What is your perspective regarding internal technical coaches vs external technical coaches? For example, let's say an external technical coach is engaged for 6 months, what happens after that...
Thanks a lot for your question! Imo, I have seen internal coaches (never technical) that came to teams only to do a couple of workshops without getting to know the team at all. This is in my opinion the least effective way to do coaching, as one of the building blocks of effective coaching is trust. In software engineering especially, as a technical coach, you have to demonstrate that you can bring something unique to the table because the engineers are typically already quite senior (unless you are coaching a team of more recent industry joiners, which can be tremendously valuable to that team to bring them to senior level in a shorter period of time instead of having them figure out every mistake themselves). Only when you are able to gain the trust of the team can you do effective coaching. So imo, a 6 months deeply embedded coach in the team can bring much more value than an internal coach that visits once every other week for a workshop over a period of a couple of years. I would argue that 6 months is actually quite a sweet spot for technically coaching a team. After that, a coach should have enabled the team to figure out more themselves. This of course highly depends on the team so it needs to be evaluated first deeply if it makes sense to coach a team. A team that is unwilling to implement certain ideas the coach brings to the table according to their needs gain nothing from coaching. I personally would probably not coach longer than 6 months as an embedded coach. If you couldn't enable a team to work in a more agile way than before, it probably wasn't the best match. And you can still visit the team from time to time afterwards to bring in new inputs and see how it is going. However, in general I think the answer of course is "it depends". The most important part is that the team and the coach match on an understanding basis. If there are people who actively work against the coaches input, not 6 nor 12 nor any number of months bring value to the team, even though such a situation is also an insight as it points towards the culprits that made a coach necessary in the first place typically...
What is your perspective regarding internal technical coaches vs external technical coaches? For example, let's say an external technical coach is engaged for 6 months, what happens after that...
Thanks a lot for your question! Imo, I have seen internal coaches (never technical) that came to teams only to do a couple of workshops without getting to know the team at all. This is in my opinion the least effective way to do coaching, as one of the building blocks of effective coaching is trust. In software engineering especially, as a technical coach, you have to demonstrate that you can bring something unique to the table because the engineers are typically already quite senior (unless you are coaching a team of more recent industry joiners, which can be tremendously valuable to that team to bring them to senior level in a shorter period of time instead of having them figure out every mistake themselves). Only when you are able to gain the trust of the team can you do effective coaching. So imo, a 6 months deeply embedded coach in the team can bring much more value than an internal coach that visits once every other week for a workshop over a period of a couple of years. I would argue that 6 months is actually quite a sweet spot for technically coaching a team. After that, a coach should have enabled the team to figure out more themselves. This of course highly depends on the team so it needs to be evaluated first deeply if it makes sense to coach a team. A team that is unwilling to implement certain ideas the coach brings to the table according to their needs gain nothing from coaching. I personally would probably not coach longer than 6 months as an embedded coach. If you couldn't enable a team to work in a more agile way than before, it probably wasn't the best match. And you can still visit the team from time to time afterwards to bring in new inputs and see how it is going. However, in general I think the answer of course is "it depends". The most important part is that the team and the coach match on an understanding basis. If there are people who actively work against the coaches input, not 6 nor 12 nor any number of months bring value to the team, even though such a situation is also an insight as it points towards the culprits that made a coach necessary in the first place typically...