What are some big red flags when hiring an agile consultant?

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What are some big red flags when hiring an agile consultant?

For me there are a few red flags to look out for.

  1. Not engaging in the agile community.

  2. A lack of knowledge around the core concepts.

  3. A consultancy that focuses on output and revenue rather than quality and expertise.

These are the reasons I think these are red flags and should act as prompts for you to investigate a bit deeper before making a call on whether to hire them or not.

Not engaging in the agile community

You want to work with people who are a part of a group, a community, a cause, or an effort where people share their ideas, concepts, and experiences.

The reason this matter is because you don’t want people who operate in echo chambers. Places where their ideas are never challenged and where they aren’t exposed to different lines of reasoning or different case studies and experiences.

You want them to be an active member of a professional melting pot where they learn from others, grow through the exposure to other lines of reasoning, and develop their critical analysis capabilities by challenging others or asking for coaching and mentoring from senior members of the community.

In my experience, there are few things better than having professionals in your community challenge your argument and allow you to develop a deeper understanding of why you think what you do, how that can improve, and in some cases, why that line of reasoning is valid.

If the only tool you have in your toolbox is a hammer, you tend to look at every problem as a nail.

That is what we are actively trying to avoid. Someone who is trapped in the past and believes that a specific best practice exists for every application and context. We live in a complex world and as such, we need to develop practices that fit with the environment we serve rather than try to run out the same old experiment, time and again, regardless of whether it is the right approach or not.

A lack of understanding or knowledge of the core concepts.

In our industry, we sometimes have people who have practiced as a scrum master for a couple of years deciding to present themselves as an agile coach or agile consultant without the necessary skills development and appropriate knowledge to do so.

You want people who can talk knowledgeably about the core concepts of Agile. Things like:

  • Empiricism or Empirical Process Control

  • Lean

  • Lean UX Product Development

And so forth.

They need to be able to articulate the core concepts of agile, in the context of the person they are serving, in a way that allows people to grasp the fundamentals and embrace the path to agility.

If they don’t have this core knowledge, they lack credibility. If they don’t know how Agile came to be and what the primary drivers of progress have been, they don’t have enough knowledge or expertise to help you in your unique, complex situation.

You want someone who learns from the community but also actively studies literature from thought leaders in the history, has attended courses and certification programmes that validate their knowledge of agile and why the theory that underpins agile is proven and reliable.

You want someone that has worked in complex environments, preferably as both a practitioner and a coach, and has a proven track record of helping teams achieve their goals and objectives, regardless of the industry or constraints that team work within.

You often find that the people who simply regurgitate what the scrum guide  says, or are sticklers for following agile dogma, are the people you least want to be working with. That isn’t agility, that is the antithesis of agility.

You want someone who is attempting to help you achieve the outcomes you want and need, through whatever best works for the team. Sure the scrum guide says X, but it does so with the purpose of trying to achieve Y. If you have a better way of doing that, great, let’s explore that option and test whether our hypothesis is valid or not.

A consultancy that focuses on output rather than quality and expertise.

A great agile consultancy is one that focuses on recruiting the top talent in the industry. People who are incredibly knowledgeable, deeply experienced, and have a proven track record of delivering great outcomes for clients.

A red flag is a consultancy that is focused on volume.

They don’t acquire the best talent nor do they nurture that talent to become even better at their job. They focus instead on ensuring that they have the volume of workers to address the volume of work they have contracted.

The latter consultancy gets into a vicious cycle because as they contract more work, they need more people to perform the work, and so they aren’t hiring experts, they are hiring who is available.

This pattern repeats with each cycle and each time they hire, the barrier to entry lowers and the calibre of consultant that you are hiring drops with the volume dependency. Because the consultancy now has so many consultants, they need to be even more aggressive in acquiring clients to feed those overheads and the spiral continues downward until something breaks.

A great agile consultancy limits their work in progress and is highly selective about the clients they bring onboard because their focus is on delivering great work, achieving objectives and goals for clients, and developing a strong reputation for competence and capability development.

So, for me, these would be the 3 red flags to watch out for when hiring an agile consultant.

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So what a question was: what are the red flags to look for when hiring an agile consultant? I think the biggest red flags for me are not engaging in the community, not being part of some group or community or effort where they’re sharing their ideas with others, having ideas of others shared with them, and working in that kind of melting pot. There’s nothing better than being part of an agile community, which I’m part of a few, and seeing something and you immediately get piled on for saying something so ridiculous that it’s not really people aren’t deliberately piling on you, right? Because they’re agile, it’s just, you know, you send them a message and all of them are writing a response at the same time because you’ve poked at something that maybe wasn’t the best thing to pull at.

And that gives you, I don’t know what the right word is, is it humility? For you’re not always going to say the right thing, you’re not always going to be able to do the right thing, you’re going to say stupid stuff. And you have to be able to take being called on saying stupid stuff. Sometimes it’s okay to say stupid stuff because if you don’t say what you’re thinking, if you don’t feel safe enough to say what you’re thinking, how would you possibly be able to learn that there might be a different way of thinking?

I think that’s one of the key things because there are so many consultants who are not part of any agile community. They just have that echo chamber of their organisation or their consultancy, and there’s not anything more information coming in from outside. Having discourse, right? Being able to articulate the core concepts in agile. So I’m thinking empiricism, I’m thinking lean. You need to be able to articulate them in a way that they are able to be understood by the other person within the context of that other person rather than just regurgitating something from the scrum guide that says, “Well, XYZ,” right?

You need to be able to say, “Well, you know, the scrum guide says this because it’s trying to achieve this idea. If you can achieve this idea in a different way inside of your organisation, then maybe that’s okay.” Being able to articulate those things, I think that’s key. So that’s just a fundamental lack of knowledge, right? That’s really it. I think it’s actually true in all consultancies, but I’m going to be very specific here because otherwise I’m going to piss off everybody, right?

There’s a difference between a boutique consultancy which specialises in a particular topic, hires people who are experts, known experts in that particular topic, and encourages them to become better experts in that particular topic, and our “butts in seats” contracting consultancy who are really only interested in how much money they can make out of the customer. They get into this vicious cycle, right? This is the thing to watch out for in consultancies as you get into this vicious cycle of, in order to stay afloat, we need to win more business, right?

We’re the consultants who say we need to win more business because we’ve got people that are in the company that need the work. Then you have experts and you have all of these high ideals with the customer, so lots of customers buy your stuff, and suddenly you don’t have enough people on the bench to service the gigs that are coming in, right? The gigs in your pipeline. So then you have to go find people who can do those gigs, but we can’t wait for those people; we need them now.

So we’re taking the people that are available, not the people that are right for that gig. They’re not bringing in people because of their knowledge and skills; they’re bringing in people because of their availability. And then you get into that vicious cycle of, now we’ve got more people, and they roll off a gig onto the bench, and we need to sell more to get more stuff rather than… I mean, it’s even worse for an agile consultancy not to do this, but having a lean outlook, right? You don’t take on more work than you can handle. You limit your work in process so that you’re playing the long game, not the short game of revenue extraction, but the long game of value creation and building relationships with your customers and not pissing them off.

So for me, those are the two big pieces: the actual individuals and the knowledge and capability that they have to understand agile, articulate it, explain it, and work with it, and work with other people in the agile space, and that bigger consultancy model of the… I call it the death spiral, right? Because there’s no way out of that if all you’re focused on is, “I need bots in revenue extraction mode.” Then you’re not going to serve your customers, right? For me, that’s the two big things.

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