Scrum Master | Retail IT | Scrum Masters at Allan Gray Proprietary Limited

Job Description

This is an opportunity to work in a large IT department with about 20 teams.
You'll be surrounded by people who are incredibly smart, passionate about creating long term wealth to our clients, and believe that world class service is critical to customer success.

We appreciate someone that is pragmatic and knows when to push for process improvement or let the team experiment and fail in a safe manner. Many of our teams have been doing Scrum or Kanban, some have even chosen parts of Agile processes that work for them, it is not one size fits all. The candidate should be able to engage with teams to either re-establish Scrum practises or assist them in Process design to achieve buy-in and help the team be effective.

This problem-space is particularly interesting, as the team the SM will engage with requires us to build systems which are highly integrated. There will be opportunity to help the team simplify their dependencies and introduce the team to modern engineering practises to help achieve their goals.

The candidate will be highly autonomous and will need to engage with not just the team but stakeholders outside the team to achieve continuous improvement.

You will not be alone, we currently have a team of Scrum Masters that you can co-facilitate, co-coach, pair on anything to help achieve a team’s goals.

We believe Scrum Masters can influence broader than one or two teams and we encourage implementation of improvement themes across the department

Responsibilities

• Organise and help execute the Scrum framework: Scrum meetings (i.e. daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, retrospectives, planning sessions) and metrics (burndown charts, predictability metrics)

• Assist the product owner in prioritisation and scheduling of work, to meet agreed delivery time frames

• Make sure that all the team members understand their roles and fulfil them to the best of their ability

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

• Identify and facilitate the resolution of identified impediments

• Helps the team in its use of Scrum and Agile practices by motivating the team and reminding the team of its goals and how they choose to meet them

Skills / Competencies

• Strong communication, coaching and facilitation skills

• Flexible, resilient, energetic and have an adaptive leadership style

• Influential. Able to exert influence without authority inside and outside the team

• Strong logical thinking and deductive reasoning

• Strong negotiation and conflict resolution skills

• Self-motivated and the ability to motivate others

• Excellent interpersonal skills, ability to work with diverse personality types and deal with conflict in an effective way.

• Collaborative. Works to ensure a collaborative culture exists within the team

• Highly observant and an expert at root cause analysis

• Committed and responsible: Take responsibility without assuming any authority that might be useful in achieving it.

• Humble and lead through Servant Leadership. Recognize the value in all team members and by example lead others to the same opinion.

Experience

• Tertiary qualification. Advantageous

• Understanding Engineering practises and can coach teams in their use… is advantageous

• Experience in dealing with all levels of business essential

Qualifications

• At least 5+ years’ IT industry experience essential

• 3-4 years’ experience within an agile development environment as a Scrum Master; advantageous