Agile Coach

An Agile Coach is instrumental in providing coaching and mentoring in support of agile approaches, methods, practices and frameworks. The role is responsible for coaching and enabling agile behaviours and emphasizing agile values and principles.

Description

The Agile Coach will influence all levels of the organization to drive increased agility, speed, quality, autonomy, innovation and nurturing an environment where transparency is the focus. The Agile Coach understands that the outcome of their success is seen through the behaviours of others, and they provide the kind of coaching necessary to enable this. This role is key to enabling people to understand, learn and behave in an agile way that drives customer and business value while creating a productive agile team culture.

Key responsibilities include:

• Responsible for establishing disciplined, effective agile teams
• Coaches to positively reinforce an agile mindset, practices, and skills to teams and individuals; provides clarity, new learnings, and fosters maturation
• Drives adoption of agile practices, techniques, and frameworks, reducing the gap between agile theory and practice.
• Develops, tracks and monitors agile metrics on things that impact value driven delivery and indicate potential problems, assisting teams in implementing solutions to those problems.
• Identifies organizational impediments to successful agile transformation and works with the leadership team to create effective strategies to overcome them.
• Creates and delivers presentations and training sessions with an eye on process and related best practices and provides guidance on creating agile artefacts.
• Fosters an environment of mutual respect and cooperation, transparency, autonomy, agility, learning, innovation, quality and speed of execution.
• Manages conflict among people and situations while recognizing and addressing sensitivities, reducing barriers and increasing communication to assure collaboration and joint action.
• Collaborates with teams to assess the overall health of their agile practices and identify improvement opportunities.
• Partners with other Agile Coaches across SD Worx to align and drive consistency and transparency throughout the organization.
• Organizes and facilitates workshops that promote agile maturity across the organization.
• Communicates well with teams and leaders of the organization, demonstrating good listening skills, asking questions and providing feedback.
• Facilitate the learning and adoption of agile principles and practices with teams, and managers, as they gain insights and experience with agile methods and practices.
• Guide transformational change with managers, programs, and team levels, in a large matrixed organization, helping them see broader perspectives, and shift mindset to adopt new skills associated with self-governing teams.

Required Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience executing agile projects in large, complex environments.
• Experience in coaching, mentoring and training new agile teams.
• Deep understanding of agile values, principles, and practices.
• Hands on experience in agile methodologies.
• Strong facilitation and communication skills.
• Strong Interpersonal and conflict resolution skills.
• Effective leadership and negotiation skills.
• Adaptive coaching style and the ability to work hands-on with teams in an advisor role with the ability to adapt based on the agile ‘readiness’ of the team.
• Enthusiastic and maintains a positive, high-energy attitude.
• Ability to operate autonomously while also working well within a team environment.
• Ability to assess, measure and communicate progress against defined goals.
• Drive for continuous learning.
• Ability to demonstrate emotional intelligence and integrity.
• Highly efficient in coaching the formation of a well-refined and prioritized backlog.

Preferred Qualifications

• 6+ years in Project Delivery roles.
• Certifications: Scrum Master, Product Owner, Coaching Agile Teams (ICP-ACC), Agile Team Facilitation (ICP-ATF) or similar