Agile Facilitator/Scrum Master at Sanlam Group

What will you do?

The Agile Facilitator is co-located with a squad and, together with the Product Owner, facilitates the processes which ensure value delivery.

The Agile Facilitators are servant leaders and coaches for squads. They help educate squad members in the required tools and frameworks, ensuring that the agreed agile process is being followed. They also help remove impediments and foster an environment of high-performance, continuous flow and relentless improvement.

Their primary responsibility is assisting the development of self-organizing, self-managing teams to achieve their goals. As members of the Agile Chapter, they work with the extended Agile Facilitator community to increase the effectiveness of agility.

What will make you successful in this role?

• Guides the Product Owners (POs) in discovery by practicing relevant agile techniques (e.g. journey maps) and facilitates in carving out MBI/MVP for larger epics.
• Guides the PO in elaboration to capture the key requirement details within Sanlam’s ecosystem.
• Supports PI Planning by facilitating timeous team breakouts and helps them identify their respective backlogs and dependencies.
• Facilitates and ensures that the squads conduct the backlog refinement cadence to slice the feature to user stories at least once within an iteration.
• Facilitates and ensures that the team conduct iteration planning cadences to plan for iterations.
• Creates and manages iterations within Sanlam’s ecosystem in alignment with the iteration schedule published by release management.
• Ensures daily stand ups are practiced so that the team has:
• Alignment on the value to be delivered on a given day
• A quick view on what value was delivered the day before
• The opportunity to highlight any impediments that need to be removed to meet the iteration goal
• Manages and ensures that the iteration board are kept updated to reflect the current status.
• Encourages the team to achieve a healthy burn down of user stories/features within an iteration.
• Represents the respective squads in squad sync and ensures that the teams are aligned, aware & adjusts for any technical dependencies. 
• Works closely with End2End team, Ways Of Working Support Services team & other support structures to ensure smooth functioning of the squads.
• Facilitates in show & tell (iteration demos & integrated system demos) and ensures the squads are able to effectively present their deliverables.
• Facilitate and ensure that the squads conduct retrospectives every iteration ensuring inspect and adapt principles.

Qualifications

• Relevant IT Qualification (IT Degree or Diploma) will be advantageous
• Scrum Master certification will be advantageous

Experience

• Minimum of 2 years working experience in a fully Agile and DevOps environment
• Utilisation of dashboards, KPI/metrics and burn down charts
• Knowledge of:

1. Engineering practices
2. Jira and Confluence
3. Behavior Driven Development methodology 
4. CI/CD pipeline and the master run executions
5. The release process

Knowledge and Skills

• Knowledge of scrum principles
• Product development process knowledge
• Agile methodology
• Sprint methodology and project management
• Reporting and Administration