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
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