Why is MYOB — Australia’s most innovative large company — hiring Agile Coaches?

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EDIT — This post is over 3 years old, and I no longer work for MYOB (see below), so please do not contact Samantha. Also, MYOB made all of their Agile Coaches redundant just before Christmas of 2018.

(first published on January 12th 2016, migrated from my LinkedIn articles)

Happy New Year to everyone. I hope you all had a restful and fun festive period, and are feeling rejuvenated for a fantastic 2016.

If 2015 were not exciting enough here at MYOB, we’re continuing to ride the wave long into 2016. We are looking for passionate, talented folks to join us on this wave. Click here to see what opportunities await you if you’re looking for a fresh start that will turn into a long and rewarding career at one of the top 12 Coolest Tech Companies in Australia and Australia’s most innovative large company (BRW 2015 Most Innovative Companies awards).

In order to be innovative as a large accounting software company, it is extremely important to set ourselves apart from the rest, both in terms of our offerings to the market and our approach to creating those offerings.

In short, we must continuously innovate with our approach to building software in order to be able to innovate with the software itself.

To that end, we are proud to be pioneering in Australia by building a team of full-time, permanent Agile Coaches across Melbourne (Richmond, as of March), Sydney and Auckland.

At MYOB we recognise the importance of never resting on our laurels; continuously inspecting and adapting our products and processes. This is easy to say, but extremely difficult to make happen. We all get bogged down in the day-to-day of delivering the things we’ve been asked to deliver, juggling priorities along the way in an attempt to meet our KPI’s. While this is all going on, we also have our own personal ambitions; we want to develop our skills, grow in experience and influence, take on greater responsibilities and contribute more broadly across our organisation.

In short, most people recognise the need for continuous improvement, but don’t feel they have time for it!

The majority of companies who hire Agile Coaches embed them in development teams through roles such as Scrum Master or Iteration Manager. Having team coaches is extremely valuable. We have them ourselves in the shape of Delivery Leads. But what this approach alone doesn’t do is address the bigger picture. In a multi-team, multi-product environment — where teams rely on other teams to deliver something of value to customers — what are the things that prevent the entire organisation being more adaptive, proactive, innovative and quicker to market?

By building a team of Agile Coaches who work across our nearly 400-strong Engineering and Experience team and beyond, we will have people with dedicated capacity to help the company improve our product development endeavours to ensure we remain innovative, evolutionary and competitive.

Besides helping individuals and teams, our Agile Coaches will help teams work more effectively with other teams, departments and stakeholders. Help folks identify and reduce dependencies that slow us down in achieving the organisation’s goals. Help non-software teams across the business understand and adapt to the more collaborative and rapid fire world of Agile Software Development. Help raise awareness and remove impediments to organisational success.

In short, our Agile Coaches will work with managers and leaders across the company to foster an environment which allows us to achieve our goals and be as good as we can be.

Companies that hire coaches at the organisational change level tend to opt for consulting companies and independent consultants. Consultants, particularly consultant Agile Coaches, are often looked upon with scepticism because, it is argued, there are few implications if success is not achieved. Having operated as a consultant myself for many years, I do not share this view. I am happy to say that I work for a company in MYOB which recognises the value and efficacy of bringing in consultants to complement our teams as required.

However, I do feel that having permanent, full-time Agile Coaches as a key part of the organisation’s ambitions is the right path for us. Making the agents of change part of the organisational heartbeat means they have skin in the game. They support the organisation on an ongoing basis to achieve its improvement goals. They need their colleagues to achieve success. Their colleagues need them to achieve success.

At MYOB we recognise that you cannot simply tell people to “improve”, “innovate” or “become more efficient”. We need to take a helicopter view of how we can improve the entire ship (systems thinking), and then encourage an experimental approach to navigate through the complexity toward our vision of the kind of organisation we want to be. We can’t rely solely on consultants to help us do that — they will only be around temporarily.

We all need to support each other in that journey as a united company — as one team.

If you think you would like to be a part of something very special in 2016, please contact Samantha Wyatt, and let us know why.

Thanks for reading! If you are looking for help with your software or product delivery, I provide agile coaching, public training (both theory and practical) up to executive management level, and more. As well as public events, I can also run training internally in your organisation for a massively reduced cost, so please ✍ get in touch.