Scrum Master

Jun 28, 2021

Role profile

Role title:

Scrum Master
Role purpose:

  • The Scrum Master plays a crucial part in ensuring the success of our Digital Operating Model; helping us to become a leading digital company
  • The Scrum Master is a servant leader to the DevOps delivery team, coaching agile methods, and providing support and facilitation to increase velocity and team productivity
  • This role is responsible for identifying risks, dependencies, and impediments, leading the team and business in finding a solution, coordinating with other teams and functional partners, and actively escalating when needed to ensure resolution
  • This role is responsible for keeping a pulse on needs and insights from stakeholders and other initiatives, regularly communicating status, changes in direction, and relevant metrics to avoid misalignment and roadblocks
Key accountabilities and decision ownership

[max 5]:

  • Support the Product Owner in ensuring right-sized story writing, aligning priorities, and planning sprint iterations
  • Coach team members on Agile methods and technical practices (e.g., CI/CD, TDD, etc.)
  • Track and manage risks and issues of the delivery team
  • Track and report on current status of all team members and the delivery
  • Facilitating key agile ceremonies, such as daily stand-ups, demos, and retrospectives
  • Monitor and optimize agile processes and practices
  • Promote continuous improvement through retrospectives and team learning
  • Coordinate with other delivery teams, stakeholders, and partners to manage risks, interdependencies, and impediments to the team
 Core competencies, knowledge and experience [max 5]:

  • Is a role model for best practices in Agile process execution, motivating other team members to do the same
  • Ability to continue to monitor, learn, and implement industry best practices from the agile community
  • Natural “servant” leader, with strong ability to coach and develop others, an inherent entrepreneurial spirit, and focuses on ever-improving team dynamics and performance
  • Viewed by the wider organization as an effective and consistent collaborator, influencer, and negotiator, able to highlight internal and external dependencies and break down complex blockers
  • Excellent stakeholder management and communications skills, with the ability to inspire, influence, and update delivery teams and senior executives
  • Excellent facilitation, organization, and problem-solving skills, helping the team manage conflicts, challenges, escalating only when team processes have failed
  • Comfortable with ambiguity and working in fluid, fast-changing environments under pressure
  • Strong grounding in traditional project management practices
  • Good understanding of the business capability/user journey, wider organizational goals, and desired product business outcomes
  • Understanding of both the current Telecommunications and digital services market and emerging business and technology trends
  • Agile software development environment and methods such as Scrum, SAFe, Kanban, XP. LSD, and FDD
  • Agile ceremonies, tools. and artefacts, e.g., retrospectives, demos, increment planning, information radiators
  • User story definition and team backlog management
  • Backlog item estimation
  • Continuous integration and continuous delivery methodologies and tools
  • DevOps culture, processes. and tools
Must have technical / professional qualifications:

  • Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or other related field
  • A total of at least five to eight years relevant experience of which at least three years needs to be as a Scrum Master or Product Owner with agile teams
  • Experience in designing and delivering complex digital capabilities
  • Experience leading teams using agile methodologies in large-scale teams
  • Certified Agile coach, Certified Scrum Master (CSM), Professional Scrum Master (PSM), SAFeCertified Scrum Master or similar
  • Experience working with agile methodologies, such as Scrum, Kanban, XP, TDD, and BDD
  • Certifications in traditional Project Management practices, e.g., Prince 2, PMP preferred
  • JIRA/Confluence, MS Project, or equivalent experience preferred

SCRUM MASTER

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving

  • Helps teams to identify blockers, risks and dependencies
  • Helps teams to remove impediments (finds the right balance so that teams dont start seeing their own tasks as impediments)
  • Ensures actions from retrospectives are managed as tasks on team boards
  • Brings structure and focus to the way teams work
  • Facilitates teams to estimate together (except in rare cases where only one person in the team understands the “How of a ticket”)
  • Helps teams to identify root causes of failure
  • Helps teams to understand what is in their control, what is not, and to focus on the prior.

Leadership and Support

  • Reminds teams of the reason behind the ceremonies, values, principles and Way of Work, holds them accountable to these values and principles
  • Protects teams from distractions (sometimes from themselves
  • Helps to create a safe space along with Leadership
  • Acts as an Ambassador for the team
  • Coaches teams into becoming self-organising fostering high levels of transparency, visibility and curiosity
  • Supports teams to optimise the way they work, including team board set-up, ceremony structure, communications, knowledge transfer, etc
  • Facilitates team members keeping themselves accountable within their teams
  • Encourages teams to swarm/collaborate on stories until they are “Done” (ticket Acceptance Criteria” must support this)
  • Encourages teams to grow (not become complacent)

Communication

  • Fosters flow of communication and removal of communication bottlenecks e.g. speak to my Scrum Master / Product Owner ensure communication flows to and from all relevant parties (teamwork, not individuals)
  • Facilitates most ceremonies with outcome-based focus, assisting the Product Owner to facilitate reviews and the team to take ownership of their stand-ups
  • Coaches teams on the difference between disruption and communication (delicate balance required to allow what is needed without allowing continuous disruption)
  • Asks the hard questions in a respectful and helpful way, enables the team to do the same

Learn more/Apply for this position