Degrees/Certifications:
Scrum Master Certification a must have!
Tops 3 Skills Needed:
| 1 | Scrum Master certification | 5-7 (Sr level) |
| 2 | Has worked with Kanban teams | 5-7 (Sr level) |
| 3 | Experience being an actual coach, understand team dynamics, recognize where the team is lacking, etc. | 5-7 (Sr level) |
Years experience:
Team: 5 sr. scrum master agile coaches, supporting 15 teams across the business teams
This team is a true agile team
Experience in Kanban teams – don’t have bandwidth for training/mentoring
Summary of Experience:
• Information Technology (IT) project based roles
• Building, leading and mentoring cross functional teams
• Application of industry-based project management and SDLC methodologies and tools
• IT project management, including all elements of scope, time, cost, risk, quality, integration, procurement, human resources and communications
• Working with business areas to prioritize requirements and select appropriate technology to deliver effective business solutions and achieve business benefits
• Managing complex large-scale or multiple mid-sized projects
• Requirements elicitation, process analysis and design expertise
• Mentoring team members in project lifecycle and agile methodologies
Required Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:
• Ability to navigate within a fast-paced dynamic environment with high degrees of ambiguity to deliver large and complex projects
• Ability to maneuver through tough political situations
• Ability to lead geographically distributed development teams
• Establishes collaborative relationships with business and technology partners at various levels in the organization
• Superior communication skills with the ability to effectively communicate to diverse audiences and all levels of the organization, able to bridge communication gaps between technology and business users, and able to foster open team communication.
• Strong leadership skills, with the ability to build cross-functional project teams and protect valuable team resources
• Ability to identify and voice concerns and project issues in a timely and effective manner
• Ability to flex leadership style to accommodate a wide variety of team member styles and leverage team diversity
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills
• Strong negotiation skills
• Demonstrates familiarity with software development lifecycles and the ability to facilitate decision making that balances business needs and technical priorities
• Understands integration tools and methods
• Demonstrates knowledge of system testing and test plan development
• Knowledge of basic business principles and company goals and objectives
• Working knowledge of software engineering, retail technologies, SharePoint, Web, Mobile, API, and Service-Oriented Architectures.
• Proficiency in Jira, Confluence, Microsoft project & Microsoft
• Skilled at reporting on sprint status, burn down charts, summarizing results, and taking corrective action.
Typical Day/Responsibilities:
• Apply scrum/agile iterative development processes to lead on-time delivery of product backlog user stories.
• Leverage risk and issue management, leadership courage and proactive / timely communications to safeguard project resources and direct corrective measures to ensure project success
• Bridge communication between technology and the business through targeted communications and fostering open dialog with team members
• Provide team members with clear communication and direction – including appropriate governance and decision making.
• Identify resource gaps and inform the program and project manager to support and enable resource managers for outsourced services as needed.
• Direct completion of applicable lifecycle deliverables in compliance with established company standards, practices and policies.
• Negotiate across multiple functions to resolve impediments and competing priorities.
• Work independently, without the need for day-to-day guidance from agile practice leaders or senior program management leadership.
• In partnership with scrum teams and product owner: identify, document, and size user stories and acceptance criteria; (2) drive definition of the minimal viable product; (3) partner with the product owner to prioritize the backlog; (4) define the scrum approach, based on best practices and learnings from previous projects, and secure scrum team and management team working agreements; (5) plan the release/sprint roadmap; and (6) plan Sprint 0.
• During the Design, Build, Test, and Deploy phases of the project, lead the scrum team: (1) execute Sprint 0 and downstream sprints; (2) partner with the product owner to continuously groom the backlog; (3) lead user story and sprint acceptance sessions; (4) partner with the product owner to run product demos to interested stakeholders; (5) lead daily scrums; (6) lead sprint retrospectives; (7) lead sprint-planning and task-definition sessions; and (8) partner with the product owner in release to production activities.
• Ensures that scrum artifacts remain relevant and up-to-date.
• Ensures that risks and impediments are visible inside and outside the team; helps remove impediments that prevent the team from making progress and meeting its commitments.
• Understands and helps drive resolution of technical issues.
• Schedule and facilitate scrum events as needed or requested.
• Build team disciplines necessary for estimating, forecasting and committing to work and for communicating about plans and estimates.
• Help the team and the product owner build the right product.
• Foster team responsibility for building the product right.
Best vs. average
A good SM embodies the following (this is a partial list):
· Can articulate why an SM exists and how they help the business (not a PM, protect the team vs the product, help the PO, etc)
· Understands agile concepts including but not limited to self-organization and emergent design and can cite examples
· Demonstrates ability to identify antipatterns and determine the optimal plan to resolve (Note, Command & Control, the enemy of agile, is not the right approach :) )
· Understands the "right metrics" and can articulate how they drive improvement. (hint: Think "trend analysis")
· Can work with those that don't understand agile (goes double for the ones that think they know it all but in reality know very little) and help them embrace agility. Citing examples is good.
· Knows how to say things so others can actually hear you (goes in conjunction with the prior bullet and very hard skill to master)
· Understanding of group dynamics (often what is happening and what is being said are two different things. Can the SM understand and work with that as they coach the team towards self-organization?)
Disqualifiers
- Red flags to look for
- Reliance on execs for decisions making
- Unwillingness to escalate
- Too willing to escalate
- Can’t estimate
- Can’t answer “Why SBUX”?
- Unable/unwilling to discuss failures and lessons learned
Performance indicators
Monitoring deliverables, Culture fit! Passionate about agile