Team Coaching

Agile Team Coaches

Agile team coaches work with teams as temporary endeavors that accomplish the build out of Agile best practices. Typically, they have experience playing multiple roles on agile teams, including the role of scrum master. The key value they add is to enable independent teams through coaching rather than management or taking part in the delivery. This creates a focus on team autonomy and independent organic delivery systems within the organization. Agile coaches have strong facilitation and diplomatic skills. They have the ability to articulate the business value of agile practices within teams (for example, to answer the question, “Why do we do it this way?”).  Their focus remains on people within the cross-functional teams and ensuring the desired agile framework is embodied. 

Agile technical coaches have the ability to explain and implement advanced agile technical practices such as DevOps, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment. Typically, they have up-to-date programming skills, experience with agile team coaching Test Driven Development (TDD), a deep understanding of refactoring, and emergent design, and experience installing and using tools for software configuration management, continuous integration, and agile project management.

Senior agile coaches support multiple teams through an agile transition and work with management to resolve issues relating to dependencies between those teams. They are responsible for ensuring that technical environments and team knowledge are in place so that projects can operate in an agile manner. Typically, senior agile coaches combine agile coaching skills with specialized skills in at least one area like product management, project management, user experience, or agile technical practices, and a track record of resolving impediments created outside of the team environment.