Agile Coach

Genesis Consulting has an immediate opportunity for an experienced, forward thinking Agile Coach with a passion for growth and business transformation for a Federal client in the Washington, DC area. Join our team and work on challenging, complex solutions that are driving innovation and technology advancement in the local community. Work with teams that are rapidly delivering value to their customers leveraging concepts of Lean, Agile, Kanban and SAFe. Our clients are some of the world’s leading companies and the candidate will be a part of challenging projects to build and support technical solutions for their needs.

Duties and Responsibilities:

The Agile Coach is responsible for the ensuring that the Agile development practices are followed and adjusted as required. The Agile Coach works with the teams and the organization to establish and adapt to Agile practices that help to ensure high quality results and a high level of customer satisfaction. Coaches may be required to work at the team level to ensure that delivery teams are adopting agile and performing effectively; at the portfolio or program level, to help agencies to establish the appropriate processes for managing a portfolio of work in an agile way; at the organization level, to drive strategic change across the organization and ensure that adoption of agile techniques is embedded from the most senior levels of the organization; or across all levels to ensure that organizations adopt a pragmatic approach to the way in which they govern delivery and continuous improvement of digital services. Duties include but may not be limited to:

• Embed an agile culture using techniques from a wide range or agile and lean methodologies and frameworks, but be methodology agnostic
• Help to create an open and trust-based environment, which enables a focus on delivery and facilitates continuous improvement
• Assess the culture of a team or organization and delivery processes in place to identify improvements and facilitate these improvements with the right type of support
• Showcase relevant tools and techniques such as coaching, advising, workshops, and mentoring
• Engage with stakeholders at all levels of the organization
• Develop clear lines of escalation, in agreement with senior managers
• Ensure any stakeholder can easily find out an accurate and current project or program status, without disruption to delivery
• Work effectively with other suppliers and agencies
• Apply best tools and techniques to: team roles, behaviors, structure and culture, agile ceremonies and practices, knowledge transfer and sharing, program management, cross-team coordination, and overall governance of digital service delivery
• Ensure key metrics and requirements that support the team and delivery are well defined and maintained
• Equip staff with the ability to coach others
• If organization level, executive coaching on the fundamental considerations of digital service delivery design
• Improve continuous integration and delivery while enabling the production of working quality software
• Provide services to develop, document and implement agile practices that are situationally appropriate
• Provide mentorship and education as well as developing/delivering guidance and instructions documentation to enable program personnel in defining the organization’s Agile processes, such as engage in Agile ceremonies, backlogs grooming, agile project management, document use cases, and developing user stories
• Must demonstrate experience designing, implementing, and leading agile coaching engagements for mid to executive level professionals, and emerging leaders
• Support portfolio and program management processes and stakeholders to improve Lean-Agile product management workflow
• Lead release planning activities, including developing capability maps, feature maps, and story maps that support rapid releases of minimum viable products and incremental delivery of enhancements
• Lead retrospectives and process improvement efforts to improve overall throughput and decrease lead time from prioritization to delivery/release
• Support senior decision-makers with plans, reports, metrics, analyses, and recommendations
• Lead the planning for agile transformation and coaching activities, including schedules and coaching implementation plans that incorporate the Coaches’ approach of guidance, instruction, and direction provided to ensure implementation and sustainment of the Agile approach, and monthly status reports
• Deliver workshops and training as required on topics such as Lean, Agile, DevSecOps, Lean UX, Design Thinking, and related topics
• Review current business practices, principles and processes and conduct business gap analysis on programs to define current ‘as-is’ business practices and outline path toward ‘to-be’ agile practices to be formulated as recommendations for government implementation
• Assist program personnel in applying and adapting agile processes throughout the programs, identify and report risks and issues that constrain programs and agile teams from effectively and quickly delivering business value, and lead coaching meetings with branch and division managers to support business improvement practices within the organization

Requirements

Minimum Qualifications/Experience:

• 5-10+ years of IT experience and/or complex systems development;
• 5+ years’ experience using Agile principles, practices, and methodologies such as Scrum, XP, Lean, SAFe on technical projects
• 5+ years of progressive accomplishment managing and implementing large, complex information systems
• 5+ years in an agile delivery leadership, management, or coaching role
• Proven leadership ability in dynamic agile environment working with executive and senior-level stakeholders
• Impeccable professionalism and strong communication skills
• Humble and results-oriented servant leader with team-first mentality who follows through on commitments
• Background in process improvement, business process reengineering, and
• Comfortable leading and facilitating backlog refinement, release planning, retrospective, demos, and project status meetings
• Experience planning strategic initiatives including developing operating models, plans, associated communications and graphics, and related supporting documentation
• Comfortable consulting with and coaching senior management and executives
• Real-world experience that demonstrates use of advanced practices and principles of Scrum and successful guidance/coaching of organizations through agile transformation challenges
• Experience in leadership coaching, organizational transformation, and Agile practices at the teams (Program and below) and at the enterprise level
• Experience with assisting leadership and working-level team members with removing barriers and embracing transformation by assisting each organization to customize its own path, approach and solutions to becoming Agile
• Leading Agile transformation by leveraging best practices
• Experience guiding Agile transformation and execution of Agile lifecycle via Agile application lifecycle management tools
• Experience in coordinating large solutions

Minimum Education:

• Bachelor’s Degree and 5-10+ years’ experience, or a Master’s Degree

Required Certifications:

• Must hold an Agile certification such as ICAgile, PMI, CSM, SAFe, etc.
• SAFe Certification Preferred
• Additional SAFe Certifications Preferred

Other:

• Must be US Citizen
• Willingness to be on-site in New Carrollton (Lanham), Maryland
• Willingness to travel and/or telecommute on occasion depending on customer needs