Scrum Master

About the position

Job purpose

• Capable of facilitating technical discussions (architecture trade-offs, technical debt, refactoring, release planning) without acting as the tech lead.


• Ability to identify and help remove technical impediments.


• Comfortable translating between business requirements and technical constraints.


• Is a servant-leader for the Scrum Team that does anything possible to help the team perform at their highest level.


• Help form a self-managed team that is motivated, predictable, transparent and consistently delivers quality work and continually inspects and adapts in order to improve and maximize throughput whilst upholding the Agile values, principles and practices.


• Facilitates the removal of impediments teams face when developing solutions


• Implements agile best practices within a team.


• Helps the development team, business and management develop a culture of collaboration - Act as a change agent to the team and organisation.


• Supports the team to be self-organising and function as an accountable, high-performance team.


• Focused and goal driven and helps to achieve the Sprint goals


• Be a master facilitator.

 


Key Activities / Output

• Act as Scrum master for 1 – 4 scrum teams with a focus on guiding the teams towards improving the way they work.


• Facilitate Scrum Events ensure that they are focused and productive (Daily Stand-ups, Sprint Planning, Sprint Reviews, Retrospectives and Backlog Refinement).


• Help facilitate Product Planning Workshops and Release Planning Sessions


• Assist the Product Owner in prioritisation and scheduling of work, to meet delivery time frames.


• Ensure backlog is in good standing by having regular re-occurring weekly backlog grooming sessions.


• Ensure that all the team members understand their role and fulfil them to the best of their ability.


• Guide/coach/mentor the development team to take on the responsibilities of the process and ownership of the product – lead the team to a self-organised state.


• Build a high performing team, focusing on improving team dynamics and performance, help the team manage interpersonal conflicts, challenges and opportunities for growth.


• Protect the team from interruptions and distractions to maximize productivity and create flow of work.


• Identify and facilitate the resolution of identified impediments.


• Help the team make achievable sprint commitments with the use of velocity data and team availability.


• Help the team members communicate, co-ordinate and meet their delivery goals.


• Ensure the team / stakeholders adhere to Definition of Ready (DoR) / Definition of Done (DoD).


• Highlight risks and dysfunctions where the DoR / DoD is not met.


• Ensure the team uses the standardized reference story for estimating.


• Ensure understanding of the Agile principles and Scrum process, across teams and stakeholders.


• Ensure adherence to the Agile principles and Scrum process and help resolve any deviations.


• Raise issues that are putting delivery at risk as soon as they arise.


• Help facilitate delivery solutions and manage expectations.


• Responsible to produce the following artefacts (Weekly Sprint Reports, Release projection / Burndown) to create visibility and transparency of the progress and status of the systems delivery.


• Continually grow and share Agile knowledge.

Skills and Experience:

• 5 – 7 years relevant working experience  as a Scrum Master


• Tertiary degree (B. Engineer, B.Com, Bsc)


• Certified scrum master/scrum


• SaFe Experience

 


Accreditations with Professional Body / Professional Registration:

• Scaled Agile
  
  
  
  
  • Certified SM
  
  
  • Leading Safe
  
  
  
  

 


Technical Skills:

• Knowledge and/or experience of Kanban


• Knowledge of the software development life cycle


• Essential the candidates are fully proficient at Jira administration, for example: Understand the JIRA data model, Create and maintain workflows, transitions, post actions, etc., Plugin evaluation, Project administration, Create and maintain Users and Security Groups, Proficient in writing JQL queries, Create and maintain fields and field configurations, screens and screen configurations


• Excellent communication skills in English in written and spoken form


• Working with ServiceNow IT Business Management (ITBM) 

Desired Skills:

• Time Management
• Critical Thinking
• Spreadsheet software
• Judgment and Decision Making
• Active Listening
• Tax preparation software
• Accounting Software