There are several specialized roles that are specific to transformations:
- Chief transformation officer (CTO). This executive-level role is responsible for leading organization-wide transformations.
- Enterprise coach. Enterprise coaches are responsible for sharing new ways of working (WoW) and ways of thinking (WoT) across many teams. They also support the CTO and coach senior leadership in the transition. They coach and lead senior coaches and team coaches to enable improvements across many teams that want to improve together. Anyone in an enterprise coach role should consider training to become a Disciplined Agile Value Stream Consultant (DAVSC).
- Senior coach. Senior coaches work with groups of collaborating teams to help them improve their WoW and WoT. Senior coaches should be trained, and potentially certified, as Disciplined Agile Coach (DAC) coaches to learn how to work with disparate teams.
- Team coach. Team coaches work with a team, and sometimes a group of related teams, to evolve their WoW and WoT. A team coach should receive Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM) training to learn how to lead teams in applying the DA tool kit to continuously improve.
In addition to the roles described above, you will likely discover that you need to create several supporting teams for your transformation to succeed. These potential teams are:
- Centers of excellence (CoEs). A Center of Excellence (CoE) is a group of people with specialized skills and expertise whose job is to provide leadership and to disseminate that knowledge intentionally within your organization. Examples include an Agile Coach CoE comprised of agile coaches, and Testing, DevOps, and Architecture CoEs. CoEs are an important strategy to support continuous improvement within your organization.
- Communities of practice (CoPs). A CoP is a collection of people who share a craft or profession who have banded together to learn from each other, to develop themselves, and to help the organization. A CoP is the means to foster social learning across your organization and to support people sharing and exploring new WoW and WoT together. Membership in a CoP is usually voluntary.
- Transformation guidance team. A transformation guidance team is responsible for guiding/leading the execution of your transformation. They do the planning and maintain the improvement backlog. Much of the actual work may be delegated, but the guidance team will oversee and manage the work.
- Transformation monitoring team. The transformation monitoring team is purposefully separate from, and independent of, the transformation guidance team. The monitoring team independently monitors the health of the transformation and provides advice and warnings to the guidance team when it finds issues. The monitoring team may also intervene when it receives complaints or reports of issues with the transformation. They may act as an impartial advocate to resolve these issues to everyone's satisfaction and they are often involved in communications.