What will you do?
- In order to meet business objectives and evolving client needs, it is necessary to ensure continuous business improvement through the introduction of new products, enhancement of existing products or changes to systems, processes or business capabilities that enable improved optimization and/or efficiency. This involves introducing some level of change into the business.
- The squads define, design, build, test and deliver these changes and ensure their integration into existing business processes. The Agile Coach works with squads to train and develop skills related to agile practices, frameworks and tools.
- The Agile Coach is responsible for equipping squad members with the right knowledge, tools and training to use agile to its full potential. The role involves understanding where squads are in their journey and to offer the right approach to support their growth. To enable continuous improvement the Coach asks the right questions, provides good mental models, challenges people in their thinking and guides them towards consistent quality in their work.
Key Responsibilities:
- Guides the Product Owners (POs) in discovery by practicing relevant agile techniques (e.g. journey maps) and facilitates in carving out MBI/MVP for larger epics.
- Guides the PO in elaboration to capture the key requirement details within the company ecosystem.
- Supports PI Planning by facilitating timeous team breakouts and helps them identify their respective backlogs and dependencies.
- Facilitates and ensures that the squads conduct the backlog refinement cadence to slice the feature to user stories at least once within an iteration.
- Facilitates and ensures that the team conduct iteration planning cadences to plan for iterations.
- Creates and manages iterations within the company ecosystem in alignment with the iteration schedule published by release management.
- Ensures daily stand ups are practiced so that the team has:
- Alignment on the value to be delivered on a given day
- A quick view on what value was delivered the day before
- The opportunity to highlight any impediments that need to be removed to meet the iteration goal
- Manages and ensures that the iteration board are kept updated to reflect the current status.
- Encourages the team to achieve a healthy burn down of user stories/features within an iteration.
- Represents the respective squads in squad sync and ensures that the teams are aligned, aware & adjusts for any technical dependencies.
- Works closely with End2End team, Ways of Working Support Services team & other support structures to ensure smooth functioning of the squads.
- Facilitates in show & tell (iteration demos & integrated system demos) and ensures the squads are able to effectively present their deliverables.
- Facilitates and ensures that the squads conduct retrospectives every iteration.
- Takes on many different styles such as observing, facilitating, expert, counselling, mentoring & teaching and is able to fluidly move between these modes to effectively model the required behavior.
Qualifications, Knowledge and Skills:
Qualifications:
- Any relevant IT Qualification (IT Diploma or Degree) will be a strong recommendation
- Agile Coach certification
- Scrum Master certification
Knowledge:
- Thorough knowledge of agile practices, rituals and ceremonies
- Good understanding of modern engineering practices
- Thorough knowledge of Jira and Confluence
- Good understanding of how agile works at scale
- Thorough understanding of how to utilize dashboards, KPI/metrics & burn down charts in guiding the team
- Good understanding of Behavior Driven Development methodology
- Good understanding of the Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment pipeline and its execution
- Good understanding of the frequent release/release on demand process
Skills:
- Able to move fluidly between coaching styles depending on the situation
- Understands the principles of team development
- Able to provide training based on adult learning principles
- Understands that principles are more important than practices.
- Able to recognize and act on team conflict
- Can coach professionally
- Has influence at organizational level
- Is familiar with gamification
- Natural and strong facilitation skills
Experience:
- At least 2 years of working in a fully agile and DevOps environment
Core Competencies:
- Cultivates innovation
- Client focus (TCF)
- Drives results
- Collaborates
- Flexibility and adaptability
Personal Qualities:
- Able to remove barriers and keep the train on track
- Drive continuous improvement
- Good Communication skills (verbal and written)
- Stakeholder management and relationship building
- Ability to challenge old ways of working
- Ability to promote self-managed team concepts
- Quality focus
- Attention to detail
- Problem solving
- Ability to priorities, plan and organize