Scrum Master at Santam Insurance

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

• Manage scrum teams to ensure they deliver on sprint goals that is aligned to release plans
• Compile conceptual sprint plans, do release planning, facilitate detailed sprint planning aligned to overall release plans and ensure sprint and release goals are defined
• Facilitate and/or ensure agile ceremonies take please incl. sprint planning, daily stand-ups, retrospectives, end-of-sprint demos, backlog refinement etc.
• Ensure alignment of delivery across different BITS teams where there are interdependencies e.g. integration or services, and raise concerns, risks or impediments at Scrum of Scrum forums 
• Create transparency and deliver required plans and reporting through use of tools like Jira and Confluence
• Ensure initiatives are run according to the Santam Scaled Agile Delivery Framework (SADF), appropriate governance processes are followed as per the SADF, relevant governance forums are in place and relevant reporting are done regularly e.g. initiative status overviews at steercom 
• Ensure teams have relevant roles, skills and capacity in place, focus to continuously improve team dynamics, efficiencies and performance through coaching, leadership and guidance, coach team to embrace Aglie way of working and embed Agile values, principles and practices 
• Ensure team does accurate and timeous logging of time spent on initiatives and stories
• Ensure effort is aligned to budget and track actuals and forecasting against budget
• Ensure initiative definition, facilitate inception phase, ensure scope is defined, estimated and signed off, understand business and technical scope to ensure quality delivery against the agreed plan and defined acceptance criteria. Ensure user story creation aligned to scope and that team delivers expected quality at the required velocity. Remove any blockers outside of the teams’ control, that may hamper delivery 
• Effective stakeholder engagement and communication incl. product owners, business owners, executives, subject matter experts, line managers, other IT managers and scrum masters
• Support product owners to plan, refine and manage backlog, define sprint goals aligned to release plans and collaborate effectively with the team. Facilitate and provide support for risk and issue management and decision making
• Administration, planning and organizing of work to ensure successful and on time delivery
• Provide support and collaborate with business stakeholders, product owners, project managers and other scrum masters, digital adoption, change management, training, design, development, testing competencies and teams across BITS
• Comply with company policies and procedures, standards and methodologies
• Stay current on industry practices and trends in the short term insurance and digital environments and contribute innovative ideas for the use of technology and improvement of processes  

QUALIFICATIONS AND EXPERIENCE

• Degree related to commerce, analysis or information/technology systems e.g. B. Comm, B.Sc., B Tech or B.Eng and / or
• Relevant Tertiary qualification or certificate/diploma in project management and/or scrum master from an industry recognized training institution
• Minimum 3-5 years’ experience as project manager and/or scrum master 

Experience with 

• Workshop facilitation, conducting demo’s and communication with stakeholders both internal and external, in business or technical terms, and at different levels of the organization
• Building presentations, creating visual representation of recommendations, and conducting workshops. 
• Working with systems development lifecycle (SDLC), and agile methodologies in multiple/complex software development projects incl. experience with agile scrum, scrum master role, sprint planning, managing product backlogs, writing user stories, running inception phases, agile reporting, test methodologies, release management and planning

Experience in the following areas will be advantageous

• Short term insurance or financial services industry 
• Digital environment