COACHING
We help you create a Way of Working based on Agile and Lean principles and practices. Our objective is to support a self-sustaining process that continues to evolve and improve across your organisation.
Our approach is informed by decades of experience working alongside teams in any sectors: our effectiveness comes from building rapport with your people. This often extends into multi-year relationships with our clients.
‘RippleRock don’t feel like a consultancy you feel like a member of the team‘ is a comment we have heard from more than one client.
Self-sustainable ways of working can only evolve within your context. We aim to understand your situation, and then challenge and support you to: identify areas for improvement, experiment with new ideas, rapidly learn from the outcomes, and alter the strategies based on the findings of these fast feedback loops.
Whilst the process is relatively simple, the skills and behaviours can be complex.
Our focus revolves around people, helping them gain insight and confidence. We find that leadership of the change is key: engaging those involved in the change, helping them feel more psychologically safe creates an environment in which they can learn more quickly.
We coach people whilst also highlighting and addressing some of the systemic challenges within their organisations, including team structures, psychological safety, relationships with ‘the business’, overburdening and ineffective prioritising.
Our aim is to provide a sustainable way of working. This requires identifying people within your organisation who will own and continue to evolve the process. We will work with them to create a vibrant group of mutually supportive practitioners.
Leadership, at all levels, is a key enabler of the lasting success of improvements. See section on Leadership.
Feedback loops are key to supporting innovation and continuous improvement. Metrics and data provide us with a powerful way to make the invisible visible. We use data to inform our coaching as it enables us to identify and explore patterns and challenges.
Metrics are used to raise awareness and pique the curiosity of teams and stakeholders. They reduce risk by enabling earlier interventions, which crucially increases the number of options we have to affect the outcome.
Importantly, psychological safety can be enhanced by using metrics for good. Metrics can be toxic when used incorrectly. Our initial challenge is often to have teams trust that the metrics will not be used to beat them up.
We show teams how to use insights to pose open questions about the wider structure – such as bottlenecks within the existing system.
We teach how to use metrics – such as forecasting techniques and the teams’ actual throughput rates – to continually align expectations of stakeholders.
Many of our clients initially define agile too narrowly. To realise the full potential of Agile your organisation will need to involve a broader group of stakeholders.
When working with development teams we also ensure that that we coach the teams and stakeholders who can impact the outcomes, e.g. HR, design, and architecture.
Increasingly we are working with non-technical teams to increase their effectiveness based on Agile principles and practices. One of our skills is to remove the jargon and take it back to the principles.
Bringing people together we facilitate discussions to help them see and engage with the bigger picture. Some of these conversations can be tricky – our neutrality and external perspective help to improve the effectiveness of the sessions and working relationships.
We have worked with these teams in our clients:
- Online retail: product, trading teams, merchandising, HR
- Financial re-insurance: actuarial, marketing and finance
- Charities: fundraising, policy, and external affairs
- Pharmaceutical: marketing, product, country sales
- Loyalty Programmes: commercial, partnerships, data, HR
