Agile coaching that put Kanban boards on BACP’s office walls

Customer background

The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) is the professional body for counselling and psychotherapy in the UK.

It was embarking on a major digital rebranding initiative, covering a new website, a new CRM system and more. Before it began, BACP wanted to make sure its own processes would support not only that programme but every project that followed.

The challenge

BACP wanted to improve how it ran projects in several ways: more transparency, engagement and communication, and faster scheduling and delivery of tasks.

Its teams were interested in how agile could improve core business processes outside software development, adding transparency, control and pace. But they also wanted to develop softer skills: better communication and collaboration, and motivating people to go the extra mile, so that projects would meet members’ needs and support the direction of BACP’s digital transformation.

So the coaching started with BACP’s own experience.

Our approach

Before the coaching, Box UK asked BACP to review a selection of its recent projects: what went well, and what could be improved. In agile terms, these are project retrospectives.

Box UK’s consultants reviewed the results in a preparatory session with the project leads taking part in the course. That gave them a fuller understanding of each participant’s requirements, objectives and pain points, and they tailored the coaching materials to match.

The session itself mixed walkthroughs of agile’s most important principles and techniques with practical, hands-on exercises, so participants could see how each idea applied to their own work. Developing product visions, for example, showed how they could act in a more user-centred way and make sure they delivered the right projects.

What we built

One part of agile that participants latched onto was Kanban: visualising work on a board, then using it to control the flow of a project so that everyone was included and involved.

As tasks moved across the board towards completion, participants could see and measure progress more easily, and they became noticeably more enthusiastic about their projects.

In one of the sessions, Box UK used the Lean Coffee format to run project retrospectives. It uncovered insight that might otherwise have gone unnoticed and unactioned.

Delivery

When Box UK’s consultants returned a few months later to review the team’s progress, the working environment had changed: a number of Kanban boards were in use around the office, tracking tasks.

Participants had started acting as champions of agile, and of Kanban in particular, happily explaining what they’d learned to colleagues. The initiative gathered momentum, and Box UK delivered a further coaching session to support the adoption of an agile mindset across the whole organisation.

The outcome

The coaching met BACP’s original objectives of supporting project delivery and increasing team motivation. Kanban had become part of how teams tracked their work, and staff were championing the approach to colleagues.

Support for agile ways of working kept growing, both among staff and in the leadership team backing the initiative. For a relatively small investment, BACP had started to change the way the organisation worked, with a culture that could keep adapting to its goals and strategy.

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