Scrum Master, TSG Agile Center of Excellence

Job Summary

This role acts as the servant leader of a specified agile product team by removing impediments and coaching the team in the agile methodology. They must understand the business at a high level and be able to exercise technical aptitude to understand and resolve impediments.  They must be capable of leading a team to self-organization and push back against the Product Owner. This role facilitates the appropriate scrum events and employs various techniques to foster collaboration and protect the team from outside distractions. They will support the Product Owner to ensure that the product backlog has substantial ‘sprint ready’ items that tie to the overall product vision. 

Principal Accountabilities and % of time

Work with primary scrum team - 90%

• Facilitate the appropriate scrum events: Sprint Planning, Daily Stand-Ups, Backlog Refinement, Retrospectives, sprint/release planning, and other Scrum-related meetings
• Inspire the agile product team to embrace the full adoption of scrum practices by coaching the team on the framework and instilling an ‘inspect and adapt’ mindset
• Empower the team to self-organize in pursuit of a better, more fulfilling experience and improved productivity 
• Generate a common understanding amongst the team of the product vision and strategy 
• Create an environment for the agile product team to thrive by protecting the team from outside distractions and over commitment
• Champion ongoing process improvement initiatives to implement agile best practices
• Design processes and practices to help the team anticipate and identify impediments while resolving basic team impediments. Recognize when to escalate the impediments and who to involve
• Assist in team development while holding team members accountable for their commitments, removing roadblocks to their work, and mentoring and developing team members
• Ensure that each team member is fully engaged in the project and making a meaningful contribution, and encourage a sustainable pace with high-levels of quality for the team
• Advise and coach the Product Owner on the scrum framework, getting items to ‘ready’, user story best practices, writing good acceptance criteria
• Drive sharing of scrum best practices across Bain agile teams
• Provide management level reporting on project status, risks and mitigation strategies
• Track and communicate team velocity, happiness and sprint/release progress to all affected teams and management
   
  Agile champion - 10%
• Contribute to initiative work within the capability team

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

• Associate's/Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education, training and experience
• 3-5 years experience on an agile team in a Scrum Master or similar role
• Some expertise in agile ways of working or demonstrated motivation to learn
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills
• Self-motivated, proactive, and dependable
• High level of detail orientation
• Proactively identifies conflicts or roadblocks, often able to resolve independently
• Effective conflict resolution skills
• Flexible to shifting priorities
• Aspires to learn from best demonstrated practices and to improve work efficiency and sustainability
• Ability to work independently and with teams
• Demonstrated aptitude to follow technical discussions
• High performance and standards as demonstrated by academic or previous job experience