Agile Development Mentor

Title: Agile Development Mentor

Location: Seattle Area

Openings: Multiple

Type: Contract or Contract-to-Hire

• Serve as a senior team member, responsible for facilitating the adoption, implementation and sustainability of Agile processes, principles, and practices
• Provide high-touch and hands-on team guidance, support, and coaching in close cooperation and collaboration across all roles and functions, to facilitate increasing maturity at a sustainable pace.
• Change Management
• Scaling Agile; release planning and dependency management
• Sprint events: planning, stand-ups, refinement, reviews/demos, retrospectives
• Impediment identification and removal
• Persona development
• Story mapping; road mapping and planning
• Backlog management: definition, grooming, and prioritization
• Story sizing and task estimation
• Team building and communication
• Tracking and using velocity, burndown and burnup
• Assist team members in identifying, prioritizing and either clearing or escalating impediments
• Provide training to Scrum Masters, Product Owners and Teams (i.e., individual and workshops)
• Serve as an advisor to teams; leading by example and challenging the status quo
• Perform ongoing assessments of the teams' Scrum maturity to inform ongoing support decisions
• Cultivate Communities of Practice
• Partner with Scrum Masters to identify and support opportunities to increase team maturity
• Partner with Product Owners to ensure vision, roadmap and personas are well-defined and understood
• Guide scrum masters on becoming better at facilitation and focusing teams on completing tasks
• Help teams continuously reflect and improve, becoming more effective in their roles and increasing their predictability, collaboration, and quality practices
• Promote environment and culture of experimentation and innovation
• Foster a trusting environment focused on servant leadership and continuous improvement
• Draft and maintain training materials, collect and collate feedback from training sessions
• Ensure Agile adherence and consistency while maintaining teams' abilities to be self- directed

Qualifications

• BA/BS or equivalent work experience required
• Expert practitioner of Scrum and Lean Start Up
• Excellent communication, facilitation and relationship building skills
• Proven success coaching teams to adopt Agile methodologies
• Minimum of two (2) years of real-world Scrum coaching experience, guiding at least two (2) organizations through varied challenges of Scrum adoption (5 years ideal)
• Minimum of two (2) years as a practicing Scrum Master
• Diverse change management experience across multiple organizations, teams, products, environments and technologies
• Ability to facilitate discussion at all levels of the organization to resolve conflicts
• Experience with approaches for scaling Agile (e.g., SAFe, LeSS)
• Stays current in the Agile space as exemplified by ongoing education in Agile frameworks training, conference attendance, user group participation and self-study
• Availability for some travel
• Working knowledge of Agile tools (e.g., Rally, Atlassian tools -- JIRA, Confluence)
• Working knowledge of the fundamentals of software development processes and procedures
• Coaching experience at a Fortune 500 (large size) organization highly desirable
• Scrum Coach Certification (CSC) preferred