Agile coaching in British Telecom: making strawberry jam

When BT began to look at how you transform an organization of approximately 14,000 people to become an agile organisation a key challenge faced was how to support this size of a transformation from a coaching perspective i.e. how do you leverage a relatively small finite coaching resource so that it can be effective. BT drew inspiration from the "Law of Strawberry Jam" and intentionally set out to build internal agile coaching capability. Based on positive experience with "pair coaching" an "apprentice coaching" model was chosen as an effective approach for building this internal coaching capability. This provided a rich and experience based learning environment while also allowing the group to be effective as it engaged with the BT Exact organisation.