Scrum Master

SUMMARY:
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POSITION INFO:

Our client offers a wide range of investment and financial planning solutions to protect and grow your long-term wealth. They are one of South Africa’s largest investment management companies, offering a comprehensive range of client-focused investment solutions to end-investors, intermediaries, and larger institutions. Our client’s comprehensive investment offerings include both passively and actively managed unit trusts, hedge funds and segregated and pooled retirement funds along the asset class and risk/return spectrum.

Job overview:

• You will be responsible for the overseeing and providing guidance to the scrum teams in BI, Analytics and Digital environment
• Additional responsibilities will include but not limited to:
  • Ensuring that development teams follow scrum framework values and agile practices
  • Mentoring and motivating the teams to improve processes, facilitating meetings and decision-making processes, and eliminating team impediments
  • The Scrum Master will be considered a subject-matter expert, have excellent logic and problem-solving skills and a drive to make a difference. They will be responsible for enforcing the rules of scrum, removing impediments from their team while promoting self-management and constantly improving our standards of work

Main responsibilities:

• Establishes and manages team cadence throughout delivery lifecycle, facilitation of all scrum ceremonies
• Ensure the development teams are practicing the core agile principles of collaboration, prioritization, team accountability, and visibility
• Stakeholder management and playback, including product owners, executive sponsors and other external teams
• Work closely with leadership to define product and establish product backlog. Owns delivery roadmap
• Support execution team with resolution of roadblocks and interdependencies, managing risks and issues
• Assist with bedding down BI capability operating model (people and process)
• Using agile methodology values, principles, and practices to plan, manage, and deliver solutions
• Training, mentoring, and supporting scrum teams to follow agile values, principles, and practices
• Determining and managing tasks, issues, risks, and action items
• Manage each project’s scope and timeline
• Coordinate sprints, retrospective meetings, and daily stand-ups
• Ensure deliverables are up to quality standards at the end of each sprint
• Scheduling and facilitating scrum events, meetings, and decision-making processes
• Monitoring progress and performance and helping teams to make improvements
• Planning and organizing demos and product/system testing
• Ensuring the proper use of collaborative processes and removing impediments for the scrum team
• Tracking project processes, deliverables, and financials
• Be the point of contact for external communications as well as prepare and present status reports to stakeholders
• Coach team members in Agile frameworks
• Facilitate internal communication and effective collaboration
• Work with product owners to handle backlogs and new requests
• Help teams implement changes effectively
• Guide development teams to higher scrum maturity

Qualification and experience:

• Bachelor''s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or any relevant field preferred
• Certified Scrum Master, SAFe preferred
• 5+ years of experience as a Scrum Master or in a similar role.
• Excellent knowledge of Scrum techniques and artefacts (such as definition of done, user stories, automated testing, backlog refinement)
• Working knowledge of agile methodology, techniques, and frameworks, such as Scrum or Kanban etc. to deliver solutions would be essential
• Leadership and management experience. Excellent people and project management skills
• Strong communication and presentation skills
• Strong analytical, problem-solving and conflict resolution skills
• Knowledge of various toolsets such as SAP Hana Studio, SAP Data Services, Informatica Data Quality Suite, Cloudera big data storage and Microsoft Power BI will be advantageous
• Experience in a Dev Ops environment and leading the development automation
• Hands-on experience with software delivery life cycle and Agile/Scrum delivery management
• Experience in project management/Team Lead roles mandatory
• Experience in delivering BI products preferable

Core competencies:

• Living up to our Group-wide core competencies, will help you achieve a successful career with our client
• Cultivates innovation: Creating new and better ways for the organization to be successful.
• Client focus: Building strong customer relationships and delivering customer-centric solutions.
• Drives results: Consistently achieving results, even under tough circumstances
• Collaborates: Building partnerships and working collaboratively with others to meet shared objectives
• Resilience: Rebounding from setbacks and adversity when facing difficult situations.

Role competencies:

• Decision quality: Making good and timely decisions that keep the organization moving forward
• Communicates effectively: Developing and delivering multi-mode communications that convey a clear understanding of the unique needs of different audiences
• Ensures accountability: Holding self and others accountable to meet commitments
• Business insight: Applying knowledge of business and the marketplace to advance the organization’s goals
• Balances stakeholders: Anticipating and balancing the needs of multiple stakeholders
• Manages ambiguity: Operating effectively, even when things are not certain or the way forward is not clear
• Builds effective teams : Building strong-identity teams that apply their diverse skills and perspectives to achieve common goals

Personal qualities:

• Flexible and adaptable - Rebounding from setbacks and adversity when facing difficult situations
• Courage - Stepping up to address difficult issues, saying what needs to be said
• Manages complexity - Demonstrated ability and proven record to make complex decisions
• Ensures accountability - Holding self and others accountable to meet commitments
• Plans and aligns - Planning and prioritising work to meet commitments aligned to organisational goals
• Accountability and reliability – to guide the team and feedback to management