Wikimedia Engineering/Agile Coaching Office

As the Foundation has grown in size, numerous teams have hit critical points where they need help in organizing and scheduling their resources in a predictable and sustainable manner. To remedy this situation, we propose the creation of an Agile Coaching Office (ACO) that focuses on process coaching for teams, individual mentorship for agile coaches, and keeping the organization productive and sustainable.

The ACO will be held responsible for the productivity and sustainability of engineering teams who have elected to leverage the ACO’s services. It will host regular trainings, provide ongoing coaching (in a variety of formats, including making coaches available to teams as scrummasters), and communicate externally about its practices. In the context of this proposal, 'agile coach' refers to a proposed new engineering position at the WMF. Agile coaches under the auspices of the ACO will be responsible for coordinating and leading whole team trainings, auxiliary team coaching, and being embedded with 1-2 teams (depending on team's maturity/coach's availability) in a scrummaster (or scrummaster-like) role. The ACO will be framework agnostic - that is, the ACO will not force teams to leverage a specific agile framework (like Scrum), but rather will facilitate teams to embrace an agile mindset and should they so desire, chose a pre-existing agile framework.

Initially, the ACO will be staffed by the department’s head and 1-2 agile coaches. Budget will be required for staffing, 1-3 in-house trainings per quarter (including travel, training supplies, food, etc.), and external trainings/certification for department staff (eg Scrummaster certification, etc).

This proposal is modeled off of the Wikimedia Foundation’s real-world experiences of what has worked and what has not, as well as from learned best practices of other successful organizations engaged in agile software development, such as ThoughtWorks and Spotify.

To date WMF teams have depended on two sources for process coaching:

First, we contracted with ThoughtWorks to bring in agile consultants for teams including Fundraising, E3, Mobile Web, and others. This had the advantage of not taking any WMF staff time for facilitation, bringing in external ideas, and bootstrapping some of our most successful teams. The downside of this approach was that the instruction felt very distant from day to day realities at the WMF. It lacked coverage of integrating remote employees, provided little to no perspective on community inclusion and management, seemed tinged with a corporate perspective, and generally felt pushed onto participating teams.

Reacting to this, both Tomasz Finc and Arthur Richards started conducting internal trainings for teams like Core Features, Mobile Apps, and others alongside providing coaching for the Language team. This had the advantage of providing a WMF-centric perspective of agile development, keeping and evolving knowledge in-house, engendering a greater degree of trust amongst the teams, and building a stronger sense of collaboration and unity, making the WMF better as whole. The downside of this approach was that Tomasz and Arthur had to take significant hits in their schedules. The process has been reactive rather than proactive and offers little to no time for any followup since both Tomasz and Arthur have their regular individual team responsibilities.

Given the growing popularity of embracing agile development philosophies and the needs of existing agile teams at the WMF, these approaches for process coaching have become inadequate and are not easy to scale. In addition, existing scrummasters/scrummaster-like people have been seeking greater institutional support for their roles. At Wikimania 2013, they opted to create a mailing list and conduct regular meetups to provide one another with the support they have sought. However, due to the ad-hoc nature of this group and the informality of the meetups, regular meetup attendance has waned while demand for greater internal support remains high. While this group has attempted to support one another, structured institutional support is necessary to better fulfill their needs. The ACO will rectify these inadequacies while also providing much needed support and a new career path for process leaders at the WMF.

To better ensure success of this group while mitigating some of the risks, growth of the ACO will happen gradually. During the first two quarters of its existence, the ACO will be staffed with 1-2 coaches who would be embedded in 1-2 engineering teams each (depending on team and coach maturity), fulfilling the agile coach role (à la Arthur Richards as scrummaster for the Mobile Web team). Pending the success of this approach, the ACO would house all agile coaches in the future, providing engineering teams with resources to fulfill roles such as 'scrummaster', as the design and product departments house and make available designers and product managers. During the third and fourth quarters of its existence, the ACO could hire 1-2 additional coaches while working with existing engineering teams to shift resourcing around occupancy of scrummaster or other process-coaching roles. The ACO would then be in a solid position to further scale to meet WMF engineering needs.

Fueled by our own experiences and the influence of other successful agile organizations, the ACO will provide crucial resources and services to WMF engineering to facilitate more sustainable productivity while also strengthening our internal bonds of collaboration and community. We look forward to engaging with the engineering community in discussing this proposal.