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, and communicate externally about its practices.

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 coaches 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.

In addition, existing agile coaches 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’ve 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.

Along with providing whole-team trainings and coaching, we envision the ACO as an incubator for new agile coaches while providing structured support for existing coaches. Initially, the ACO would 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 could house all agile coaches in the future, as the design department houses all designers or product houses product managers. In addition to providing structured support, the ACO will also provide a new career path for process leaders at the Wikimedia Foundation.

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.