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