Cherie Silas, MCC, Author at Tandem Coaching

ICF Core Competencies: Acknowledging Client Responsibility

ICF recently released and updated competency model that will go into effect for credential applications in early 2021.What does this change mean for coaches? It means that it’s time to step up our game and start focusing on what these indicators mean to who we are as coaches. The competency markers aren’t meant to be a checklist to make sure you go through every coaching session. They are intended to help you have a way to look at how your coaching mindset is being outwardly manifested. If these things aren’t showing, don’t create a list of questions to check off the markers. Instead, take a look inside and see what needs to change about who you are as a coach in order to reflect these things in your everyday life. Being a coach goes way beyond what you do inside a coaching session. It’s who you are and what you have become. It’s how you look at people and how you interact with the world that surrounds you.

NLP Techniques: It's about the Influence

NLP Techniques: It is About the Influence

While NLP presuppositions are quite fascinating in their clarity and precision on their own, try to beat “The map is not the territory,” the true power comes from the understanding of how intertwined and interdependent they are.

ICF Core Competencies: Ethical Coaching Practices

What Are the Values?

Ask any Agile practitioner these days what Agile values are and he, most likely, will recite you some lines from the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Ask him the final line of the said Manifesto and the result might be quite different, but I digress right in the first paragraph. Ask a Scrum practitioner and he’ll give you 3-4, maybe 5, if he’s real good, values Scrum holds dear. Next ask a different question, “What ARE the values? What are we talking about here?” And you’ll be lucky if you hear a half-baked off-the-cuff answer. Sometimes it’s just like, “well, values are values, those are what’s valuable.” Duh… A quite interesting viewpoint and a crisp definition comes from Mark Manson’s “Subtle Art of not Giving a F*ck”.

Scrum Has a Messaging Problem

I call on the Scrum and the larger Agile community to correct our messaging while we walk the continual path of tackling hard problems. Be less dogmatic. Think Agile. Be more like water and Scrum On!

Coaching Agreement – STORMMES Model

A great way to get a start with a new client or new coaching objective is to create a coaching agreement. STORMMES is a sample model you can use to gain greater clarity on the client’s goal and how you will work together for success.

Agile Metrics - What Happens in Vegas, Monte Carlo

Agile Metrics: What Happens in Vegas stays…

In the previous 3 articles I reviewed some of the most important Agile metrics that Dan Vacanti’s ActionableAgile software helps you to get with ease. Those were Cycle Time with the help of the Cycle Time Scatterplot, and a multitude of metrics, provided by the Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD). In the latest article we looked at Work Item Age and its importance with the help of Aging Work in Progress Diagram.Looking at the Cycle Time Scatterplot we discussed the significance of percentiles and how they can be used to predict the cycle time and avoid the trap of a single-number, point-in-time answer. This is cool, you’d say, but not merely enough, and I would agree. We need better techniques to predict possible timeframes for a completion of a set of work items. And, sometimes, we need to know how many right-sized work items can be completed within a given time frame.Let’s face it, we live in a real world, where “When Will It Be Done question” is as omnipresent as ever. We cannot bury our heads into the sands of the #NoEstimates beach and hope the questions will go away. Let’s learn better ways to answer those questions.

Agile Metrics and Aging Work in Progress

Getting to 85 – Agile Metrics with ActionableAgile Part 3

Discover the keys to optimizing workflow with the Aging Work in Progress chart. Learn how to interpret team productivity and efficiency insights for better outcomes.

Weekly Scrum Interview Question – What is the Sprint Length?

This question "What is the duration of a Sprint" is seemingly simple, but depending on the interviewing situation, company, interviewer, and their familiarity with Scrum you might need to give them more or less details and answer additional questions your answer might bring up.

Mastering Agile Metrics - from Cycle Time to CFD

Getting to 85 – Agile Metrics with ActionableAgile Part 2

In the first part of Getting to 85 – Agile Metrics with ActionableAgile we looked at the Cycle Time Scatterplot as generated by ActionableAgile software. That piece also discussed some ideas the scatter plot could bring about and conversations that potentially might occur.Let’s take a look at another important chart and set of metrics the ActionableAgile can produce based on sample or custom loaded data – Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD).

Cherie Silas, MCC