Our Coaching Approach

Our Coaching Approach

Artisan coaches have one goal: Sustainability.

We help organizations, teams, and individuals help themselves.
Artisan Agility believes strongly in INSPIRED TEAMS and PASSIONATE LEADERS. Our coaches:

  • Assess what’s currently happening by talking with team members, leaders, and managers;
  • Observe how teams and individuals work together;
  • Understand how processes and tools are used to support the work.

Then, we begin the work to offer the best approach to help everyone continue their growth and achieve their goals. Our founder, Jim Schiel, has always said that the primary job of a manager or leader is to remove themselves from the critical workflow. We believe coaches play the same kind of role — assess, observe, support, and coach with the goal of making the individual, team, and organization self-sustaining.

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Artisan Agility’s Resource Library

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Satisfaction
Guarantee

We’re so confident in our coaching techniques that if you don’t believe any progress has been made in the first 90 days, we’ll offer you a full and complete refund of your coaching fees.

We’ve offered this guarantee for several years, but nobody’s ever had to take us up on it!

Our 3 Types of Coaching

Organizational
Coaching

Achieve strategic objectives, enhance leadership capability, and create culture change.

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Team
Coaching

Involves group talent and introducing new ideas to improve a team’s total performance.

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Individual
Coaching

Offers skills, tools, and encouragement for any individual to define and realize their specific goals.

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Organizational Coaching

Align on Agile

All too often, Agile Development is seen as something you “DO” as opposed to something you “ARE.” Organizations attempt to “implement” Agile instead of changing the organization to BE Agile. Our coaches clarify what Agile REALLY is.

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Focus on Value

We show you how to focus your product development efforts on improving business value and creating the greatest return on investment while keeping your customers (and regulatory agencies) happy.

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Create an Agile Organization

Agility at the organizational level is a new experience for most companies. Our coaches can show you how to make little changes in how your organization works that can make BIG differences in cost, schedule and quality!

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Improve Workflow

The biggest challenge most product development teams face isn’t technology nor changing requirements. The biggest challenge teams face is HOW they do the work. Our coaches will show your teams how to streamline their workflow and get MORE done in LESS time.

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Understand What’s Happening

Many organizations are so overly complex that measuring performance, productivity, quality and value generation is nearly impossible. Our coaches can show you how to unwind the confusion, bring clarity to reality, and allow you to effectively fine-tune your organization.

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Push You Forward

Organizations suffer two weaknesses: They go out of their way to avoid making mistakes, but make the wrong choices and waste time as a result; they also resist experimentation as a way of learning. Our coaches help you embrace methods that push the organization forward.

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Team Coaching

Role Alignment

Just like a sports team maps out plays, we help your team navigate new roles and assignments in Scrum, Kanban, or XP. What does a manager do? What’s the responsibility of a Scrum Master? When the roles are used correctly, the team works more effectively.

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Consistency Without Complexity

Teams frequently adopt behaviors that make it very difficult to get work done in a consistent and predictable manner. Our coaches help teams strip away complexity, learn new habits and create a predictable cadence for your development efforts.

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Teams That Can Do The Work

The best teams are the ones that have the skills they need to get the job done and, when they don’t have the skills, know how to get them. We’ll teach your teams how to work together to create the skills balance they need, all the time, to get the job done.

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REAL Team-Building

Too often, teams are “created” by getting people together in a room and announcing that they are a team. Real teams need ground rules, working agreements and more. Our coaches will help you define an approach for properly forming ANY team.

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Individual Coaching

Product Ownership

Owning a product is like having the keys to your dream home, but Product Owners frequently find themselves thrust into a role they don’t completely understand. Artisan coaches help Product Owners work with development teams to create clear, effective and user-centric Product Backlog Items focused on business value.

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Being a ScrumMaster

Being a ScrumMaster is a difficult job. It’s rarely understood how powerful the role is and how a great ScrumMaster can helping teams become INSPIRED. Our coaches help ScrumMasters understand how to be a great servant leader, how to help teams and organizations be effective and how to have fun while doing it!

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Agile Leadership

Managing and leading in an Agile organization takes new skills and an understanding of complex adaptive systems created by self-organizing teams. Artisan coaches help management teams understand how to be successful in a way that leverages the innate power of your development teams.

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REAL Team-Building

Too often, teams are “created” by getting people together in a room and announcing that they are now a team, but real teams need ground rules, working agreements and much more! Artisan coaches will help you define an approach for properly forming ANY team and positioning them for success.

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Testimonials

Here’s what some of our clients had to say about us:

“I took a Scrum Master course and was completely impressed. Agile and Scrum are concepts that do not exist in a vacuum. Without real business contexts, and especially real software development experience, Agile doesn’t mean much. It was Jim’s ability to teach the material with his finger always on best practices that made the class a home run.”

Pete Lunenfeld, Executive V.P., Registry Monitoring Insurance Services, Inc.

“I recently took the Certified ScrumMaster class. Not only did our instructor thoroughly understand the course material and knows how to teach it well but he also has many real-world examples to further enhance one’s learning. I really enjoyed the class and learned a lot!”

Barbara Kroczak, Senior Program Manager, Riverbed Technology

“CSM training with Artisan was the best training that I have ever taken. The class was lively and interactive. They covered Agile fundamentals and material relevant to the CSM exam. They were not hesitant to take questions and had lots of examples from real world experience. I passed the CSM exam with an almost perfect score without help from any other sources.”

Farhan Hamlani, Information Technology, E*TRADE Financial Corporation

“I had the pleasure of attending a 2-day seminar on Agile and it was fantastic. If you are looking to improve your understanding of Agile from someone who has done it (not just someone who read it) for years, Artisan is the one. I have attended many other seminars but none as plain and simple. Most coaches add an unnatural aura to Agile as if it were some mystic and ancient magic. Artisan presents these concepts in a dispassionate yet highly precise manner.”

Bhagavan Jalli, Director of Design, Innominds

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Recent Blog Posts

How Scrum Masters Can Make Team Values Real

The Scrum framework has five values: commitment, courage, focus, openness, and respect -- but, like many organizational values, Scrum values are frequently written off as an interesting side note in the executive summary of Scrum, but are rarely understood or properly used. In my nearly 20 years of coaching teams and organizations, most failures

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Making agile development work for your company can seem daunting, but if you focus on the four keys of focus, quality, effectiveness, and continuous learning, you'll be well on your way to success. In this blog post, we'll explore what each of these keys means for your business and how you can implement them.

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