Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches

We have experienced that despite the remark made by my manager, the teams will do their things, teams still need help to grow their agile maturity and business impact.

Therefore, we distinguish the role of the Team coach. The team coach works close with the team citee:[clean-code,clean-coder], PO [3] and the Scrum master [4, 2]. The team coach helps the different teams to identify improvements. He supports the scrum masters in their ambition to help the teams forward [5].

She is the advisor to empower the team to reach focusing fluency in the agile fluency model.

I expect a professional Scrum master to possess the above capabilities. Teaching, coaching, and mentoring the Scrum team to grasp agility are one of her main responsibilities. Scrum masters in an organization shall exchange ideas and tips through a community of practice.

The delivery coach has a strong focus on optimizing the flow of the development process. She is the advisor to empower the team to reach delivering fluency in the agile fluency model.

To increase the delivered business value, the delivery coach identifies bottlenecks, replaces local optimizations for more generic solutions. She builds quality into the software development lifecycle.

She sits with the team to help them automate deployments and testing and to embrace development practices like BDD and TDD.

The delivery coach will also explain the importance of this to the leadership teams, so they support the teams towards their technical excellence.

I expect a technical Scrum master to possess the above capabilities. If not, he must hire a technical delivery coach to support his Scrum team. Most organizations cannot afford multiple coaches for one team.

The role of leadership is often seen as the biggest challenge in having a successful agile transformation. A leader sets the tone for the entire organization [6, 7, 8, 9].

Leaders should communicate what agility means for their organization and be an example by adopting agile values and practices.

The agile counselor does not focus that much on the development process as the delivery coach but aims to empower leadership. She has an eye for the health of the teams and will address bad smell with the leadership team. The counselor coaches the leaders on their agile mindset [10, 11, 12].

She points out, for example, when old-school thinking and behavior hurt on the performance and delivery.

These three profiles bear similarities with Adkin’s areas of mastery. Both distinguish between technical and transformational support.

The delivery coach has some commonalities with technical mastery, but rather than having a team focus, she will also act on leadership level to create awareness and commitment for technical excellence. While doing this, she plays a crucial part in the Agile transformation.

The agile counselor works with the leadership team, which requires business mastery as well as transformational skills.

A team coach preferably supports the team by offering technical support and coach on the process and Agile mindset. Being part of the coaches’ team, she will actively participate in the transformation as well.