You’re considering hiring an Agile Methodologies coach or a Scrum Master. Which one is right for you?

The main goal of coach is to ask relevant questions to help answer person by himself. Thus agile coach is someone who will help you to solve mainly any challenges inside the cross functional team.

The Agile Coach goes far beyond the application of agility in its squads, it acts at both the operational and strategic level, it is the guy responsible for bringing agility to the whole business.

Agile coach is a expert not only in scrum but in different agile frameworks such as XP, lean, kanban etc. Usually he oversees lot of scrum masters and acts as auditor some times.

The Agile Coach serves as a mentor, facilitator, and change catalyst, assisting teams in overcoming challenges and enhancing their practices. They focus on agile culture, encouraging collaboration, transparency, and continuous learning. Additionally, the Agile Coach acts as a change agent, identifying improvement opportunities and promoting constant adaptation to optimize organizational performance. Their approach is holistic, aiming not only at processes but also at agile values and mindset.

If your team needs guidance in implementing Agile principles and practices, hiring an Agile Methodologies coach is ideal. They provide overarching guidance on Agile adoption, culture, and strategy, fostering continuous improvement. Conversely, if your team is already familiar with Agile but requires day-to-day facilitation and adherence to Scrum framework, a Scrum Master is more suitable. They focus on team dynamics, ceremonies, and ensuring adherence to Scrum principles for effective project delivery. Choose based on your team's specific needs and maturity level in Agile adoption.

Scrum Master is an expert in Scrum and it's ceremonies. Some one who runs daily standups, plannings, demos and retrospectives. He is considered as servant leader.

The Scrum Master is a crucial role in agile methodologies, such as Scrum. Its main responsibility is to facilitate the team's development process by removing impediments and ensuring the correct application of agile principles. The Scrum Master serves as a servant leader, promoting collaboration and effective communication among team members, the Product Owner, and other stakeholders. They also help the team understand and adopt agile practices, fostering continuous improvement. The Scrum Master has no authority over the team but seeks to create an environment that promotes self-management and increased productivity.

The Scrum Master and the Agile Coach share the responsibility of facilitating, promoting continuous improvement, and acting as change catalysts. Both emphasize agile culture, collaboration, and effective communication. The main difference is that the Scrum Master operates within the Scrum framework, while the Agile Coach seeks more comprehensive agile transformations throughout the entire organization.

Agile coach is bigger role and higher responsibility than scrum master. Agile coach is responsible for making sure that agile principles are followed correctly and efficiently in project. While scrum master is responsible for running scrum for a team in a project

The Scrum Master and the Agile Coach play crucial roles in promoting agile culture, collaboration, and continuous improvement, acting as facilitators and catalysts for change. While the Scrum Master focuses specifically on the context of Scrum, ensuring the proper functioning of this framework, the Agile Coach seeks broader agile transformations throughout the entire organization. In summary, both share similar goals, but the Scrum Master operates within a specific scope, while the Agile Coach aims to influence change on a more comprehensive organizational scale.

Before you even start down this path. Ask yourself what do you want to do? You have an agile practice in place, and you want to improve it? You have what you think are "mature" practices and you want to put a picture and name in your team organogram? You do not have agile adoption in the organization, and you want to reorganize your business with agile adoption? Scrum Master is an additional responsibility someone in the cross-functional scrum team takes on.

Choosing between an Agile coach and a Scrum Master depends on your needs. If you're transitioning to Agile, an Agile coach provides broader guidance on Agile principles and practices, organizational culture, and change management. A Scrum Master, on the other hand, focuses on implementing Scrum within a specific team, facilitating ceremonies, removing impediments, and coaching team members. Consider your organization's goals, scale, and readiness for Agile transformation to determine the best fit.