What Does An Agile Coach Do?

WHAT DOES AN AGILE COACH DO?

Published: Nov 20, 2024 – The Agile Coach collaborates with development and platform teams to define and implement a new collaborative approach, focusing on autonomy and reducing dependencies. This position drives the adoption of DevOps principles, ensuring teams take end-to-end responsibility for production deployments and reliability improvements. The coach provides guidance and hands-on support to facilitate organizational transformation toward Agile and DevOps, helping teams and leaders improve processes and performance.

A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Agile Coach

1. Agile Coach Responsibilities

Agile Coaching: Operate as the change agent and the in-house expert for Agile ways of working.
Agile Transformation: Drive the continued adoption and improvement of Agile principles, practices, mindset, and tooling.
Leadership Development: Coach managers to apply the leadership philosophy of servant leadership and set a clear vision for the Agile transformation.
Team Collaboration: Work closely with the Development teams and also the IT and business managers to help them shape their teams to adopt the Agile mindset and way of working to be successful and efficient.
Continuous Improvement: Draft the development path for Agile coaching and ensure global anchoring within DSM
Development Automation: Strive for development automation by CI/CD tooling.
Empowerment: Promote a culture of experimentation, transparency improvement, empowerment, and innovation
Innovation: Increase collaboration and innovation in teams and introduce techniques that promote adaptability and flexibility in the face of unpredictable circumstances.
Strategy Design: Responsible for designing a strategy for the organizational adoption of Agile.
Performance Tracking: Follow up on the progress of the Agile teams, assess results, consolidate improvements, and remove impediments.
Continuous Improvement: Spread Agile best practices between different teams, integrate Agile teams within non-Agile processes, and measure results of the Agile transition.

2. Agile Coach Job Summary

Team Collaboration: Work with teams and leadership to understand their needs, problems, and challenges.
Agile Strategy Development: Devise strategies with key Agile leadership roles and Management to help transform teams to Agile or enhance Agile team performance.
Agile Training: Train teams and individuals in key Agile roles on Agile concepts and principles.
Coaching Expertise: Develop coaching expertise within key Agile roles (Scrum Masters, RTEs, etc.).
Tooling and Tracking: Help the teams, programs, and portfolios establish and sustain tooling to manage and track work and improvements.
Agile Transformation Support: Support teams through Agile transformation, with a focus on sustainment.
Event Facilitation: Support/co-lead key team and program events (PI, Big Room Planning) to enable self-managing teams.
Metrics and Value Delivery: Help develop stewardship and tune metrics to make value delivery visible to management and business stakeholders.
Agile Practice Coaching: Agile practice coach for a product family or specific agile practices.
Community Building: Create a Community of Practice, bringing together Scrum Masters and Product Owners.
Agile Leadership: Help lead their organization through their Agile transformation.
Business Capability Coaching: Provide coaching and training within the business capability.

3. Agile Coach Accountabilities

Agile Frameworks: Work with development teams using Agile frameworks to deliver software iteratively and effectively.
Impediment Removal: Identify and remove blockers and impediments.
Coaching and Mentorship: Coach and mentor team members on Agile principles and practices.
Product and Tech Interaction: Help develop healthy product and tech interactions as we work to clarify the vision.
Facilitation: Facilitate Agile events and group workshops.
Agile Training: Contribute to and deliver Agile training.
Metrics and Reporting: Maintain and report against relevant metrics.
Communication and Visibility: Assist with internal and external communication, and improve visibility.
Continuous Improvement: Engage with others to find, and act upon, opportunities for improvement across delivery processes.
Leadership Collaboration: Collaborate with and influence leadership.
Team Expansion: Help hire and onboard new Scrum Masters.

4. Agile Coach Job Description

Agile Practices Promotion: Promote agile practices and mindset across the team and help us to continuously deliver value and improve in a fast-paced environment.
Agile Metrics: Help teams to identify growth areas towards their high-performing team journey and use agile metrics to make the progress visible.
Team Empowerment: Work to empower teams to make them autonomous and self-organizing.
Coaching and Experimentation: Actively involve, guide, and coach teams in setting up experiments with rapid prototyping and MVP, supporting incremental and continuous delivery.
Culture Development: Develop a culture of trust and transparency in terms of identifying and reporting dependencies, impediments, and resolutions.
Role Support: Support, help, and coach the team members in practicing their roles.
Innovation and Change Leadership: Cultivate innovation and act as a change agent in the organization.
Continuous Improvement: Work with other Agile Team Coaches and Agile Project Managers to improve the continuous value delivery approaches constantly.
Training Support: Provides support for training courses and delivery modalities and advice to the Community of Practice.
Reflective Coaching: Coaches the organization to reflect and continually discover better agile ways of working.
Mentorship: Mentor and enable others to learn, grow, and become better professionals.

5. Agile Coach Details and Accountabilities

Agile Coaching: Provides agile coaching to scrum teams.
Strategic Input: Provides strategic input into delivery tasks.
Agile Metrics: Measures meaningful agile delivery metrics (focused on TRUE value).
Continuous Improvement: Responsible for continual improvement of TRUE delivery velocity.
Agile Research and Innovation: Provides best-in-industry agile research and innovation.
Agile Delivery Solutions: Provides solutions on how to deliver Agile releases to clients within existing constraints (fixed timeframe/scope/cost).
Team Mentorship: Take responsibility for mentoring teams on how to get better.
Organizational Assessment: Assess and understand real use case examples on how the organization currently functions and apply meaningful, value-added coaching on corrections that matter most, not just the ability to recite agile best practices.
Retrospective Facilitation: Runs retrospectives and tracks improvement action items to completion.
Scrum Event Facilitation: Knowledgeable and capable of running all Scrum Events including Sprint Planning Session, Daily Scrum, Scrum and Share, Reviews, and Retrospectives.

6. Agile Coach Additional Details

Agile Strategy: Work at a strategic level to define an Agile Transformation Journey and create a roadmap.
Agile Integration: Advise and assist in integrating an Agile development process with existing processes.
Training and Development: Create a Training Plan and deliver training to the leadership teams.
Agile Centre of Excellence: Set up an Agile Centre of Excellence to promote best practices and lead the transformation.
Team Selection: Facilitate the selection of the first Agile team of teams to transform.
Sustainable Agile Capability: Create a sustainable Agile capability within the organization to reduce reliance on external coaching.
Agile Standards: Set standards for the healthy application of Agile practices across the whole organization.
Recruitment and Role Selection: Help to recruit and select the right people for the key roles.
Change Leadership: Champion the change within an organization, cultural change, focusing the organization on business outcomes.
Coaching and Mentorship: Mentor, coach, train, and guide the change process, developing leadership in others and guiding organizational agility.
Organizational Transition: Facilitates the overall organizational transition providing ongoing support to agile projects and leadership.
Consultancy and Process Improvement: Delivers consultancy and analyzes projects, identifying and implementing opportunities for simplification, efficiency, and enhancement to deliver business process improvements, customer satisfaction, cost reduction, and revenue growth.

7. Agile Coach Essential Functions

Business Agility Planning: Help to plan and implement the path to Business Agility.
Continuous Improvement: Guiding the teams on continuous improvement toward delivering value continuously.
Agility Implementation: Work with teams to assist them in implementing and improving their Agility.
Transversal Initiatives: Work and implement transversal company initiatives like OKRs and agility assessments, among others.
Team Maturity Assessment: Assess the maturity of the teams and coach them to get better and continue to improve.
Stakeholder Collaboration: Proactively collaborate and communicate with internal and external stakeholders.
Agile Culture Promotion: Promote an agile culture throughout the module.
Agile Adoption: Encourage the adoption of the agile culture in the application software departments, improving the way we as an organization are working today.
Scrum Mastery: Be a scrum master for 1-2 teams, facilitating the process in the team and having a special focus on the team's well-being.
Product Owner Support: Enable the Product Owners to understand and practice agility as well as support them in arranging the Product Backlog.
Network Development: Communicate with stakeholders and develop and facilitate an extensive network within the complete organization.

8. Agile Coach General Responsibilities

Self-Organization Leadership: Lead the Scrum teams to self-organization.
Agile Process Improvement: Improve development processes across multiple Scrum teams using Agile methodologies.
Customer Satisfaction: Help the Product Owners and development team to achieve the highest customer satisfaction possible.
Product Strategy Support: Support efforts for creating a compatible product in line with the product strategy.
Impediment Removal: Remove impediments and coach the Scrum teams on removing impediments within and across teams to reduce waste of time.
Agile Framework Education: Help the Scrum teams to identify and fill in blanks in the Agile framework, providing education where needed.
Product Owner Mentorship: Mentor the Product Owners on how to organize and translate requirements into stories.
Scrum Maturity Development: Help the Scrum teams achieve higher levels of Scrum maturity.
Organizational Process Improvement: Support the Business Leads with the improvement of organizational processes, for example, release management.
Training Program Management: Initiate and run training programs.
Process Testing and Improvement: Conduct testing of processes against agreed specifications, corporate standards, architecture, and methods, and make recommendations for process/procedural improvement.
Business Process Management: Applies business process management tools, techniques, and methodologies to evaluate existing processes and effectively deliver business process improvements.
Training and Coaching: Coordinates the training of others in various business improvement models, following up with coaching to ensure the sustainment of new approaches.

9. Agile Coach Key Accountabilities

Servant Leadership: Act as a servant leader and change agent providing thought leadership and hands-on guidance to Product Suite Teams and stakeholders across the enterprise to drive a smooth transition into the Agile mindset and culture.
Agile Best Practices: Utilize organizational and industry best practices, engage with teams through observation/interaction, workshops, and training to increase understanding and productivity improvements, and foster a cohesive Agile approach within the product suites.
Coaching Engagements: Work with the product suite teams and services teams within the context of specific coaching engagements to support LACE goals and KPIs.
Agile Culture Change: Lead the change to strengthen the Agile culture, working with teams and individuals to inspire the adoption of agile mindset and behaviors.
Value Identification: Help the teams and initiatives to identify and define value, and organize and work around value.
Agile Training: As an active member of the "Agile Academy" design and deliver training to create awareness and educate the teams, scrum masters, product owners, managers, and leaders to better understand their roles and how they can best support the transformation to lean-agile ways of working.
Training Development: Collaborate to develop Agile training materials and support communities of practice (CoP) as they relate to Agile practices.
Tool Utilization: Work with the teams to ensure the appropriate tools are being leveraged and aligned practices are being followed to enable consistency and metrics where needed.
Agility Assessment: Assess the health and agility of teams, and teams-of-teams (ARTs) to help them identify areas for further improvement and support them on their agile journey.
OKR Coaching: Coach and train the teams and leadership in identifying and defining objectives and key results (OKR).
Agile Coaching Development: Build the in-house Agile Coaching capability through the "Agile Coaching Apprenticeship Program".
Scaling Practices: Act as a bridge for establishing the scaling practices and principles strategized by the Business Agility Coaches.

10. Agile Coach Roles and Details

Collaboration: Closely work with development teams and platform teams to define this new way of collaboration.
Autonomy and Dependency Management: Ensure that all team members understand the necessity to be autonomous and avoid dependencies among them.
DevOps Responsibility: Foster end-to-end responsibility as they have to be full DevOps teams, monitoring what they deploy to production and looking proactively for reliability improvements.
Cross-Team Collaboration: Collaborate with cross-technical teams to move how they work currently (based on projects and ticket requests that they receive) to this new approach (PaaS), defining the product that they have to offer so that allows DevOps teams to be autonomous.
Customer-Centric Development: Drive platform teams to understand how they should consider development teams as their customers, focusing on their necessities and experience, and having constant communication so that evolve properly these new products.
Agile and DevOps Support: Provide hands-on support to employees across widely varying levels and roles, lead teams toward further understanding and adoption of Agile as well as overall company growth and improvement.
Cultural Adaptability: Work effectively in a culturally diverse global organization and with teams located in different parts of the world.
Continuous Improvement: Drive continuous improvement by providing high-level stakeholders with information about performance and forward suggestions for improvements and/or cost reductions.
Transformation Guidance: Consult, guide, and provide expert support to the transformation program towards Agile and DevOps in a Product-oriented organization.
Leadership Coaching: Help leaders and IT teams to change their ways of working to become fully agile.
Organizational Change Leadership: Facilitate and lead organizational change and transformation based on people change leadership and management, organizational culture, systems thinking, and other behavioral sciences.
Best Practices Research: Research best practice methodologies for agile and coaching and assess them for adoption into the teams.