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Agile Coach: Crucial for Transformation
Agile Coach or Scrum Master: What’s the difference? (+ Free White Paper)
here is currently a big demand for Agile Coaches. But what is the difference between an Agile Coach or Scrum Master? People often ask us what such a coach can add to a modern, self-managing organization. Aren’t the teams already coached by the Scrum Master? Yes they are! There are many similarities between the two roles. Both the Scrum Master and Agile Coach help organizations to develop an Agile mindset. They both use similar techniques to support and facilitate teams in this respect. The difference between them lies in their scope.
The Scrum Master
The Scrum Master is part of a specific scrum team and plays a leading role in this team. He or she is in the workplace every day, knows the team inside out and knows exactly what’s going on.
The Scrum Master’s concrete tasks:
- Ensure that the team works according to the Scrum rules.
- Organise practical aspects: plan meetings, look for process improvements and ensure that the developers have the right tools, etc.
- Solve problems (impediments) that the team can’t solve itself.
In addition, he or she supports the team in the broadest sense of the word, for example by helping the Product Owner with the user stories or by stepping in during testing.
The Agile Coach
Unlike the Scrum Master, the Agile Coach isn’t part of a specific Scrum team. He or she has an independent role and will coach several teams and/or the management.
The grow and focus of the Agile Coach has several levels. A Team and a Program Coach are focussing on guiding the individual team members of teams. The Enterprise Coach is focussing on the implementation of the Agile way of working in the organisation as a whole. The Agile Coach Bootcamp is focussing on the team and program coaching.
The Agile coach’s concrete tasks
- Make the different teams and individual employees aware of their strengths and weaknesses so that they can develop towards an Agile mindset.
- Promote a healthy group dynamic by offering the teams new tools and techniques (e.g. for the retrospective).
- Allow teams and activities to work together effectively, for example by implementing the Agile way of working.
- Supporting individuals and teams by using the competencies: coaching, mentoring, facilitating and teaching.
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Conclusion: Agile Coach or Scrum Master?
So although there is a lot of overlap between the roles of Scrum Master and Agile Coach, there are also big differences. Agile Coaches don’t deal with the content, but above all with the process. Experience teaches us that this transition is a very radical and time-consuming operation that is never 100% finished. So the Agile Coach has a bright future.
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