
Every organization's coaching needs are unique, based on the current state and level of maturity within Agile and SAFe. In the beginning stages, day to day guidance is a critical part to the success of a new transformation. While trying the internal path may work for some, the majority of organizations will progress at a much faster pace with external experience and support.
ICON's coaches are the best in the industry with decades of experience. Our coaches have been a part of multiple transformations, each with a focus on different parts of an organization. It's important to identify what type of coaches you need, to span across the necessary parts of the organization. Find out below which coach might be right for you.

ICON's Agile coaches are specialized to target different roles and levels in your organization.
An ICON SAFe Transformation Coach designs Agile, SAFe, and DevOps Transformation solutions, matched to unique customer situations.
- Conducts assessments for Lean-Agile or SAFe readiness, DevOps maturity, SAFe effectiveness, and business agility transformation health.
- Develops a common understanding of Agile, Lean, SAFe and DevOps principles with the Leadership team to articulate a vision, roadmap, and plan for the transformation.
- Develops sustainable centers of excellence (e.g., for DevOps, Agile) and communities of practice to build long lasting advocates and a culture of improvements, innovation, and learning.
- Identifies and coaches internal champions to replace reliance on external coaches with internal expertise.
- Guides value stream identification Workshops.
- Addresses fundamental shifts of going from a project focus to product focus.
An ICON SAFe Portfolio Coach guides people and refines processes to build systems and solutions that the Enterprise needs to meet its strategic initiatives.
- Applies business strategy and management frameworks, lean product management techniques, business process management approaches, and other techniques that relate to innovating products, processes, or operations in the business domain.
- Collaborates with Senior Leadership and the Transformation Coach, if different, to develop and execute the transformation plan.
- Works with the Transformation leaders and senior internal coaches to build a Lean Culture leadership and plan the “bridge” between the Business functions and solution delivery teams.
- Supports implementation of the business strategy through programs that develop and maintain the company's value-added products and services.
- Guides Investment funding for allocation to ongoing programs and new initiatives, in accordance with business strategy and current strategic themes.
- Assists with the reinforcement and anchoring of Lean-Agile values into the company culture.
- Provides portfolio context and Life-Cycle Governance.
- Coaches Lean Portfolio Management team members, Enterprise Architects, and Epic Owners in their new responsibilities; including Portfolio backlog creation, prioritization, and refinement.
An ICON SAFe Product Management Coach promotes customer-centricity, problem solving, building business cases, prioritization, analytics, and measurement.
- Assesses and coaches on customer-centricity and understanding users, including design thinking.
- Ensures clarity on the driving work that supports the business strategy and is aligned on the pain points of the consumer.
- Assesses and coaches to create a broad, innovative, end-to-end solution vision with a focus on user experience to increase motivation and remove friction by utilizing different UX frameworks.
- Assists in creating a roadmap to phase work in a meaningful way that delivers value, fosters learning, and leaves the client with a positive experience. Embrace MVP and leverage Lean Startup techniques.
- Coaches data-driven priority decisions and decision authority.
- Sets priorities focusing on both company and use goals, employing techniques to prioritize work.
- Coaches on backlog management techniques, including tools, as well as level of detail in epics, features, stories, etc.
- Assesses and coaches on level of team maturity, including product management expertise and the ecosystem of the team related to discipline and usage of backlogs to drive work.
An ICON SAFe Solution/Multi Train Coach prepares, plans, trains, and coaches multiple Agile Release Trains (ARTs) as a Solution Train.
- Guides development of a vision and roadmap for modifying Agile adoption, to include strong metrics and reporting systems, for continuous improvement.
- Coaches senior and middle managers in their new responsibilities.
- Coaches Solution and Product Managers and Solution Architects and System Architects in their new responsibilities.
- Coaches Solution and Release Train Engineers in their new responsibilities.
- Coaches Agile teams, Scrum Masters and Product Owners in their new responsibilities.
- Conducts regular Inspect and Adapt Workshops to discover improvement opportunities.
- Develops and helps collect usable metrics for management and executives.
- Provides support and education for improving estimates during PI Planning.
- Develops a sustainable Agile CoE, Agile working groups, and internal Agile community.
- Identifies and coaches internal champions to remove reliance on external coaches.
An ICON SAFe Program Coach prepares, plans, trains, and coaches Agile Release Trains (ART).
- Guides development of a vision and roadmap for modifying Agile adoption, to include strong metrics and reporting systems, for continuous improvement.
- Coaches senior and middle managers in their new responsibilities.
- Coaches Product Managers in their new responsibilities.
- Coaches Release Train Engineers in their new responsibilities.
- Conducts regular Inspect and Adapt Workshops to discover improvement opportunities.
- Develops and helps collect usable metrics for management and executives.
- Provides support and education for improving estimates during PI Planning.
- Develops a sustainable Agile CoE, Agile working groups, and internal Agile community.
An ICON SAFe Team Coach serves as a coach/trainer for SAFe and Agile teams.
- Creates a culture of self-organization and experimentation, where learning and innovation can flourish.
- Coaches the whole team to reinforce the Lean-Agile mindset, principles, values, and practices.
- Coaches the product owner and Scrum Master in their unique roles.
- Facilitates and coaches the teams on effective ceremony execution (standups, estimation, backlog refinement, demonstrations, and retrospectives).
- Ensure the team's progress/success and measures are highly visible to stakeholders and the team.
- Ensures the teams adhere to the Client's agile process and working agreements regarding cadence, tool usage and a variety of procedures that must be synchronized to be effective.
An ICON SAFe DevOps Coach supports leadership and coaches clients on SAFe DevOps projects.
- Locates and assesses specific root causes of delivery pain, establishes baseline metrics, and creates an action plan to deliver measurable DevOps improvements.
- Aligns DevOps goals with strategic business objectives, establishes measurable performance goals and defines the highest-value, shortest-lead-time path to success.
- Aligns Leaders, Development and Operations on principles of continuous delivery and prepares them to execute the DevOps action plan within a SAFe context.
- Guides the development of a DevOps culture, through targeted people, process, and technology improvements and to maximize value delivered by SAFe initiatives.
- Advises on various application and infrastructure hosting models, including cloud, on-premise and hybrid and architect delivery pipelines that best enable clients' delivery and operational objectives.
- Facilitates and supports the mindset, culture, and set of technical practices that foster communication, collaboration, and cooperation among all Enterprise, Program and Team members needed to develop, test, deploy and maintain a solution.
An ICON SAFe DevOps/Technical Coach supports teams in configuration management, continuous integration, test-driven development, deployment, DevOps, and related technical practices.
- Coaches Agile Release Train (ARTs) teams to adopt and enable continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) practices throughout SAFe Program Increments for the purpose of realizing more frequent, higher quality system demos and releases.
- Provides training and hands-on workshops in Pair Programming, BDD, TDD, CI/CD, test automation and related technical practices.
- Works with SAFe Systems Teams and other Dev, QA, and Ops personnel to integrate software assets from the teams, perform end to end testing, assist with deployment, and facilitate frequent System Demos.
- Works with Dev, QA, and Ops teams to modernize the DevOps tool chain, extract maximum value from existing tools and install, configure, and optimize best of breed tools.
- Defines appropriate DevOps performance metrics, establish relevant telemetry and reporting throughout the delivery pipeline, and leverage captured data for continuous improvement.
An ICON OKRs Coach educates how OKRs work, the schedule of workshops, huddles, and the overall OKR cadence.
- Ensures the smooth running of the planning process, including: setting up workshops at all levels with the right groups of participants, scheduling the planning process itself, setting reminders for submitting the quarterly OKRs, and fixing the OKRs, when needed.
- Conducts quarterly OKR Workshops at the company level.
- Efficiently assigns resources; help negotiate resources where there is overlap or interdependencies between areas or departments.
- Helps identify key strategic and operational objectives.
- Ensures transparency and overview of the strategic goals.
- Communicates the vision, mission, and strategy regularly and how OKRs relate to them.
- Integrates the OKR tools into the daily work: maintaining the OKRS on the intranet.