Agile Coach - 6 Months

Agile Coach - 6 months - Brussels - France Or Nld + Eng

Function Description

- For its development teams working on in-house developed products, my client is actively looking for an agile coach with IT analyst/development background who will be able to:
- Work with software development teams to help improve their effectiveness and get the benefits of applying agile principles to their work
- Blend in with an agile software development team, developing business products in short development cycles (using scrum)
- Ensure scrum is implemented correctly, while realizing a proper fit with the existing development practices: work out what agile practices will help to solve the team challenges rather than to convert teams to an ideal agile process
- Coach and mentor new or existing scrum masters and roles in the product team.
- Ensure that the ways of working are consistent across the teams
- Explain and promote scrum and agile principles, practices and values to team members, management and stakeholders
- Assist the teams to focus on the timely delivery of high quality products, in line with the priorities of the product backlog
- Participate in estimating and prioritizing development activities required to address the business requirements
- Contribute to the definition of enhancements for applications and team operations

Responsibilities

- Act as scrum master for 3 or more scrum teams with a focus on guiding the teams towards improving the way they work.
- Facilitate team meetings (eg, sprint planning, sprint demo, retrospectives, decision making meetings, etc.)
- Assist the Proxy product owner with keeping the backlog groomed.
- Ensure that user stories and tasks are effective, very clear and concise, and are easy to understand and implement by the scrum teams
- Coach the team in understanding and translating customer business needs into user stories (and a further breakdown in tasks and activities) for the relevant roles in the scrum teams
- Ensure cross-team coordination and communication
- Identify impediments (blocking issues) that may prevent teams from delivering. Use influence skills to remove impediments
- Help the team see their own process and improve their processes. Maintain relevant metrics that help the team see how they are doing
- Liaise between the developers, analysts and testers.
- Foster better communication between the disciplines.
- Apply project management skills when necessary.
- Take responsibility for managing dependencies between the client teams and 3rd parties, or between the client teams and other scrum teams.
- Transfer knowledge and skills to team members so the team becomes more self sufficient

Experience & expertise

- background knowledge of gas flow management domain is an asset
- proven experience (minimum 2-3 years) in an agile software development context
- knowledgeable in change management techniques
- certified scrum master, product owner
- experience in guiding agile teams through agile transitions
- experience with improving customer satisfaction and the reduction of product defect rates
- general knowledge of architectural techniques and structures
- Solid technical affinity, able to think along bottom-up reconstruction of application functionalities, starting from technical documentation or even codebase.

Problem solving skills:
- analytical and synthesizing skills to clearly recognize issues and requirements and determine solutions for them Technical Skills
- fluency in the use of the following tools:

o documentation-communication tools (Microsoft Office or equivalent) o project reporting tools o MS TFS (or similar)
- General knowledge of technical IT matters like databases, SQL, .NET architectures and tools, code sourcing
- the ability to participate in the analysis of functional problems and the selection of the most appropriate solution

Communication Skills
- Active listener & motivational speaker (treat team and stakeholders as the experts by showing that you are listening to them)
- Rather than telling people what they should do, ask questions to encourage the team to think for themselves
- Be the approachable go-to expert for all scrum and agile questions and advise. Ability to explain the "why" behind agile practices

Personal Skills
- Goal directed attitude
- Find satisfaction in helping others succeed
- Initiative, flexibility, optimism, determination and resilience
- Working in a team environment, supportive, not cowed by authority
- Able to navigate conflict
- Ability to work relatively independently and proactively following the priorities and timing of the product backlog and sprint planning

Analytical skills
- allowing rapid learning of various and new businesses or technical matters in the context of multi products maintenance.
- Ability to communicate in Dutch (spoken) or French (spoken) and English (written).
- Customer, solution and improvement minded
- Elimination factors are: preference for directing others, defensiveness, judgmental attitude, low threshold for frustration

Offer:

Daily rate based on your experience .

If you are interested in this challenging opportunity send me your CV at (see below) or call me.