2. Guidelines
A) Assess your skills
Fill your radars (skills, traits, and undesired traits) using the levels
descriptions you find here.
B) Plan your improvement
Identify a competence you really whish to improve and explore it.
Have a mentoring conversation with a more experienced Agile
Delivery Manager.
C) Track your progress
Collect feedback to measure your progress. Update periodically
your radars, and have a follow-up mentoring conversation.
3. Agile Delivery Manager Self-Assessment
Guidelines for self-assessing your skills level
1) The levels you are going to identify for each one of your skills are personal and relative to you.
Using radars to compare a skill level between two coaches makes no sense: it’s like comparing
velocity between two teams. Radars are placeholders for a conversation, exactly like user stories,
between you and a mentor.
2) When you assess your level of a skill, remember the purpose is to identify and visualise
opportunities for improvement and to track your progress over time. Rating yourself too high or too
low would defeat the purpose.
3) Tip: you can print or draw the radars on paper, or you can download the radars’ deck and edit
each radar’s chart adding your data and saving the deck.
A) Assess your skills
B) Plan your improvement
C) Track your progress
4. Agile Delivery Manager Levels
Level 0: Tourist
Never heard about that!
Level 1: Just starting
Rule based behaviour, strongly limited and inflexible
Level 2: Improving
Incorporates aspects of the situation and context
Level 3: Capable
Act consciously taking into account long term goals and plans
Level 4: Expert
Sees the situation as a whole and acts from personal conviction, invents and
introduces small scale innovations, personal improvement is self-sustaining
Level 5: Globetrotter
Has an intuitive understanding of the situation and zooms in on the central aspects,
has an easy and creative way of doing things, invents and introduces large scale
innovations to deal with truly unique situations.
5. Agile Delivery Manager Self-Assessment
Lean-Agile
Mastery
Knowledge and understanding of Agile, Lean, Scrum, as well as other frameworks such as Kanban, ScrumBan,
eXtreme Programming, Scrum/XP hybrid, Lean Startup, and other lean and agile hybrid approaches.
Enacts in everyday work Lean/Agile mindset, values and principles, and masters various Lean and Agile
practices. Knows the whats and the whys.
Having experienced Agile and Lean in various teams, organizations, and industries. Has a direct experience of
what good looks like in Lean and Agile.
Being a reliable, trustworthy source of experience, wisdom, and recommendations. Being someone, like a
mountain guide, you can entrust when you need it most with your journey toward lean and agile excellence.
Training &
Mentoring
Ability to effectively train team members on Lean and Agile mindset and values and principles, on Lean and Agile
ways of working and related practices, on deep collaboration and co-creation, on problem and solution co-
evolution, on non violent communication (or equivalent techniques), on giving and receiving effective feedback.
Ability to upskill business stakeholders, managers, and team members on lean and agile ways of working.
Ability to offer the right knowledge at the right time in the right way, so that individuals, teams, and
organisations learn what they need to support their goals.
Facilitation
Ability and the experience in facilitating agile recurring meetings and ceremonies, including bigger and more
complex workshops such as Inception.
It’s the ability to facilitate discussions, to facilitate common understanding, to manage conflict, to facilitate
consensus making and collective sense making, to help collective decision making.
It includes the ability to practice active listening with curiosity, openness, and without being judgmental. It consists
in perceiving what has been told, emotions, body language, posture, tones, and the surrounding context and
environment.
6. Agile Delivery Manager Self-Assessment
Product delivery
management
It’s the knowledge, understanding, and experience in agile release management that includes the ability to
manage backlog priorities and estimates, to create agile roadmaps, to define delivery success criteria, to express
delivery constraints using the agile triangle, to identify risks and unknowns and prioritise accordingly.
It’s the knowledge and experience of agile management principles such us those for example described in Radical
Management and Management 3.0. It includes the ability to adopt different management approaches that fits the
specific challenge at hand, as described for example in the Cynefin framework.
It’s also the ability to track, visualize and report on the progress of the delivery (scope, schedule, quality,
financials, team health) at iteration, release and programme level. It may include hiring, stakeholder relationships
management and communication.
It includes the knowledge of different techniques and practices to be a servant leader to self-organising teams.
Dependencies
management
It is the ability to help team to identify, visualise, weight, and manage dependencies. It includes both technical,
business and people related dependencies. It includes both things that team is depending on and things others
are depending from the team.
It’s also the ability to manage stakeholders, inform them on the status of the dependencies and get updates on
dependencies from supplier teams, and handle the consequences.
It includes the ability to organise dependent work in ways that suits the circumstances (e.g with queues, staggered
sprints, or syncronised sprints).
Enterprise agility
Knowledge and understanding of traditional and modern organisational culture, organisational development,
ogranisations.
Understanding of traditional and modern organisations structure (e.g. hierarchical organisations, networked
organisations, flat organisations), functions (e.g. PMO, Marketing), and governance processes.
Having direct experience of different organizational cultures and their relation with Scrum and lean/agile. Having
direct experience of paradigms shift related to lean/agile mindset, and of agility at business and organisation level.
Understands and applies lean/agile theory for organisations, including for example systems dynamic, and complex
adaptive systems.
7. Personal Traits Levels
Level 0:
The trait is absent or the opposite trait is present
Level 1:
The trait is present in you as much as in most of the people around you
Level 2:
Some acquaintances, friends or co-workers would mention the trait when asked about your
traits. You can mention some events and behaviours where you exhibited the trait.
Level 3:
You consistently exhibit the trait over time and consistently whenever it’s appropriate. You
can mention several events and behaviours where you exhibited the trait. The opposite trait
is not part of your coping mechanism even under stress.
Level 4:
Almost everyone recognises it as one of your key strong traits.
Level 5:
You are a role model for the trait.
9. Personal Traits Self-Assessment
Initiative
The ability and tendency to assess and initiate things independently. The ability to act first or take charge on one's
own without first being requested to do so or before others do. The ability and tendency to initiate: to start an
action, including coming up with a proposal. The readiness to embark on a new venture. Having a fresh approach
to something; a new way of dealing with a problem.
Flexibility
The willingness to change or compromise. The quality of bending easily without breaking.
The extent to which a person can cope with changes in circumstances and think about problems and tasks in
novel, creative ways. Even in case of stressors or unexpected events.
Optimism
Hopefulness and confidence about the future or the success of something.
A disposition or tendency to look on the more favoruable side of events or conditions and to expect the most
favourable outcome.
10. Personal Traits Self-Assessment
Resilience
The ability to properly adapt to stress and adversity.
The ability to recover from or adjust to misfortune, damage, change or a destabilizing perturbation in the
environment. The ability to become strong, healthy, or successful again after something bad happens.
Determination
The firmness of purpose.
The quality that makes someone continue trying to do or achieve something that is difficult.
Having the positive emotion that involves persevering towards a difficult goal in spite of obstacles.
Detachment
The state in which a person overcomes his or her attachment to desire for things, people or concepts of the world
and thus attains a heightened perspective.
The ability to manage emotional boundaries, to find the proper level of emotional engagement, in order to allow
the space needed to rationally choose, maintain integrity and avoid undesired impact by or upon others.
The ability to maintain neutrality, serve the coachee’s agenda, reduce coachee dependence, not colluding with the
coachee’s desire to accommodate their dysfunctions or limitations without attachment or judgment.
11. Personal Traits Self-Assessment
Discernment
The ability to obtain sharp perceptions and to judge well.
The ability to see and understand people, situations and things clearly and intelligently.
The quality of being able to grasp and comprehend what is obscure such as hidden context, implicit assumptions,
intangible things, mutable and uncertain circumstances.
Supportive
Providing encouragement, emotional help and support. Being informative. Being sympathetic. Having and
showing concern. Appreciating present strengths, successes, and potentials. Recognizing and searching the best
in people and helping them to envision what they can achieve.
13. Personal undesired traits
Directive
Preference to direct others, to assign tasks and supervise people and resources.
Propensity to define and enforce standards, guidelines and rules.
Predilection to positions of authority in a top-down hierarchy.
Defensive
Being concerned with guarding against threat of criticism.
Perceiving openness, transparency, fluid roles and responsibilities, honest feedback as threats.
Being anxious and avoiding to exit the comfort zone, to express opinions or take positions in public.
The feeling that one has to justify his/her behaviour and act as though questions are attacks on him/her.
Judgmental
Having or displaying an overly critical point of view.
The conviction that when there are 2 different opinions or points of view, one must right and the other must be
wrong; and that most problems admit one optimal solution.
The tendency to think that a truth, a value or a best practice does not admit exceptions and does not depend on
contexts, circumstances or personal preferences.
Low threshold to
frustration
Getting easily stressed.
Getting irritated or angry when facing small frustrations that would just annoy other people.
Reacting disproportionally to adversities.
Favouring immediate pleasure or avoidance of pain over avoiding long-term stress and defeatism.
14. LUCA MINUDEL - LEAN-AGILE COACH & TRAINER
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