Technical Coaching for IT Organizational Transformation

Technical Coaching for IT Organizational Transformation from LeanPub.

What skills do technical coaches need to be effective in supporting an organizational transformation program? How can they influence the choices and behaviors of client personnel? How does their work fit into the larger transformation effort? How can we stop repeating common anti-patterns in transforming organizations and get results?

The technical side of organizational transformation often receives insufficient attention, leaving organizations with great market insight, innovative ideas, ambitious plans, clear priorities, a streamlined structure, efficient processes…and no way to execute.

After countless attempted transformations, process adoptions, and framework implementations, it seems as if little progress has been made. The world continues to suffer from poorly-designed, badly-behaved, costly, and hard-to-maintain applications and systems.

The ongoing problem is due in part to management consultants and client leadership underestimating the importance (and the difficulty) of technical improvement to support business goals, in part to the tendency to approach change mechanically, without proper consideration of the humanity of those involved, in part to ineffective coaching methods at the team level, and in part to the global shortage of well-qualified technical coaches.

This book offers suggested remedies for common anti-patterns in organizational transformation programs, clarifies the range of skills a qualified technical coach must cultivate (going well beyond technical skills), and describes a practical way to make gradual, step-by-step progress with improvement guided by appropriate metrics.