Agile Coach Job Description: Roles, Salary

A team is an integration of individuals from different backgrounds and experiences. Integrating these individuals in a way to work together and achieve success is a tough job. However, an agile coach is an experienced professional who can help teams work with an agile approach. 

The role of an agile coach is to help groups and teams follow a plan to develop software more efficiently. The coach possesses abilities to create documents for learning lessons and finds ways to improve work. A good coach must track the quality and metrics procedures to implement changes and improvements in the organisation. 

The skills to be a successful agile coach are communication skills to convey ideas clearly and avoid jargon. People skills are also necessary to interact with employees of the company. It also helps create professional relations with coworkers and stakeholders that are beneficial in future. 

Individuals can acquire the skills and knowledge to be agile coaches with experience or through courses. One can also pursue our Agile Coach Certification to be a successful coach. Further, one can find more information about the agile coach job description through this article.

Agile Coach Description - An overview

An agile coach helps manages and empower a team to improve their ability to deliver services and products. They work with scrum groups and coach them to upskill and use agile methods to deliver high-quality results. They may also shift the entire work culture of an organisation to adopt an agile methodology.

An agile coach’s responsibilities and roles may depend on three main principles:

• Teams: The coach must work with the team to collaborate and build trust. They must also ensure that all the decisions made are collaborative.
• Empowerments: The coach must empower the team both mentally and physically. They must ensure the team has the support and information to succeed.
• Predictability: The coach must predict the expectations and timelines for the team in advance. This way, the team knows what to expect from the process and system.
• An Agile coach must use their knowledge and experience to ensure their team's success. They must replace a command and control culture with a collaborative one. This way, they can ensure well-being while attaining success.

The proficient agile coach will work at the tactical level with each team member to improve management. While integrating agile processes into each task to enhance ways of working. 

Further, one can find the detailed roles and responsibilities of an agile coach job description in the article. So, read on!

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Roles and Responsibilities of an Agile Coach

An agile coach must fulfil many roles and responsibilities to attain all goals and ensure team victory. 

One can understand the roles and responsibilities of agile coaching in three core patterns. These patterns are Enterprise Agile Coach, Agile Coach - Process and Agile Coach - Delivery.

Enterprise Agile Coach

The Enterprise Agile Coach implements plans to transition an entire organisation to Agility. 

Also Read: Planned Business Values vs Actual Business Values

Role:

This type of agile coach implements new ways of working for the transition to agility. They design and apply new plans and roadmaps for a smooth transition.

The coaches need to be strategic to fulfil this role. They must integrate the organisation's core values with the transformation process for business agility. 

Responsibilities:

The responsibilities of an Enterprise Agile Coach include:

• Providing regular training on agility to others
• Leading the enterprise to practice and improve
• Coaching and mentoring other agile coaches
• Smoothly facilitating changes in ways of working
• Counselling on the business model
• Dealing with resistance to change
• Implementing policies to support agile approaches
• Changing organisation’s policies to support agile approaches
• Ensuring structural changes and processes at the organisational level
• Teaching Agile Processes to senior managers
• Guiding and evaluating agile frameworks
• Forming relationships with leaders to fasten the transformation process
• Engaging with the employees and managers of the organisation for connections
• System things to point out dysfunctions and bottlenecks.

Agile Coach for Process

Also Read : Agile vs V Model 

Role: 

The agile process coach implements and adopts agile approaches through a culture shift. However, unlike Enterprise agile coaches, they don’t transform the company culture. They only lead and transform the cultures of a few teams under them. 

The coaches use their influence and experience to change the culture from command and control to a collaborative one. They interact and work with each team member tactically. It helps enhance proficiency in executing Scrum processes. They are Agile Scrum masters for various teams and improve working ways to enable agility.

Responsibilities:

The core responsibilities of an agile process coach are:

• Coaching Agile Teams
• Developing an agile mindset to ensure a smooth transition of culture to agile
• Mentoring Product Owners and Scrum Teams
• Training team members' agile ways of working
• Support agile-based processes by implementing governing policies.
• Recognising relevant metrics to define the measurement system
• Implement changes to ease into new ways of working
• Expose dysfunctions by applying system thinking
• Counselling and evaluating agile frameworks
• Thinking of new ways to form contracts with customers and vendors

Agile Coach for Delivery

An agile delivery coach implements plans and ensures the transition of project delivery to an agile approach.

Role:

The core role of an agile delivery coach is to make successful business deliveries at a sustainable pace. They must teach, mentor and coach teams to adopt agile approaches and frameworks. 

An agile delivery coach must work with employees and stakeholders to implement agile approaches. 

Responsibilities:

The responsibilities that an agile delivery coach needs to fulfil are:

• Achieving high-quality products and short cycle deliveries by teaching agile approaches to teams. 
• Guiding teams on agile practices like planning, estimating and story mapping.
• Enabling teams to perform well
• Resolving delivery impediments
• Conducting multi-team events like room planning, retrospectives and the scrum of scrum
• Implementing necessary changes in ways of working
• System thinking to bring bottlenecks to the surface
• Measure and test the maturity of a team regularly
• Mentor and guide other scrum masters
• Engage stakeholders to achieve business values
• Improved prediction of solution delivery
• Developing self-organising agile teams.

Senior Agile Coach Job Description

The Senior agile coach is an experienced professional responsible for mentoring teams and implementing agile practices. The coach may have to mentor directors, QA leads, Technical leads, Team leads and product owners. Further, they upgrade frameworks, processes, and principles to deliver quality business capabilities. 

Since these coaches are more experienced and knowledgeable, they serve as subject matter experts and implement agile approaches. They may also scope agile practices throughout the organisation. 

These coaches must possess people skills and communication skills along with other technical skills. They must implement smooth changes by taking help from other seniors to ensure a maintained office environment while applying changes. 

Senior agile coaches must also display behaviours that manifest key mindsets of being Agile. Other than that, they just identify opportunities for continuous team and operational improvements.

Salary of an Agile Coach

The salaries of agile coaches depend on various factors. For instance, the pay may be lower for a fresher agile coach. However, as they gain experience and become experts, there will be a significant increase in their salaries as well. 

Agile coach pay may also depend on the location where they work. For Eg. if they work in larger cities like Delhi or Mumbai, they can expect higher salaries. While the pay may be lower for people working in smaller towns and rural areas. 

In India, the average salary of an agile coach is INR 15 lakhs per annum. The salary for an entry-level agile coach may be around INR 10 lakhs per annum. However, with experience and time, an experienced agile coach can earn up to INR 20 lakhs per annum.

Become an Agile Coach

An Agile Coach job is well-paid with high scope in the future. It is a good option for students and professionals to excel in their careers.

Anyone can become an agile coach by gaining agile coaching certification. They can get this via online or offline courses. StarAgile offer A+ Agile coach programs that allow individuals to learn and implement agile approaches. 

The Agile Scrum Master Certification by StarAgile is a very beneficial course and teaches the implementation of agile approaches in scrum groups. One can also learn how to develop agile principles for their team and ensure success in the market. It is a great way to boost one’s career and must be preferred. So, sign up now!