Who is an Agile Coach? And How to Become a Professional Agile Coach?

Organizations are switching from the traditional software development process to embrace trending processes that help them to react or act quickly to meet the needs of their customers. Implementing agile methodology has helped companies to become more efficient and cope effectively against the constantly changing environment. Although it is easy to understand agile methodology, it is hard to master. And this is when an agile coach comes into picture. Lean agile center of excellence (LACE) is a group of agile coaches that makes decisions on how to implement agile practices across an organization and regularly send updates to the head agile coach. Most of the companies create LACE to fully adopt the Lean-Agile practices for best business outcomes.

What is a Lean Agile Center of Excellence?

A Lean Agile Center of Excellence (LACE) is a small team of agile coaches created by an organization which follows agile practices to produce working software for a company. Adopting Lean-Agile practices differentiates companies from each other to produce greater results.

Who is an agile coach?

If you are contemplating a career as an agile coach, you need to know who is an agile coach, roles and responsibilities and what are the necessary factors involved in becoming one.

An agile coach is a project management professional who ensures the agility in multiple agile teams of a company and also is accountable for coaching and training scrum masters in agile teams. By utilizing a set of agile brainstorming techniques an agile coach can solve issues regarding process problems, inventing new products, inter-group communication problems, budgeting exercises, project scheduling etc.

An expert agile coach relates with some of the activities mentioned below:

1. An agile coach aligns with the changing needs of an organization to create a perfect road map that relates with the company’s objectives.
2. The coach encourages scrum masters and stakeholders to apply agility in their work.
3. To create a high-performance team, the coach identifies the areas that need improvements and devises plans to empower the team with essential skills to improve performance.
4. The agile coach is responsible for facilitating events like scrum meetings to address the transition taking place in an organization.
5. Each client has different business goals, so an agile coach needs to choose the best agile framework to align with the deliverable of a company.
6. An agile coach requires understanding the existing project management process of a company to facilitate them with tools to reap benefits.

What are the roles of an agile coach?

1. Training team members on agile practices.
2. Mentoring for performance.
3. Conducting various team level events to encourage self-organizing capabilities.
4. Helping an agile team to reflect and develop.
5. Removing obstacles for the team to act properly.
6. Usage of tools to support collaboration in a team.
7. Guides the team to follow agile milestones like feature deliveries, huge events, due dates of project stages, stakeholder meetings etc. to track the production process.
8. Coaching team stakeholders.
9. Providing conflict resolutions.

How to become a professional agile coach?

There are different types of agile coach available according to the roles they fulfill in an organization. They can be an agile team coach who facilitates one or two agile teams or multi-team coach who works with the Lean agile Center of Excellence in the organization or can be a delivery coach, enterprise coach or specialized agile coach. However, when you work as an agile coach you need to perform all the roles mentioned here to be labeled as a professional agile coach.

Once you are clear with the roles and responsibilities required for each type of agile coach you can take formal training to be an expert in that role. You can enroll for a certification course available on agile coach which helps you to build fundamental skills and provides you with knowledge about different approaches in agile models like Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, Disciplined agile, XP, so that you can provide training on how to include agile framework in a company as a certified agile coach.

Any individual who wants to become a professional agile coach can follow these steps:

1. Obtain a bachelor’s degree in computer science, software development, project management or information technology if your goal is to work in a software development business.
2. Become familiar with the Scrum methodology as it is the most popular approach in agile methodology most businesses implement.
3. Gain more knowledge and training by making contacts with agile professionals.
4. Getting certified in agile coaching programs like Team coach certification, Enterprise Coach certification, Agile Team Facilitation Certification and Agile Coaching Certification will verify you as an expert in Agile coaching.

Conclusion

With the new inventions in technology and evolving customer requirements, agility is no longer an option, but a necessary procedure implemented by businesses to survive in uncertain situations to deliver better. Companies are creating Lean Agile Center of Excellence which involves a team of agile professionals who coaches and mentors team members to improve the software production process by practicing agile principles. This creates an increasing demand for agile coaches as companies are looking for experts to guide their teams in cultivating an agile mindset.