector bring additional challenges not often seen in the private sector. No one has a greater depth of experience leading, coaching, and improving government Agility than the coaches at NextUp. In addition to team and leadership coaching, we can also advise on acquisition approaches to effectively buy Agile services and provide an objective assessment of vendors to ensure you’re getting the best value for taxpayer funds.

Dedicated, full-time attention from an embedded coach can help teams struggling with their transition or stuck by waterfall-type assumptions in planning, delivery, or performance management. Our coaches partner with your teams to establish a strategy with visible goals and exit criteria, then collaborate with them over successive sprints to overcome obstacles and lay the groundwork for self-improvement.

Great leaders need an array of relational, creative, and introspective competencies to build an environment where people and organizations achieve amazing things. Even when leaders have those tools, their ability to enact positive change can be significantly limited by behavioral patterns that limit our ability to inspire others. NextUp’s executive coaches can help you grow as an individual leader through structured, one-on-one coaching that begins with a Leadership Circle 360 Assessment, then collaboratively defines a path of personal growth.

Is your business well-served by your Agile transition? It can be hard to tell, particularly for enterprises with delays between the actions of teams and business outcomes. Our coaches can assess individual teams, and the enterprise as a whole, with an impartial evaluation of current Agile practices, policies, and tools to give you objective insight into the strengths and challenges of your approach.