A capability model for Agile / Lean consulting

Let's say that you started out on an Agile development team.  You were repeatedly successful and eventually people started asking you to help, not to deliver a project, but rather to help setup more Agile teams.  Let's say you were repeatedly successful in setting up those teams and eventually people started asking you to help, not to setup Agile teams, but to make their entire organisation Agile, whatever that might mean.

Here's my view of what you need to know, and get good at, to be effective at the Agile / Lean consulting game:

As a foundation, you need to have basic consulting skills and more importantly the right consulting mindset.  See The Secrets of Consulting, Flawless Consulting, etc.

Next are several core capabilities:

• Problem solving.  See Problem Solving 101, Toyota Business Practice, etc.
• Facilitation.  See The Secrets of Facilitation, Gamestorming, Visual Meetings, etc.
• Communication / Presentation.  See The Minto Pyramid Principle, Made to Stick, Persuasive Business Proposals, Advanced Presentations by Design, Presentation Zen, slide:ology, Crucial Confrontations, Influencer, Influence: Science and Practice, etc.

Finally some advanced capabilities:

• Organisational change.  See The Knowing-Doing Gap, Leading Change, The Power of Positive Deviance, Switch, Change Anything, etc.
• Organisational design.  See The Personal MBA, Designing Matrix Organizations that Actually Work, IT Governance, Enterprise Architecture As Strategy, Managing the Design Factory, The Principles of Product Development Flow, etc.

To be clear, my view is that the foundation comes first, the core capabilities come next, and the advanced capabilities are last.  In a pinch, the core capabilities will cover for a lack of knowledge and experience in the advanced capabilities but the reverse is not true.

All of this is fed by what I'll call influences:

• Agile
• Lean
• Lean Startup
• Systems thinking
• Design thinking
• etc.