Agile Coach Contract
Title: Agile Coach
Duration: 12 months contract
The Agile Coach (AC) will responsible for:
- Overseeing the agile practices and maturity plan of 3-5 Agile Squads
- Shape and define agile maturity assessment criteria and assess squads, providing them with a rating and an improvement plan
- Coaching Agile mindset and practices to tightening up elements such as ceremonies, reporting, estimation and user stories
- Improving agile adoption within the squads, as well as embedding and enforcing agile adoption
- At squad level, AC will also act as an impediment buster so that squad can deliver with minimum blockers
- Coach squad members on areas of improvement against a specified assessment criteria
- Agile Coach will help SMs to facilitate and plan all the Scrum events; Sprint planning, Retrospective, Sprint review, Daily stand up, Backlog refinement.
- Help to shape the enterprise agile agenda and overall plan, including leadership engagement and education
- Drive the education and adoption of the SAFe framework, including running PI planning, supporting POs with product roadmaps and backlog development in prep for PI planning
- Run scrum of scrums to support SMs in a RTE capacity
- Define, assemble and communicate portfolio level reporting for Squads and the ART § Mentoring Scrum Masters on Agile best practice and produce a development plan and learning curriculum
Key Responsibilities / Accountabilities
- Work with Squads to build a trust and collaboration mindset among stakeholders so everyone can make decisions together as a group & create compelling customer propositions
- Support Product Owners to make vital solution decisions that keep delivery moving forward.
- Coach squads to transition away from waterfall and more towards a product delivery
- Facilitate estimation and prioritization techniques – e.g. planning poker to size user stories
- Work with SA and IT to plan and manage releases and proactively plan forward looking sprint plan with indicative sprint goals and MVP releases
- Promote a test as you go process to ensure that customer value is delivered frequently via product increments of potentially shippable code
- Support the PO with customer demos, CUG and customer launch activities
- Conduct Agile Basics training and team set up for squads – sprint 0 mobilization
- Facilitation Scrum Events: o Sprint planning o Retrospective o Sprint review o Daily stand up o Backlog refinement o Customer demos (show and tell)
- Help squads in improving Agile Maturity (velocity, backlog health, burn-down, flow)
- Facilitate backlog refinement support for PO and BA to ensure rich detail in user stories through education of Squads on how to create user stories as well as craft a product roadmap
- Stitch design – UX-UI, copywriters into the requirements and development process
- Help build predictability in Squads, so that teams can know each other’s velocity and outputs
- Facilitate discussion, decision making and conflict resolution
- Escalate impediments in a timely manner to minimize disruption to the development team
- Ensure that tools such as JIRA are up-to-date and complete, inc. communicating metrics to the squad and wider stakeholders to monitor and manage team performance
- Self-assess the squad against agile maturity framework criteria, as well as take recommendations from external assessment and take ownership of implementing the improvement actions
- Establish strong relationships with stakeholders / PO to understand strategic, tactical and operational challenges in Business
Interaction
- Enterprise Wide – Squads, wider stakeholders and Leadership
Skills / Competencies
- Lives Agile values and is an Agile process champion for the Bank
- Enterprise level planning and execution
- Coaching mindset
- Written/verbal communication
- Impediment resolution at a portfolio level
- Risk anticipation and resolution
- Analytical ability – presentation
- Design thinking mindset
- Negotiation/conflict management
Education and Experience
Minimum formal education Bachelor’s Degree Certification requirement Any industry recognized certifications – CAL, SAFe, CSM, PSM, CSPO, APMP etc… Experience 5+ years working in Agile and waterfall delivery environments, or exposure to different delivery methodologies