An Agile/Scrum coach

I'm pleased to say that upon returning from my vacation last week, I found out we'd made the decisions to get a Scrum coach into the company to help us with our transition to Agile. Sadly, getting one in should have happened before we made the transition, but I get the feeling that management though that our two days of training was going to be adequate. It's become painfully clear that we're not really "there" with what we need to be doing to making this a success - too many people weren't trained up in what they needed to do before we started doing it, and even though we've been (desperately) sharing with each other to improve our practice as quickly as possible, things are going wrong and we don't really have the skills to improve what we're doing on our own. It's not quite Lord of the Flies but there is far too much anarchy and uncertainty, and to me it seems obvious some train wrecks are on the way. (Hopefully these won't involve too many pointy sticks and tribal rituals but there's no telling right now.)

Of the two interviews I took part in, I was most impressed by the second, a youngish woman I'll call L. While both candidates understood the need for flexibility across a variety of areas, L seemed to have a clear vision of exactly what she'd do to help us get up to speed as fast as possible, including running classes across a variety of work functions and doing personal coaching (and attending meetings such as sprint planning sessions and retrospectives).. I also really liked her answer to my question about what business owners should do in preparation for a sprint - a real sticking point for me as because of the way we were trained, people are convinced you are supposed to do NO work for a sprint before a sprint starts, except for the situation when you have a sprint zero. There is work to do before a sprint starts, but the business owners were not coached in what they needed to provide prior to their sprint plannign session, and we're struggling because of this. Anyway, in addition to the every-going sprint backlog maintenance, she said we need to be

1) getting the user stories to the right size (no point in having them all be at the half a year size - I think by "right" she means so they can be broken down into work items by the team and be close to one sprint size though perhaps only the first is true)

2) doing work with the product owners (not sure exactly what kind, probably in terms of defining the user stories and rechecking the prioritization of the backlog)

3) making sure the acceptance criteria for the user stories is testable and getting the product owner to agree to the define acceptance criteria.



I'm sure there's actually a lot more work that ought to be done in sprint perparation, but I've had very little experience in this area - anyone want to add to the list?