What is an Agile Team Facilitator?

What Is an Agile Team Facilitator?

Now that you’re aware of the roles of Scrum master and product coach in Agile, you’ll be interested to know about the role of Agile team facilitator, or ATF. Within the Agile team structures, the team facilitator actively helps Agile teams work better by improving their communication and collaboration and assisting them in the shifts required for Agile team environments. 

While the Agile team facilitator role might sound quite like a Scrum master role, it is different in a few key ways. First, the Agile facilitator is referred to as ‘framework agnostic’ because it is not tied to a Scrum framework. Rather than focusing directly on the work output, the team facilitator in Agile focuses on the people on the team, their strengths and weaknesses, and how they can be utilized to help the team move forward with its work. Additionally, Agile team facilitators work with multiple teams, whereas Scrum masters work only with their specific team. 

An Agile team facilitator needs to have extensive knowledge of employee and workplace behavior; having a background in occupational or organizational psychology can be especially helpful. Agile team facilitators also need to have strong interpersonal skills. They often work closely with individuals to determine their strengths and weaknesses and alleviate individual pain points with an end goal of helping the team function better together. 

The benefit of having an Agile facilitator is to help address issues that affect productivity and improve how the team works together. Because an Agile team facilitator can work with multiple teams at once, this role can result in considerable improvement across the entire organization.