053: Bob Costello: Coaching Agile Teams: From Being a Group to Becoming an Agile Team

Join Dr. Krister Lowe and today’s featured guest and leading organizational coach Bob Costello—a Senior Agile Coach with the Eliassen Group—for this week’s episode of The Team Coaching Zone Podcast! Bob offers over 20 years experience in the software industry and has held leadership positions in both software startups and large organizations. He has a background in software development, product management, and engineering. For the last 8 years Bob has been helping organizations, both at the team and leadership levels, to make the transition to agile. Bob excels at helping organizations achieve both their business and organizational goals of an agile change program, with leadership coaching, team coaching and change management. He has a rich background of experience with IBM Design Studio, BlueCollar Objects, Akkolade Consulting, Valtech, ACS, CGI-AMS, BEA Systems, Deloitte, Next Software and more. In this episode Bob shares his journey over the last 20 years rising up through the ranks in the software development industry to becoming an agile leadership and team coach. Themes covered in the podcast include: working at NEXT Software with Steve Jobs; The Agile Manifesto; the changing operating context that catalyzed the agile movement; agile principles and practices; coaching agile mindsets vs. process; “being” vs. “doing” agile; using situational leadership for coaching agile leaders and teams; shared leadership in agile teams; the 4 SCRUM ceremonies; managing your role as an agile team coach; team maturity and development; agile teams as learning teams and more. Bob also shares some great stories coaching agile teams as well as recommendations on books and team coach training programs that focus on agile. All team coaches including both generalist practitioners as well as specialists in coaching agile teams will find Bob’s insights and lessons learned well worth the listen. This is an episode that you will surely not want to miss!