Agile Coach

Agile Coach

Location: Scottsdale, AZ Duration: Contract (06 + Months - Possible Extension) Schedule: Mon - Fri (Remote is fine but travel to Scottsdale AZ is needed for the planning sessions.)

We are looking for an experienced Agile Coach to help transition our business from its existing work practices to infusing a real agile understanding from the top-down. The Agile Program Coach is an expert in agile methodologies, a proven thought leader and collaborator responsible for working with Program teams to lead and execute training and coaching efforts for ***'s Medicaid business for Next Generation Digital Agile Transformation Office. This role also includes supporting Program strategy, roadmap, processes, structures, guidelines, architecture and creating communities of practice for Agile delivery. To coach, mentor and guide our people to figure out the best solutions for their specific department challenges. You will analyze the organization's existing infrastructure and implement improvements to help streamline processes and create efficiencies. Ultimately, you will play a key role in the long-term strategy across the entire organization, helping our teams to deliver better products in a faster, more efficient manner.

Duties:

• Facilitate learning and development through individual, team and senior management coaching in agile practices to ensure adoption of best practices.
• Effectively communicate agile principles, scrum practices and overall operating model across the organization, working to empower business leaders in key Agile roles at all layers of the organization.
• Can proactively identify the most valuable mentoring & coaching opportunities.
• Coaching objectives include:
• Working with project teams to analyze current systems and processes and design a strategy for the adoption of agile best practices.
• Guiding teams to help them stay on track with agile techniques, fine-tuning approaches as needed to ensure the overall strategy is being met.
• Leading teams to diagnose and resolve complex business challenges.
• Undertaking daily follow-ups with individual team members to ensure projects are on track and goals are being met.
• Holding stand-up meetings with cross-functional teams to review project status.
• Supporting teams in determining the resource allocation to maintain agile practices and ensure smooth project delivery?

Lead and/or facilitate training sessions and workshops (virtually and in-person) for both development and functional teams, as well as key stakeholders, aimed at rolling out and sustaining department-wide adoption of Lean-Agile methodologies, with particular focus on the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Scrum and Kanban delivery.

• Training will include introductory, advanced, and role-specific training to further the organization's agile practice.
• Willingness to travel 3-4 weeks of each quarter.
• Able to train using SAFe's prescribed material as well as put together own material to support specific training/overview requests (using tools such as MS Teams, PowerPoint, WebEx and Miro).

Define, create, and support implementation of:

• Training, learning and development strategies
• Delivery plans
• Agile maturity assessments
• Agile improvement backlogs
• Advanced trainer plans
• Solution roadmaps

Collaborate with Program and teams to support creation and evolution of the Agile transformation roadmap and drive Agile activities across the team/organization in accordance with Program transformation strategy. Promote and advocate a culture of continuous improvement, setting goals and milestones and being accountable for them.

• Align, define, and socialize strategy in agile work management tooling, including delivering training and coaching business colleagues to use tools (Miro, Rally, Retrospective tools).
• Develops and tracks key metrics to help in speeding the Agile transformation efforts and gauge the maturity of the teams.
• Lead working groups to meet transformation deliverables such as identifying a standard set project metrics, revising project templates, setting up communities of practice and updating processes.
• Work with the team to create a plan to meet deliverables, facilitate meetings, track progress and action items, take minutes and update wikis.

Experience:

• Direct experience across multiple value streams of varying organizational complexities
• Deep knowledge of Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) v5
• Comprehensive understanding of concepts, theories and principles within agile discipline and broader knowledge of others disciplines such as corporate finance, design thinking, and product management
• Expert in the field of agile, including: Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Kanban, scrum, agile/lean, process flow

Skill In:

• 5+ years Agile Coach / Management consulting experience with teams that are new to Agile practices
• 7+ years delivering Agile projects utilizing a variety of methods including Scrum, Kanban, and Scaled Agile Frameworks (SAFe), etc., using collocated and distributed delivery models.
• Experience running agile projects of varying size and complexity, including large transformational programs
• Facilitating small- and large-group sessions, (examples include: Communities of Practice (COP), Inspect and Adapts workshops, and Value Stream Identification workshops)
• Strong leader, educator, and coach
• An excellent communicator and motivator
• Bachelor's degree; Master's preferred.

Ability To:

• Showcase examples of implementing agile techniques in different cultures and environments
• Drive and lead organizational change in a dynamic environment
• Demonstrated ability to influence successfully within a matrix environment and build effective business and technology partnerships with all levels of team members
• Communicate difficult concepts and influences others to adopt a different point of view
• Facilitate large- and small-group sessions.
• Train SAFe outputs such as Epic creation, Feature creation, and Portfolio Canvases
• Deliver compelling training, both in person and virtually through videoconferencing
• Adapt communication style to fit audience

Education:

• Req: Bachelors; Pref: Masters
• Other Certification(s): SAFe® Program Consultant (SPC); ICC-Client; SAFe® Lean Portfolio Management (LPM)
• Other License(s): SAFe® Release Train Engineer (RTE), SAFe® Program Consultant Trainer (SPCT), advanced Agile Coaching certificational communication skills.