Scrum Master

Scrum Master | 10 month contract | Inside IR35 | £525 per day | London/Swindon (Hybrid working, remote-first)

Reporting into:

Agile Lead

Responsible for:

Championing Ways of Working (WoW) inside Scrum and/or Lean Agile (Kanban) teams, enabling the completion of Sprint Goals to deliver incremental customer value.

Key result areas

* Defines and delivers against Sprint Goals towards quarterly team-level Programme Increments.

* Embeds good Agile practices and associated WoW at team level and influences the department via Agile Community of Practice.

* Discovers and commits Objectives and Key Results at the team level to measure success of WoW changes.

Key tasks

* Performs the role of Scrum Master (or equivalent in Lean Agile) across up to two teams.

* Adopts appropriate Agile frameworks, methods and techniques tailored to the context of the team.

* Undertakes continuous/regular improvements via retrospective techniques of inspection and adaption, agrees measurements and tracks progress towards improvement.

* Undertakes Agile Planning techniques focused on incremental delivery of customer value with team, Product Owner, Product Manager and other valued stakeholders.

Core skills

* Significant experience of at least one, ideally two Agile frameworks and associated methods. Preference given to Scrum and Kanban.

* Able to communicate “why Agile” as well as “how to do Agile”.

* Experience of adopting Lean Principles (eg: focus on value, waste identification and elimination) with examples of successful changes to behaviour and practice yielding positive impact upon customer value delivered.

* Pragmatic / Agnostic Agile: selects methods and techniques best suited to context always in the context of people over process over tool.

* Evolving the team’s WoW to support the business’ North Star and associated key Values

* Experience of scaling Agile WoW across at least two teams using appropriate elements of a core scaling framework such as Disciplined Agile, Nexus, LeSS and/or SAFe.

* Agile Planning focused on incremental delivery of internal and external customer value over volume of work.

* Able to shift from Servant Lead to Leader when initial or follow-up direction is needed to kickstart changes to working patterns or learned behaviour.

* Close working with Product Owner and Product Manager to curate a backlog of options for potential commitment to deliver.

* Ability to challenge and push back to defend the team to ensure focus remains on the safe delivery of value.

* Detailed knowledge of Agile practices and techniques such as (but not limited to) Story Mapping, Impact Mapping, Event Storming and Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD).

* Experience of working in a DevOps environment beneficial.

Behavioural

* Servant Leader: supporting the team in achieving Better Value Sooner Safer Happier.

* Team-level Agile coach: supporting the team to discover options for improving their Agile WoW, and reason why.

* Influencer – can articulate and challenge ideas and concepts relating to agility and/or DevOps in Engineering and Product to better align outputs to outcomes delivering customer value.

* Able to work with a high degree of autonomy with team to determine effective ways to deliver value in an emergent context.

* Encourages autonomy and ownership inside own team.

Qualifications

* Degree-qualified in science, technology or engineering.

* Minimum Agile qualification of either CSM, CSPO, DASM, PSM. PSPO, KMP or equivalent.

* Additional qualification in Lean an advantage.