I've spoken to a few customers recently about our new Coaching Loops feature in Berlin.
The feedback has been that some of our customers are already trying quality initiatives like this with their own customisations and that we've introduced some nice new capabilities with this product.
One customer I spoke to was especially interested in the feature that ensures consistent quality checks and opportunities to provide feedback across all engineers.
When customers configure Coaching Loops they have an option to define a Take first coaching opportunity and a Time to look back.
Our thinking here was firstly that automated generation of coaching assessments could easily swamp the coaches, especially when coaching on a high volume process such as Incident Management.
Customers can control the volume of assessments by setting the Sample Size. This way only a percentage of coaching opportunities would result in a assessment.
A new problem is introduced here... coachees that infrequently participate in the process don't have a high probability of being coached when the sample size is set low.
For example, you may have a Coaching Loop setup to improve the quality of Change Requests. If Bob raises 90 changes requests a month and Alice only raises 10 you can see that with a sample size of 10% Alice may never get coached. As she infrequently raises Change Requests it might also be that she is the ideal person to receive coaching!
Customers can ensure better coverage of coaching assessments by configuring Take first coaching opportunity with Time to look back
With the configuration above when Alice submits a change request Coaching Loops searchs back 30 days to see if we created an assessment in that time frame. If not we disregard the Sample Size and create an assessment for the Coach to complete.
With Coaching Loops customers should be able to ensure a level, consistent volume of coaching for all participants in a process, raising the level of quality overall.
If you are interested in Coaching Loops download the Whitepaper and get in touch
