Sr. Principal, Agile Coach
About Northern Trust:
Northern Trust, a Fortune 500 company, is a globally recognized, award-winning financial institution that has been in continuous operation since 1889.
Northern Trust is proud to provide innovative financial services and guidance to the world’s most successful individuals, families, and institutions by remaining true to our enduring principles of service, expertise, and integrity.
Summary: We at Northern Trust are promoting new agile ways of working, building high performing teams that deliver technology solutions for business outcomes with quality and stability. This involves working closely with the Business, Product and Technology teams to promote the agile mindset, helping managers make the shift from directing work to developing people and getting a division or a unit ready for change.
We are seeking a Change Agent, a program/portfolio coach, who can help us in this multi-year people, process and technology change initiative. You will be responsible for working with cross functional teams to increase Agile acumen, develop and enhance intellectual property, and streamline and implement processes and best practices to ensure successful adoption of Agile principles, techniques and mindset to achieve the greatest business value.
You must be able to provide mentoring and coaching to Scrum Masters and Product Owners, and must be able to correlate learnings to principles and practices with supporting, relevant, real-world examples.
Who you are:
- A seasoned Agile Practitioner who thinks principles over practices, pragmatic, and can apply coaching methods in context of the system/environment.
- Curious and a hungry learner
- A Problem solver
- Tenacious
- Collaborative
- You own your work
You must have:
- Solid foundation in Agile, Scrum, Lean, Less, Kanban and other frameworks
- Great communication, facilitation, team building and conflict resolution skills
- Passion for coaching and training
- Ability to create mid management engagement and buy in
- Attentive listening and a consultative mindset to understand areas and reasons of resistance or fear to help Product Owners, managers and teams make the transition and embrace agility
- Advanced knowledge and experience with Agile techniques such as continuous integration, automated testing, test-first approaches such as TDD, ATDD, etc., pairing, Agile games, etc.
- Organizational skills required to determine the program's goals, and to assess and develop the team or program's transformation plans
- Minimum of 15 years of product/software delivery experience
- Bachelors or Master's Degree in Computer Science or a relevant field
- Prior experience with large scale transformation
Your daily work may involve:
- Leading through influence and acting as an agent of change with a set of teams or a program to evolve their ways of working
- Working with technology, business, product and operations partners to understand current state, challenges and coaching, training and mentoring them through the transition
- Establishing coaching and transformation backlog and sharing progress with key stakeholders
- Building and Reviewing Team/ART (team of Team) practices with Scrum Masters/RTEs/Agile Delivery leads and working establish team coaching plans
- Keeping an eye on improvement in maturity, quality, predictability and delivery as adoption of agile practices increases to ensure coaching meets the required outcomes and agility for the business
- Coaching mid managers on making the shift from project to product/outcome driven execution
- Facilitation of retrospectives, continuous improvement workshops and other forums focused on removing team and program impediments to agility
- Contributing to communities of practices and enhancing agile acumen across a wide set of roles
Reasonable accommodation
Northern Trust is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the employment process, please email our HR Service Center at
We hope you’re excited about the role and the opportunity to work with us. We value an inclusive workplace and understand flexibility means different things to different people.
Apply today and talk to us about your flexible working requirements and together we can achieve greater.
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