This presentation will discuss AARP’s Agile journey for building a grassroots Agile coaching and team facilitator community early into our technology transformation, detail our approach, challenges, lessons learned, and present-day evolution. Participants will walk away with a lean blueprint for starting or evolving similar communities anchored in change management research, adoption strategies, instructional design constructs, and servant leadership principles. The presentation will outline how our Agile Coaching Community (now Agile Community of Interest or COI) developed key service offerings that are widely leveraged throughout the enterprise, such as:

• Start-Up and Re-Start Team Workshops- Three half-day or two full-day workshops for new and existing teams that combines active collaboration and training to help teams define their vision, outcomes, roadmap, backlog, stakeholders, team agreements, and a sustainable path towards new ways of working in the spirit of the agile values.
• Targeted Team and Stakeholder Workshops- Two-hour team workshops that facilitate discussions around continuous improvement or overcoming specific team challenges (for example, the Art and Science of User Story Design and Stakeholder Engagement Training and Collaboration).
• Community Outreach- The Agile COI sponsors and facilitates several outreach activities in the form of Lean Coffees or discussions during our Radical Sabbaticals. At least once a year, AARP’s Information Technology Services department encourages all staff to dedicate themselves to a full day of professional development as individuals or in a group. The Agile COI has facilitated virtual Lean Coffees that ask participants to design the agenda in the session and timebox discussions on topics that have included facilitation techniques, product management principles, agile mindset, Kanban system design, Scrum framework, experimentation, and team maturity.