Senior Scrum Master at Old Mutual South Africa

Job Description

Senior Scrum Masters are leaders, facilitators, and coaches for an Agile Team. Leads a team in Agile, Scrum, and SAFe principles, ensuring that the agreed Agile practices are being followed. Senior Scrum Masters leads and facilitates the removal of impediments and foster an environment for high-performing team dynamics, continuous flow, and relentless improvement.

Senior Scrum Master’s primary responsibility is managing the self-organizing, self-managing team achieve its goals. Scrum Masters do this by facilitating, teaching, and coaching team practices, implementing and supporting SAFe principles and practices. Senior Scrum Master empower the team to coordinate with other teams in the programme.

• Drive & facilitate the team engagements for better efficiency of the team. Bringing stakeholders and team closer to ensure total alignment on work required.

• Drive & Facilitate the removal of impediments for the team.

• Drive & Facilitate events such as daily stand-up meetings, Backlog Refinement, Sprint Planning, Sprint Reviews, Sprint Retrospectives, and decision-making processes to ensure optimal value.

• Acts as a safeguard for the team.

• Aligns across other teams at Scum of Scrums to improve overall programme delivery.

• Leads team effort in relentless improvement.

• Builds a high-performing team, focuses on ever-improving team dynamics and performance, and coaches the team in self-management.

• Drive & Facilitates preparation and readiness for ART events.

• Ability to run and facilitate core meetings and activities: Backlog Refinement, Sprint Planning, story writing, sizing, prioritising, Daily stand ups, Sprint Reviews and Sprint Retrospectives.

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS/EXPERIENCE (REQUIRED FOR THE JOB)

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Commerce, or Information Systems.

• 8 – 10 years’ experience in project/software delivery.

• Familiarity and experience in Agile/Scrum/Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).

• Certification as a Scrum Master Certified SAFe® Advanced Scrum Master or Advanced Certified Scrum Master (A-CSM) or Certified Scrum Professional (CSP) desirable.

• Knowledge of Kanban/Lean desirable.

• Knowledge and experience in using tracking and collaboration tools such as Jira, Miro and TFS.

• Knowledge and experience with typically used Agile techniques such as User Stories, ATDD, TDD, etc.

COMPETENCIES REQUIRED

• Strategic: Can understand, identify and acts on broader opportunities to drive longer term, value-adding change.  Applies judgement effectively. Identifies and acts on market and/or competitor trends/opportunities

• Technical competency: the knowledge and abilities required to apply technical principles 

• Executing: Displays consistent energy, drive, and perseverance to deliver results. Demonstrates a willingness to take calculated risks to achieve stretch performance goals.

• Customer: Putting the customer at the heart of business decisions and driving to improve value for customers.

• Leading with Influence: Influences and rallies people behind common goals; actively supports growth and inspires others to exceed expectations. Communicates clear strategies and objectives for own function.

• Collaboration: Creates trust, respect and builds meaningful relationships. Able to handle a wide range of relational challenges to ensure collaboration across boundaries.

• Innovation: Generates creative/out of the box solutions. Challenges the status quo and/or demonstrates ability to relate to challenges from a range of diverse but relevant perspectives. Willing to take calculated risks when introducing novel ideas.

• Delivery: responsible for achieving outcomes and documenting plans

• Personal Mastery: Learns and actively works to build self-awareness; develop through experience and feedback from others. Copes effectively with stress and has the resilience to take on stretching and challenging assignments. Adjusts effectively to work within new work structures; processes; requirements and cultures.

Closing Date

• 27 January 2022