WHAT DOES AN AGILE DO?

Published: May 14, 2025 – The Agile professional drives cross-functional collaboration to deliver iterative value through Agile frameworks such as Scrum or SAFe. This position ensures consistent backlog refinement, sprint planning, and continuous improvement through retrospectives and stakeholder engagement. The individual also facilitates transparency, adaptability, and speed by aligning team efforts with business goals in dynamic environments.

A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Agile

1. Agile Business Analyst Job Description

  • Requirements Management: Identify relevant stakeholders, select appropriate techniques and processes to capture and manage requirements.
  • Facilitation and Problem Solving: Facilitate workshops with stakeholders and the team, demonstrating excellent elicitation skills, analysis, and problem-solving capability.
  • Business Analysis: Assess and document the current state of business functions and processes to identify business requirements.
  • Communication and Value Articulation: Articulate requirements and communicate business and customer value to the delivery team, and ensure requirements adhere to the criteria.
  • Backlog Grooming: Work with the team to break down requirements into manageable sizes and help create acceptance criteria.
  • Reusability and Documentation: Manage requirements in such a manner that they can easily be reused in the future.
  • Data Analysis: Perform data analysis to drive key insights and decision-making.
  • Agile Advocacy: Advocate for Agile principles and practices within the team.

2. Agile Coach Responsibilities

  • Cross-Team Collaboration: Works with multiple teams, potentially across multiple projects
  • Agile Coaching: Leads and coaches teams (and the wider organisation) in agile values, principles, behaviours, practices, and frameworks
  • Technical Practice Mentoring: Regularly pairs with individual team members to coach them on agile technical practices (e.g., TDD, unit testing, and refactoring)
  • Quality Assurance: Ensures that a high-quality solution is produced, aligning with agile delivery practices
  • Agile Training: Runs agile training (and Train-the-Trainer) sessions
  • Ceremony Facilitation: Attends agile ceremonies and meetings to guide and facilitate good outcomes
  • Backlog Support: Supports and mentors the Product Owners and Iteration Managers to create a healthy backlog
  • Agile Maturity Improvement: Improves the overall agile maturity of individuals, teams, and the organisation
  • Risk Management: Helps to manage and mitigate project risks

3. Agile Product Owner Additional Details

  • Requirements Gathering: Coordinate the gathering of functional requirements from business stakeholders and subject matter experts.
  • Feasibility Analysis: Research and analyze enhancement and project requests to determine feasibility and present findings to management.
  • Stakeholder Engagement: Arrange meetings with stakeholder teams to lead discussions, resolve design decisions, and address project roadblocks.
  • Documentation: Create detailed documentation of requirements, including Use Cases, Process Flow Diagrams, Report Specifications, and Data Mapping and Flow Diagrams.
  • Delivery Model Adaptability: Adapt to and work in Agile, Waterfall, and hybrid delivery models.
  • Project Coordination: Coordinate status meetings and generate progress reports.
  • Testing Support: Assist in creating test scripts and coordinating project and enhancement testing.
  • Problem Analysis: Analyze and troubleshoot medium to complex system and application problems, providing recommendations.
  • System Testing: Conduct system testing for releases, upgrades, and compliance with contractual and legal requirements.
  • System Support: Perform periodic on-call support duties for supported systems.

4. Agile Project Manager Essential Functions

  • Objective and Risk Identification: Identification of objectives, scope, risks, and expected outcomes
  • Program Communication: Accountability for program status, issues, and impediments in communication
  • Release Planning: Program-level release planning and oversight
  • Risk Escalation: Impediment and risk escalation
  • Communication Facilitation: Facilitating communication into and out of the program
  • Dependency Coordination: Coordinating dependencies and alignment between the various project efforts that make up the larger program
  • Activity Alignment: Coordinating the alignment of technical and non-technical activities
  • Timeline Management: Take responsibility for the overall timeline management
  • Stakeholder Collaboration: Working in partnership with business owners, Product Managers/Analysts, and Sponsors to clearly define business needs and create a better understanding of program value
  • Goal Definition Support: Assisting Product Managers/Analysts in the definition of project/program goals and objectives, and communicating expectations for completion to the teams

5. Agile Scrum Master Accountabilities

  • Agile Practice Enforcement: Ensures Agile/Scrum practices are followed consistently in spirit and seeks to continually improve them
  • Ceremony Facilitation: Facilitates and effectively drives Agile ceremonies
  • Impediment Removal: Understands and helps remove impediments. Drives activities towards completion
  • Performance Optimization: Pushes the boundaries, ensuring the team can achieve maximum velocity and quality
  • Sprint Planning: Ensures sprint planning is effective, achievable, and on time
  • Metric Management: Works with the team to collaboratively identify, maintain, and measure metrics that can be used to improve the team
  • Retrospective Improvement: Ensures sprint reviews and retrospectives are data-driven to improve the team
  • Issue Tracking: Ensures prioritized issues or improvements raised during retrospective are logged into a backlog and works with the PO for timely completion of the same
  • Agile Coaching: Providing coaching to uplift, adopt, and embed Telstra's Ways of Working and agile best practices
  • Tool Support: Supporting, monitoring, and encouraging timely maintenance of delivery tools (e.g., Jira)
  • Delivery Leadership: Support Mission GSM and the Delivery, and lead the progression of delivery
  • Conflict Management: Conflict management involves systemic impediments across the group’s flow of work, and works with GSL on possible resolutions

6. Agile Tester Roles and Details

  • Team Collaboration: Work with the product owner and collaborate with the development team
  • Requirement Understanding: Understand the user stories and their acceptance criteria
  • Story Clarification: Attend meetings to clarify user stories and changes
  • Risk Management: Identify risks and mitigate these wherever possible
  • Task Prioritization: Prioritize tasks that could help deliver a shippable product at the end of every sprint
  • Testing Suggestions: Make suggestions on automation, as well as exploratory and acceptance testing
  • Test Design: Take responsibility for designing tests
  • Test Execution: Execute test cases/scripts and log defects
  • Issue Resolution: Contribute to getting issues resolved
Relevant Information
What Does An Agile Coach Do?
What Does An Agile Project Manager Do?
What Does An Agile Product Owner Do?