Position: Agile Coach
Location: NYC,NY/ Alpharetta, GA
Duration: Long Term
JD:Required:
Agile Transformation Program Firm has embarked on a Firm-wide Agile/DevOps initiative to transform how Business and Technology collaborate to deliver value with greater alignment, speed, and productivity. We established the Agile Center of Excellence, with sponsorship and focused at the highest level, to develop this transformational strategy through guidance, governance, training, enablement, and culture change.
Position Description
- The role of Agile Coach is a unique opportunity to join the new and exciting Agile Transformation Program and have an outsized commercial impact on the Firm-wide adoption of Agile/DevOps at one of the world's premier financial services firms, Morgan Stanley.
- You will work closely with highly motivated teams, as well as senior product owners and stakeholders in both the business and technology, to ensure successful outcomes for Agile program participants.
- You will be a thought partner, a change agent, and above all, a role model and teacher.
- If you excel where vision, innovation, and a passion for constant improvement are critical; if you enjoy working with teams to realize theirbest; if you are a life-long learner, a critical thinker, and a strong team player, then this could be your next career.
Qualifications and Experience
- An experienced and respected practitioner of Agile; not just a Coach but a Player, with the credibility that comes from having experienced Agile adoption firsthand.
- A passionate and articulate teacher of the how and why.
- A hands-on leader with a track record of high-quality delivery.
- A change agent and culture carrier.
- An excellent communicator with great people skills.
- A lifelong student of continuous and ongoing experimentation, learning and improvement , someone who takes personal satisfaction from seeing teams learn and grow.
- An active follower of industry trends, a voracious consumer of Agile thought leadership, blogs, community activities, and other sources of insight.
- 3 years' experience in an Agile leadership role such as Coach, Scrum Master, or Product Owner, in which you can evidence significant commercial impact.
- 5 years' experience in a customer facing, hands-on delivery role, working with or within Agile teams to deliver significant business value.
- A track record of training and coaching teams and individuals at various levels.
- A track record of applying Agile and DevOps approaches, practices, ceremonies and techniques through experimentation and improvement; a library of lessons learned which you call on to inform the right approach for each new situation.
- Broad knowledge of Agile approaches such as Scrum and Kanban; Agile techniques such as story mapping or big room planning; DevOps concepts such as Continuous Deployment or Behavior Driven Development; and approaches for Agile at scale, such as in portfolio planning and dependency management ? combined with a deep expertise in one or more areas.
Responsibilities:
- Providing coaching, support, and guidance to Squad members and all relevant stakeholders to influence Agile culture and behaviors.
- Ensure squads are aligned to the Morgan Stanley Agile playbook and measurement framework.
- Model behaviors to support the organization's transformation to a new way of working.
- Actively creating and maintaining the culture within your Squads and Fleets, based on the organization and Agile leadership behaviors.
- Help embed the nervous system of the new way of working (e.g., cross-functional collaboration, etc.) within your Squads and across the organization.
- Bring a continuous improvement and MVP mindset to the Squad’s work.
- Reinforce the right culture, behaviors, and mindset within your Squads and across the organization, based on the organization's leadership principles.
- Challenge and provide constructive feedback and recommendations for improvement to Squad practices enabling Squads to realize their mission and deliver on their KPI.
- Help to anticipate and resolve potential blockers (e.g., resource constraints or skill gaps, that prevent the Squad from doing its best work).
- Ensure Squads and Fleets are interacting with dependent stakeholders effectively (e.g., with Senior Leadership, Fleet Leads, Product Owners).
- Assess and enhance the Agile maturity of Squads.
- Observe and engage with individual Squad members to identify opportunities to improve Agile performance and provide training and resources to equip Squad members with management practices to enhance their Agile maturity.
- Provide ongoing training to new Agile Coaches and members of the Agile Delivery Practice.
- Assist with and train on product framing, story writing, story mapping, and sizing.