Position Description
The role of Agile Coach is a unique opportunity to join the new and exciting Agile Transformation Program and have an outsized commercial impact on the Firm-wide adoption of Agile/DevOps at one of the world's premier financial services firms. You will work closely with highly motivated teams, as well as senior product owners and stakeholders in both the business and technology, to ensure successful outcomes for Agile program participants. You will be a thought partner, a change agent, and above all, a role model and teacher. If you excel where vision, innovation, and a passion for constant improvement are critical; if you enjoy working with teams to realize their best; if you are a life-long learner, a critical thinker, and a strong team player, then this could be your next career. Agile Transformation Program of our company has embarked on a Firm-wide Agile/DevOps initiative to transform how Business and Technology collaborate to deliver value with greater alignment, speed, and productivity. We established the Agile Center of Excellence, with sponsorship and focus at the highest level, to develop this transformational strategy through guidance, governance, training, enablement, and culture change.
Qualifications and experience
-An experienced and respected practitioner of Agile: not just a Coach but a Player, with the credibility that comes from having experienced Agile adoption first hand
-A passionate and articulate teacher of the how? and why?
-A hands-on leader with a track record of high-quality delivery
-A change agent and culture carrier
-An excellent communicator with great people skills
-An influencer, with strong persuasion skills and the courage and experience to challenge and advise senior leaders up to C-level executives
-A lifelong student of continuous and ongoing experimentation, learning and improvement - someone who takes personal satisfaction from seeing teams learn and grow
-An active follower of industry trends, a voracious consumer of Agile thought leadership, blogs, community activities, and other sources of insight
-3 years? experience in an Agile leadership role - such as Coach, Scrum Master, or Product Owner, in which you can evidence significant commercial impact
-5 years' experience in a customer facing, hands-on delivery role, working with or within Agile teams to deliver significant business value
-A track record of training and coaching teams and individuals at various levels
-A track record of applying Agile and DevOps approaches, practices, ceremonies and techniques through experimentation and improvement; a library of lessons learned which you call on to inform the right approach for each new situation
-Broad knowledge of Agile approaches such as Scrum and Kanban
-Agile techniques such as story mapping or big room planning
-DevOps concepts such as Continuous Deployment or Behavior Driven Development
-and approaches for Agile at scale, such as in portfolio planning and dependency management - combined with a deep expertise in one or more areas
Responsibilities:
-Work 1 on 1 and in group settings with team members and stakeholders to embed Agile mindset and practices
-Provide training, lead teams through Agile practices and ceremonies, and transition into an advisory role as team maturity grows
-Influence and change behaviors
-Model the appropriate Agile behaviors and act as a role model and culture carrier for the organization
-Influence stakeholders' Agile behaviors through direct feedback and guidance, and coach leaders to champion Agile leadership behaviors at all levels of the organization
-Tailor Agile principles for each team, regularly assess project maturity and provide action plans for improvement
-Work with team members including Product Owners and business stakeholders, to overcome adoption challenges and ensure success; for example to keep focus on business KPIs, or to brainstorm solutions
-Push squads' thinking and challenge them as needed; for example if prioritization is not based on business KPI-based criteria
-Work with the Product Owner and squad members to preemptively surface, escalate and address obstacles
-Encourage and facilitate cross-silo collaboration
-Improve Agile practice across the Firm and feed thought leadership back into our Agile Operating Model, playbook and tools
-Contribute to documentation, training, best practices and knowledge capitalization
-Coach and mentor new joiners to become effective Agile coaches