Agile Project Manager

Agile Project Manager/Scrum Master

Location: Remote Contract duration: through end of December

The Agile Project Manager/SM is the team role responsible for ensuring the team lives agile values and principles and follows the processes and practices that the team agrees they will use. The primary responsibilities are to serve the team in turning requirements into the working software, track progress and help the team achieve their commitments and goals. The APM will act as the Scrum Master to facilitate scrum events, supporting the team in following the Scrum framework. This role may also handle some traditional project management duties including scope definition, resource balancing, communication of status to executives, clients and partners, budget oversight and risk/issue management.

Essential Duties:

• Guides and coaches the Scrum Team on how to use Agile practices and principles to deliver high quality products and services to our customers.
• Helps team to achieve a high performing level by recognizing areas of strength and improvement and employing appropriate coaching and development techniques.
• Responsible for ensuring Scrum is understood and the team adheres to Scrum theory, practice, and guidelines.
• Coaches the Scrum team in self-organization, cross-functional skillset, domain knowledge and communicates effectively, both internally and externally.
• Works with Scrum Team, as well as internal and external stakeholders, to influence and drive decision making and support organizational project or product teams.
• Resolves team impediments and limits the external interference the team must deal with.
• Ensure transparency and collaboration across the team and other teams working and works with other Scrum Masters across the organization to facilitate scrum of scrum events.
• Works with Agile coaches and other Scrum Masters to grow within the role.
• Contributes to the advancement and improvement of Agile practices within the organization.
• Facilitates and supports all scrum events: Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective etc.
• Facilitates cross team collaboration, and Scrum of Scrum level events.
• Assessing the Scrum Maturity of the team and organization and coaching the team to higher levels of maturity, at a pace that is sustainable and comfortable for the team and organization.
• Ensure product quality expectations are defined and known across the team.
• Track and monitor progress daily and help the team achieve their commitments and when problems are identified work with team to develop corrective actions.
• Building a trusting and safe environment where problems can be raised without fear of blame, retribution, or being judged, with an emphasis of healing and problem solving.
• Assisting with internal and external communication, improving transparency, and radiating information.
• Supporting and educating the Product Owner, especially with respect to refining (aka grooming) and managing the product backlog and road mapping.
• Collaborate with the team in scheduling work, including defect remediation and refactoring, guarding against the accumulation of technical debt.
• Manage and report the status of scope, schedule, resourcing, and financials. Including tracking budget and product metrics.

Scrum Master Qualifications / Skills:

• Exemplify and promote Agile values and principles.
• Outstanding communication, facilitation, negotiation, and coaching skills.
• Excellent skills and knowledge of servant leadership, facilitation, situational awareness, conflict resolution, continual improvement, collaboration, increasing transparency, and root cause analysis.
• Extensive knowledge of program and project management principles and methods.
• Knowledge of multiple PPM and agile frameworks (i.e. Waterfall, Hybrid, Scrum, XP, Kanban, LeSS, etc..),
• Clear understanding of software development life cycle models.
• Adept at understanding requirements, refinement, story splitting, estimation, velocity, retrospection.
• Planning and problem solving with product management and delivery teams.
• Solid understanding of and demonstrated experience in using appropriate tools, such as Jira, Confluence, Microsoft Project, Visio, ServiceNow and all MS Office Tools.
• Understanding of financial controls needed in project management and consulting work, experience with budget tracking.
• In-depth understanding of how to scope and estimate work.
• Understanding of execution metrics and how to leverage for teams’ continuous improvement and reporting.
• Experience working with multiple teams in a variety of different contexts (different team sizes, different organizations, different cultures, co-located vs. distributed, etc)
• Proficient in Visio, MS Excel, PowerPoint and other Office applications to build process flows and presentations.

Education, and Certification Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree and 5-7 years of product/project development experience on an Agile Team.
• Must have first level PM and Scrum Master certification PMI-PMP, (CSM ) (PSM), PMI-ACP
• Preferred Certification Requirements (Any of these is a plus):
• Lean Six Sigma certification a plus.
• PMI- PgMP®
• Second or Third level Scrum Master certification (A-CSM, PSM II, PSM III, CSP, CTC)
• CSPO or equivalent
• Track record of continued and recent education in Project/Program Management and Agile/Scrum, including training, conferences, user groups, self-study, etc.