Agile Forest

Find your path to agility with Renee Troughton






Scrum Master

  • Done a 2 day CSM/PSM course
  • Reading the basic Agile books

Agile Coach

  • Starting to read most of the key Agile and Lean books
  • Tries to resolve complex departmental waste issues


Enterprise Agile Coach



5 thoughts on “Enterprise Coach, Agile Coach, Scrum Master: What’s the difference?

  1. I would tend to describe the differences between ScrumMaster and an Agile Coach in terms of the scope of the organisation that they are involved with (horizontally in terms of how many teams and products/initiatives) and the degree to which they are embedded with a given team (ScrumMaster) vs move to where the needs are (Agile Coach). Isn’t that more relevant in describing a role than the books that they may have read?

    This sounds like the ScrumMaster only works inwardly with a cross-functional development team. What about the ScrumMaster’s services to the Product Owner, to technical practice improvement and to the product / project community inc. business stakeholders and management to help them understand how to become aligned with the Agile approach? This ScrumMaster role isn’t only about training, mentoring and coaching the development team. That is likely to lead to local optimisation. It’s a capability building role that is relevant as long as there are capability improvements worth leading and investing it.

    Might a ScrumMaster need a bit more of what is under Agile Coach to assist in the ways described in the Example ScrumMaster Checklist?

    How does having ScrumMasters tie an org “solely to Scrum”? Scrum is a minimalist framework which, by design requires other Agile-aligned elements to be added. I think that such a rationale for no ScrumMasters could only hold if the organisation wants to avoid the most widely used Agile framework altogether.

    Re Enterprise’ Agile Coach, I would emphasise Flow through the Value Stream, Organisational Design and Leadership Style coaching.

    1. Hi Rowan, If I said that mentoring and training was only for the development team, then it was my error. I would have hoped I said the team which includes the Product Owner and yes naturally I would extend that to anyone with interactions with the team.

      Re: the “soley to Scrum”…. I am pretty sure I didn’t say that. In fact, I am pretty sure that I said Scrum Masters should have good general knowledge of XP and Kanban as well. Also not sure how we got onto the No ScrumMasters debate.

  2. Jonathan says:

    I’d call out that at a corporate level scaled agile.. beit SAFe or Nexus is aimed at a single product with a single product backlog, where as enterprise agile can have multiple products and P.O.s but a single roadmap.
    Typically enterprise agile leads to themed teams

    1. Hi Jonathan, Thanks for the comment, I agree that what I am describing is better known as enterprise agility. I feel that Enterprise Agility is more what organisations need than a scaled approach to Agile, just most of them don’t know the difference, hence the purpose of the post.

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