What Is The Process Of Becoming A Professional Agile Coach?

 

“Adopting agile can feel worse before it feels better. Problems and tensions can become more visible, which can be uncomfortable for some teams. But when tensions are more visible, you have a better opportunity to solve them.” - Jordan Husney

Is an agile coach a valuable role for an organizational change?

An agile coach is a member of project management whose role is to motivate individuals, groups and teams of an organization to adopt agile values and 12 principles of agile methodology. Basically, a majority of agile coaches come from a background of IT, project management, product management and software development. 

Organizations planning to switch from traditional working techniques to adopt an agile method of working might recognize the need for creating a small team of agile coaches to implement agile methodology. This team of agile coaches is known as the Lean Agile Center of Excellence where they implement SAFe agile framework to run the projects successfully in large enterprises. So, as the organization grows, the demand for the agile coach is increasing too. 

Why does a software development team require an agile coach?

As agile is a bit challenging to master, most of the leaders in teams face difficulties in implementing agile practices due to false expectations created by the entire team. In spite of implementing all the recommended agile methods, yet something seems going wrong. This is when an agile coach adds value to the team by determining what is failing to produce desired outcomes. And finds ways to rectify the situation correctly. 

Some of the organizational benefits of an agile coach:

1. An agile coach can serve as an objective party to navigate common pain points of an organization in the adoption process. 
2. The coach also saves time, money and resources of an organization.
3. An agile coach is not only responsible for training an agile team but also someone who helps the organization to embrace the culture of agile shift.
4. Various Agile Brainstorming Techniques are conducted by an agile coach to stimulate the team’s creativity and to help them with day-to-day productivity. These sessions help to provide interesting solutions to complicated problems.

Responsibilities of an agile coach

1.     An agile coach designs the plan of a company for the future agile practices to be implemented.

2.     He is the role model for agile principles for the entire organization.

3. He is responsible for the success of the product development and growth of an organization.
4. He also coaches the other leadership teams like scrum masters and product owners.
5. Builds an agile culture of transparency across the organization and also heads scrum meetings.
6. An agile coach spots issues in the project development process and provides support to fix them.
7. Their role is to offer team training to provide continuous guidance for the team members as they incorporate the agile frameworks to address changes.
8. Looking through the team’s perspective an agile coach will always stand by the team’s side in order to train them about the appropriate tools to use and achieve the desired goal.
9. He will be able to perceive the broader picture of all the shortcomings that affect the project management plan.
10. An agile coach should be able to identify the capabilities of the team members to use it in the product development process.

Steps to become a successful agile coach:

1.    Prior experience in the software development field by working as a project manager, senior product manager and scrum master is required.
2. Before opting for agile training courses, an individual should master some of the popular agile frameworks and methodologies.
3. Then explore some agile certification courses like Certified Scrum master (CSM), Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Project Management Professional (PMP).
4. Improve your agile coaching skills.
5. Complete the relevant training required to become an agile coach in a large enterprise.
6. Prepare your resume and gain coaching experience.

Title descriptions

1. How many dedicated individuals does it take to create an effective Lean agile center of Excellence team?

     Lean Agile Center of Excellence requires 4 to 6 dedicated people to support smaller groups and twice the size for larger groups.

2. How do agile brainstorming techniques benefit the team members?

    By incorporating Agile Brainstorming Techniques, an agile coach can encourage   collaboration and interaction between the team members to present their ideas comfortably so that they can find solutions for complicated problems.

3. What are the three types of agile milestones used in software project management?

    Agile Milestones are the specific point of a software project which defines the completions of the important stages of a product development. Some of the significant milestones in agile projects are Fixed date milestones, Program increment milestones which marks the end of each     iteration or sprints, Learning milestones which denotes questions about the project’s feasibility.

About Advance Agility

We, at Advance Agility, are the new-age Agile Coaching, Consulting and IT services company. We enable end-to-end Digital Transformation. Agile execution is integral to our being. We are doing SAFe implementation with small, medium and large organization across the globe. Our vision is to be the leading Agile execution player globally. To keep adding value at every process stage. We are on a mission to empower our clients, move from concept to cash in the shortest sustainable lead time by adopting human centric approach to business agility. Embracing the change is in our DNA. Things that keep us apart are Quicker and Seamless execution with End-to-end gamut of services. Our Global presence and Stellar Track Record give us an edge over our competitor.

Connect with us at advanceagility.com to learn about SAFe and SAFe Implementation. We provide various SAFe certification courses along with DevOps, Scrum, Agile Coaching and more trainings. Write to us at contact@advanceagilty.com for any agile training or consulting needs. We are always looking for competent agile trainers as well. So if you are a good trainer or want to become one, do get in touch with us to that we can learn, grow and achieve together.