What is an Agile Coach?
An Agile coach is responsible for Agile transition/transformation within teams and an organization. Agile coach gets identified or hired while transitioning from their existing working practices, such as Waterfall, into working with the Agile values and principles. They usually have much experience with different Agile methodologies, such as Scrum, XP, Kanban, Large-Scale Scrum, and Scaled Agile Framework. They are generally proficient in coaching and mentoring and can guide and help people figure out the right solutions for their challenges.
Why should an organization adopt an agile way of working?
Compared with traditional management approaches, agile offers several significant benefits. Agile promotes self-management, and self-management increases productivity and satisfaction among staff. Agile is inspired by lean thinking that minimizes waste. An agile way of working improves visibility and helps in continually adapting to customers' changing priorities. Agile enhances customer engagement and satisfaction, brings the most valuable products and features to market faster and more predictably, and reduces risk.
Difference between Agile and Scrum?
Agile is a set of values and principles to respond to change faster while developing a product. Scrum is a framework to apply all these values and principles. Scrum has been around since 1995, although it gained more popularity in the last 10-12 years as many organizations get attracted towards it after the 2008 financial crisis. The agile manifesto was written in 2001 by 17 software professionals and brined all popular empirical approaches under a single umbrella to develop software products. Scrum is not the only way to adopt these values and principles but is most popular on the name agile methods. There are others like Extreme Programming, Large-Scale Scrum, Scaled Agile Framework, and Lean Software Development.
What are the top 5 challenges while transitioning to agile?
Here are some common challenges faced by corporate while transitioning to agile.
• Lack of agile knowledge: Resistance from the employee due to lack of knowledge and benefit that agile brings to them.
• Cross-functional team: Cross-functional team formation is challenging in many organizations as employees have worked in a single function for a long time.
• Self-organization: This is also due to habit as employees have been in command and control conditions for a long time.
• Ownership: Lack of support from senior management, as many still believe it is a job for IT.
• Lack of Agile Coaches: Successful transition needs support from experienced agile coaches. Lack of agile coaches or inexperienced agile coaches takes more time than expected.
To view the full blog and this blog "Agile Coach Interview Questions" is originally published on Agilemania website.
