Senior Scrum Master — Agile Delivery Champion

The Scrum Master serves a vital role and is in the unique position to help coach, guide and facilitate an energetic and knowledgeable team. As the Scrum Master you will serve as a critical liaison between the product delivery team, product manager and senior management providing critical direction, communication and assuring the quality delivery of products and services to our customers.

• Leads one or more agile teams as the scrum master and team member.
• Employs best practices for agile/scrum methodology, while operating within the department’s overall SDLC Framework.
• Works collaboratively with the product managers and team members to give input and support to the strategic direction of the initiative.
• Motivates and supports team members and ensures they have the tools and knowledge to do their jobs and that all blocking issues are resolved quickly.
• Creates self-organizing agile teams and facilitates the delegation of tasks and responsibilities to appropriate team members.
• Acts as moderator for sprint planning, daily standups, sprint demos, and refactoring/reflection sessions.
• In partnership with the Product manager & Product Owner ensure a robust, prioritized backlog is available.
• Supports Product Manager in understanding and communicating team effectiveness and performance.
• Communicates team status to all internal stakeholders and continuously refines/improves metrics by working with the team.
• Coordinates cross team dependencies with other Scrum master’s and participate in Agile Community of Practice (CoP).
• Escalates issues that require executive attention.
• Discovers opportunities to support organizational initiatives and develops strategies and programs to promote initiatives.
• Participates in the development of programs as a strategic partner that supports the company plan as directed by leadership.
• Provides planning, project coordination, and management for the development of organizational initiatives, while concurrently facilitating efficient operations to meet current and future business needs within the organization.
• Responsible for balancing workload to optimize the effectiveness of project development and management.
• Performs analysis to determine root cause of challenges and provides solutions for improved operational and process performance.

EDUCATION

• Bachelor’s degree in business or a technical discipline (Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering) required.
• Continuous learning, as defined by the Company’s learning philosophy, is required.
• Certification or progress toward certification (CSM, SSM) is highly preferred and encouraged.

EXPERIENCE

• Seven years of progressive responsibility as a scrum master/agile project manager in an insurance environment.
• Proven experience as a scrum master on several successful software development projects involving multiple developers is preferred.

QUALIFICATIONS

• Clear understanding of one of the agile frameworks and key best practices (Disciplined Agile, SAFe, Scrum, Kanban etc.).
• Strong analytical, problem solving and planning skills.
• Must demonstrate leadership ability to effectively interact with all levels of management.
• Stakeholder Management, Negotiation and Communication skills.
• Understanding of the fundamentals of iterative and incremental development.
• Ability to help manage scrum team backlog and priorities using agile based tools (Service Now, Jira, Rally/Central Agile, Version1, etc.).
• Excellent communication, facilitation, and mentoring skills.
• Ability to effectively present budgetary and/or cost information and respond to questions as appropriate.
• Demonstrable conflict resolution skills.
• Demonstrable risk management and mitigation skills.
• Knowledge of tools used to assist with scrum team planning (Service Now, Jira, Agile Manager, Version1, etc.).
• Ab…