Senior Lead Scrum Master

About Northern Trust As a global leader in innovative wealth management, asset servicing, asset management and banking services, Northern Trust (Nasdaq: NTRS) is proud to guide the world’s most successful individuals, families, corporations and institutions. Since 1889, we have aligned our efforts with our three guiding Principles That Endure:
Service, Expertise, and Integrity. Together, they reflect the three cornerstones of business conduct which we strive to instill in our employees, whom we call partners, and to provide to our clients and the communities we serve worldwide. With more than 135 years of financial experience and over 24,000 partners, we serve the world’s most sophisticated clients using leading technology and exceptional service.

Major Duties :
1. Create empowered, self-organizing, high-performing teams by serving as the team’s servant leader

• Mentor the team and the Product Owner on Scrum and Agile best practices

• Continuously improve team productivity and facilitate completion of work

• Educate the team, Product Owner and stakeholders on the business value of engineering practices, and promote the use of engineering practices to provide faster delivery, better quality, and fewer defects

• In collaboration with the team and Product Owner, regularly assess the Agile maturity of the team, identify improvement opportunities, and implement the improvements at a pace that is sustainable and comfortable for the team and the organization

• Coach the team on the value and methods of developing cross-functional skills

2. Facilitate planning

a. Coach the Product Owner on creating and maintaining a continuously prioritized Product Backlog of stories with clear acceptance criteria and high-level estimates

b. In collaboration with the team, facilitate the creation of team agreements which minimally include a Definition of Done (DOD) and a Definition of Ready (DOR)

c. Facilitate regular Release Planning workshops

d. Ensure updates to the plan are communicated to stakeholders

3. Facilitate delivery

a. In collaboration with the team, identify and mitigate risks, issues and dependencies internal and external to the team

b. Remove impediments that prevent the team from delivering work and continuously improving

c. Facilitate sprint execution including elaborate planning sessions, sprint planning preparation sessions, sprint planning, daily stand-ups, sprint reviews and sprint retrospectives. Team coaching on:

I. Creating small stories with thin slices of end-to-end functionality

ii. The value and use of relative estimation

iii. Executing Design/Build/Test activities daily

iv. Testing early and often during each sprint

v. Incorporating engineering practices

vi. Completing committed stories in the sprint

vii. Completing Potentially Shippable Increments (PSI) in each sprint

viii. Correctly and effectively using velocity for planning

4. Time box events to effectively manage the team’s and stakeholders’ time. Create information radiators that automatically and continuously share pertinent information with the team and stakeholders. Increase transparency and aid in internal and external communication and alignment. Read and recommend valuable Lean and Agile books, blogs, articles, etc. to continuously increase the team’s Agile maturity.

5. Seasoned expertise in Agile principles and practices, with deep technical and/or business knowledge. Provides comprehensive, in-depth consulting and leadership to team and partners at a high technical level.

6. Able to facilitate open, fact based discussions, build consensus and reach decisions.

7. Carries out moderately complex activities and initiatives which can involve multiple disciplines and/or ambiguous issues.

Knowledge :

Excellent oral and written communication…