Senior Scrum Master at Sanlam Group

Purpose of the role

• The Senior Scrum Master will assist in facilitating operational aspects of product development, starting with initial requirements gathering through to design specification and delivery within Sanlam CX. The incumbent will also assist the product teams and cross functional members with enhancing and streamlining of processes whereby set goals are achieved. This will be done by using best practice standards in agile methodology, and as a core team member or collaborator in a facilitative capacity, also working closely with key stakeholders of CX and respective product owners within Sanlam CX. The Senior Scrum Master is responsible for various workstreams ensuring that delivery happens in a measurable and predictable fashion at the appropriate cadence, and against well-defined and understood set of requirements

What will you do?

Outputs/Core tasks

Key responsibilities of the role include the following:

• Co-ordinate and align design related and relevant activities across CX Strategy, CX Design, CX Technology and CX Digital.
• Work with product owners to handle backlogs and new requests.
• Guide Product Owner (PO) in the discovery of practicing relevant agile techniques (i.e. journey maps) and facilitate carving out MBI/MVP for larger epics.
• Guide the PO in elaboration to capture key requirement details within Sanlam’s ecosystem.
• Use agile methodology values, principles, and practices to plan, manage, and deliver solutions.
• Support sprint planning by facilitating timeous team breakouts and assist to identify their respective backlogs and dependencies.
• Determine and manage tasks, issues, risks, and action items.
• Schedule and facilitate scrum events, meetings and decision-making processes.
• Track project processes and deliverables.
• Monitor progress and performance in assisting teams to make improvements.
• Manage and ensure that the iteration board are kept updated to reflect the current status.
• Plan and organise demos, as well as product and system testing.
• Facilitate and ensure that the squads conduct retrospectively every iteration ensuring inspect and adapt principles.
• Train, mentor and support scrum teams to follow agile values, principles, and practices.
• Facilitate and ensure that teams conduct the backlog refinement cadence to slice the feature into user stories at least once within an iteration.
• Facilitate and ensure that teams conduct iteration planning and cadence this to plan for iterations.
• Encourage the team to achieve a healthy burn down of user stories and features within an iteration.
• Guide teams to higher scrum maturity.
• Facilitate internal communication and effective collaboration in ensuring the proper use of collaborative processes and removing impediments for the scrum team.
• Be the point of contact for external communications (e.g. from customers or stakeholders).
• Represent the respective teams in group retros and ensure that the teams are aligned, aware and adjust for any technical dependencies.
• Facilitate in show and tell (iteration demos and integrated system demos), and ensure the squads are able to effectively present their deliverables.
• Ensure deliverables meet quality standards at the end of each sprint.
• Assist in building a productive environment where team members ‘own’ the product and enjoy working on it.
• Ensure daily stand ups are practiced in order for the team to achieve the following:
• Alignment on the value to be delivered on a given day.
• Quick view on what value was delivered the day before.
• Opportunities to highlight any impediments that need to be removed in order to meet the iteration goal.

What will make you successful in this role?

Role Requirements

Qualifications

• Degree or Diploma in Information Technology.
• Scrum Master certification.

Knowledge

• Knowledge of Scrum principles.
• Knowledge of engineering practices.
• Knowledge of Jira and Confluence.
• Knowledge of Behaviour Driven Development methodology.
• Knowledge of CI/CD pipeline and master run executions.
• Knowledge of the release process.

Experience

• 5-7 years’ relevant experience within an agile and DevOps environment.
• Experience in dashboards, KPI/metrics and burn down charts.
• Experience in Scrum within Product Design or Design Ops environment will be an advantage.

Competencies

• Communicates effectively
• Decision quality
• Analytical thinking
• Cultivates innovation
• Optimize work processes
• Plans and aligns
• Concern for accuracy
• Customer focus
• Balances stakeholders
• Collaborates
• Drives engagement
• Drives results
• Nimble learning
• Being resilient
• Advanced Excel skills