The Role of an Agile Coach

Either you are from the IT department or non-IT department, likely you have heard of the term Agile. In the US, at least 71% of the companies are now using Agile and 98% of those companies have become more successful because of Agile.

Agile (click here for full description) is a way of working that can help teams or organization to overcome complex problems by focusing on a set of principles, techniques and practices. The new way of working was initially developed to overcome some of the challenges faced by delivering software development projects. Nowadays Agile is being used by organizations globally including those that are non-IT related to deliver complex projects and business goals.

Why do companies need an Agile Coach?

Agile implementation can sometimes be difficult as it requires the team or organization to adopt new ways of thinking and working that can be completely different from their current practices. Furthermore, the organization may not have individuals that possessed the experience of leading and guiding Agile transformation. According to research, the leading cause of 44% of Agile project failures is due to the lack of prior experience with Agile techniques.

To overcome this, an Agile coach can be employed to help organizations, teams, and individuals adopt agile practices and methods while embedding agile values and mindsets. Even for teams that are already familiar with Agile, the agile coach can focus on establishing guidelines, practices and templates to support an enterprise-wide adoption and propagation of the agile practices across organization.

What does an Agile Coach do?

An agile coach is responsible to train corporate teams on the agile methodology, overseeing and facilitating the development of agile teams to drive overall business results. Following a more structured approach, the agile coach typically starts with assessments to assess the current maturity level of the team or company and benchmark it against the desired goals. The assessments are usually done via interview sessions with the involved stakeholders and survey tools that can measure some of the adoption success factors and components such as the culture of the organization, leadership, level of understanding of the agile principles and practices. The agile coach will then design the adoption roadmap focusing on areas that are crucial based on assessment results and the desired outcome of the team or organization.

Besides that, the agile coach is also responsible for engaging with the team, reviewing and guiding the team to follow the agile practices, events, communications, leadership style and tools used by the agile team. Because of the nature of the role, it is important for the agile coach to be able to work well with the team to gain trust and respect, allowing team members to be more comfortable and transparent.

The demand for and salary for agile coach are growing in the recent years. This is because of the growth of agile adoption among companies, the important role of an agile coach and the benefits that the coach can potentially bring for the organization.

What it takes to become an Agile Coach?

Becoming a successful agile coach requires the individual to have in-depth understanding of Agile principles, practices, techniques and frameworks, and prior hands-on experience of managing projects and training agile teams. Besides that, having Agile-related certifications is also important to showcase your professional expertise and experience within the knowledge domain of Agile. Some of the useful certifications form the Agile Business Consortium that you can explore are the Agile Project Management, Scrum Master, Agile Programme Management and Agile Business Analyst.

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