Agile Coach

ROLE & RESPONSIBILITIES: 

Sparksoft is a fast-growing woman-owned small business that provides innovative technical solutions to the federal government. We are seeking an Agile Coach to facilitate the transition from traditional to Agile ways of working, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and customer value. The Agile Coach will ideally be helping teams maximize value delivery to customers, streamlining processes, and identifying opportunities for optimization.

• Facilitate learning and development of Agile methodologies among employees through individual and team coaching
• Coach senior managers in agile practices to ensure adoption of best practices across the organization
• Communicate agile principles, scrum practices, and overall operating model across various programs
• Champion the use of metrics and other objective measures by teams to exceed expectations
• Undertake daily follow-ups with individual team members to ensure projects are on track and goals are being met and bottlenecks are eliminated
• Maintain objectivity regarding issues and how to troubleshoot them by applying agile principles
• Hold stand-up meetings with cross-functional teams to review project status
• Support teams in determining resource allocations to maintain agile practices and ensure smooth project delivery.
• Act as a change agent to help transform organizational culture and mindset towards agile values and lean thinking

REQUIRED EXPERIENCE: 

• 6+ Years of experience working in agile organizations with an agile coaching role and 3+ years of agile delivery experience.
• Deep understanding of SAFe and Agile with hands-on experience in Scrum, Kanban, Lean, and/or eXtreme Programming.
• Designing or contributing to the Organization’s Agile Transformation Vision, Roadmap, Strategy and Execution based on SAFe or other scaling frameworks
• Experience removing bottlenecks, implementing process improvements in a large enterprise.
• SAFe SPC Certification (Certified Program Consulting) or equivalent.
• Coach individuals and teams across a large and complex business area to adopt Agile principles, values and practices.
• Actively escalate observed issues and remove impediments; resolve conflicts across teams and identify risks and recommend mitigations and solutions.
• Continuously assess the Agile maturity of teams and individuals at all levels of leadership, educating and mentoring to address gaps.
• Use role specific coaching techniques that increase collaboration, transparency and promote a culture of experimentation and innovation.
• Ability to provide recommendations for improvements to existing agile organizational practices and patterns at the Portfolio, Program, and team level.
• Ability to identify ways to improve Organization’s agile maturity.
• Maintain best practices, tools, templates, and other content to support agile implementation and communities of practice.
• Facilitate open communication among teams and stakeholders.
• Promote positive team dynamics to ensure members collaborate and work effectively within and across teams.

PREFERRED EXPERIENCE: 

• People leadership/management experience.
• Experience championing organizational change initiatives preferred.
• Experience implementing Agile principles and practices in different cultures and environments preferred.
• Experience infusing Agile principles, practices and methodologies to achieve team success.
• Demonstrate a commitment to continually improve, share learning with others and encourage team development.
• Expert in facilitating agile training sessions, motivating the team to learn agile principles.

EDUCATION & CERTIFICATIONS:

• Bachelor's degree (or higher)
• 5+ years of experience as an Agile Coach with SAFe Agile Experience
• Proven experience facilitating SAFe events including PI Planning, ART Synchs and managing dependencies across multiple Agile Release Trains (ARTs).