Agile Coaching at Workday: Cultivating High-Performing Teams

As an Agile Coach, my purpose is to help our amazing product development teams get the very best out of themselves, and as someone who understands what it takes to foster a high-performance environment, fun is a huge factor in Workday’s success-it’s one of our core values after all!

Before joining Workday a little over three years ago, I worked in consultancy for about seven years, doing everything from QA, to business analysis, to product management, and eventually Agile Coaching. Now I work within a pillar of Workday known as ‘Talent’, which consists of nearly 40 best-in class product development teams and their supporting leadership. The talent team looks after all our talent applications from learning to talent management and recruiting.

A Sprint Through a Day in the Life

As an Agile Coach on a small, dynamic team, my work days are anything but routine. Supporting teams across Europe and North America means my focus can shift rapidly, depending on the strategic initiatives we’re driving. One day, I might be embedded within a development team, coaching them on workflow optimisation, and the next, I’m facilitating leadership workshops aimed at cultivating new skills within our pillar and beyond. This blend of immersive coaching and strategic training keeps my role both challenging and rewarding.

I primarily utilise tools and frameworks that foster collaboration and streamline processes, ultimately helping teams become more effective. In Workday, we use both Scrum and Kanban frameworks, to help teams build their Agile maturity over time. Seeing how high-performing teams in Workday leverage these frameworks has been a huge learning for me.

I’ve witnessed remarkable results from teams that truly embrace the principles behind Agile frameworks! Their dedication to understanding the ‘why’ has empowered them to innovate and excel. Additionally, having readily available team performance data has been instrumental in guiding their experimentation with meaningful metrics.

Being an Engineering Workmate has given me a firsthand look at what it truly means to experiment and adapt your working methods — it’s been eye-opening. Plus, the collaboration tools are top-notch: Slack, Jira, Zoom… everything is optimised to help teams deliver value quickly.

When The Pressure’s On

We recently had a project related to a critical delivery for a customer in the US Government, one of those projects that very much had a fixed deadline and had fallen quite far off-track.

I ended up playing a key role in it, when I was asked to support the team for the last three months of the project by helping them refine their ways of working.

This was targeted to help them begin to deliver with both pace and consistency. Through hands-on coaching, as well as running a few short, time-boxed experiments, I managed to help them get things moving smoothly in just a couple of weeks. Then, it became a race to deliver.

Throughout this pressurised sprint to the finish, I helped them by steering them back toward best practices and strong discipline when the pressure came on. I also made their work highly visible, and encouraged them to frequently revisit the magic question of “What do we NOT have to build right now?”

Thankfully, due to the amazing desire of the team to succeed, and a very timely intervention from myself as an Agile Coach, we managed to deliver our promise on time to the US government, which they were extremely grateful for. Quality was never compromised, and as a result, the value delivered to the customer was at the highest level.

Experiment, Fail Fast, And Learn Quickly

My ultimate goal is to cultivate high-performance team environments where individuals thrive. Workday actively supports this by investing in continuous learning, encouraging a “Think like a scientist” mentality, and even embracing ‘fast failures’ for rapid learning and sharing.

I recall proposing a new approach for visualising product team delivery health using burn-up data. Instead of resistance, the area embraced it as an experiment, recognising its potential for improvement. This collaborative effort led to a remarkable increase in planned feature delivery, from 43% to 92% in just 18 months! While the teams were the true heroes, I received heartfelt recognition from senior leadership, making me feel genuinely valued and impactful.

Our Workmates? Our Superpower!

Workday recognises that its people are our superpower, and the support we get is excellent. From a professional standpoint, they’ve supported me in several ways. I have been able to complete additional training with the International Consortium for Agile, which was really important to me. I have also been able to carry out loads of personal training within Workday’s learning tool to gain additional skills and context to help me do my job better — like building my knowledge of how our system architecture operates.

Most important of all for me though, and something I’m really excited about, is starting my Level 9 certificate in “Building Successful Products” in partnership with Technological University Dublin. All of this has been facilitated by Workday, not just monetarily, but also critically by giving me the time and space away from my day job to complete it.

I think when you enjoy the work you do and spending time with the people you work with, you operate more effectively as teams and deliver results with a laser focus. Workday encourages us to get to know each other and we see each other as individuals and friends first, which makes working together so much more enjoyable. Even though my own team is geographically dispersed, we’ve had plenty of opportunities to share a drink in person, and this makes all the difference. As I said, fun is a big part of Workday’s culture and it’s clear it’s one of the absolute keys to its success.

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