Scrum Master

Company: MSUFCU
Location: East Lansing
Posted on: November 22, 2022

Job Description:

Position SummaryUnder general supervision, but in compliance with established policies and procedures, this position is responsible for ensuring the team lives agile values and principles and follows the processes and practices that the team agreed they would use to build and maintain MSUFCU digital and core banking solutions. This includes the various MSUFCU-owned websites, digital banking applications for web & mobile, core banking system, as well as the employee intranet and other internal systems and applications. This position drives the agile ceremonies that include, but not limited to, sprint kickoff, daily stand-ups, sprint review, sprint demo, sprint retrospective, and works with the team to estimate larger items like epics and individual user stories in the backlog. This is also a cross-functional role that works directly with project and product stakeholders to perform backlog grooming and ensure work items are ready to execute on. This role also tracks and communicates project and sprint health to the team and key stakeholders.Work LocationThis position can be fully remote or hybrid with a combination of working both onsite at the Headquarters 2 building in East Lansing and remotely. A schedule of expected onsite and remote workdays will be discussed during the interview process.ResponsibilitiesScrum Master I

• Orchestrates the Agile/Scrum ceremonies and processes for the department.
• Ensures positive and productive scrum ceremonies, including daily scrum, backlog refinement, Sprint planning, Sprint Reviews with demos and retrospectives for 1 Scrum team
• Provides support to the team using servant leadership characteristics including active listening, stewardship, team building, and a commitment to continuous learning and growth of the team.
• Acts as a mentor to ensure teams work in alignment to core Agile principles of collaboration, prioritization, team accountability, and visibility.
• Builds a trusting and safe environment where problems can be raised without fear of blame, retribution, or judgement, with an emphasis on healing and problem solving.
• Ensures sprint plans include a healthy balance and prioritization between support work, technical debt, and new project feature innovation thus optimizing the effectiveness of the software delivery process.
• Develops, maintains and reports measurements on the health of the project, team, and sprint using agile metrics; and provide communication and updates to business stakeholders.
• Involves team in identifying and removing impediments and known risks early through analysis and prioritization; thinks outside the box on how impediments can be overcome
• Facilitates backlog refinement and work item estimation activities ensuring stories are actionable and sized appropriately helping to optimize the team's capacity and velocity capabilities.
• Guides the team on how to use agile/scrum practices and values
• Trains and challenges the team to break work down into smaller pieces still delivering value; assists with User Story writing using INVEST
• Performs tasks as part of a cross functional team using agile and utilizing project management software.
• Supports the quality assurance process including validating solutions created meet acceptance criteria, ensuring standards are adhered to, validating the testing process has been completed before releasing code, and all development follows the established Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) including: analysis, design, development, code review, testing, change management, etc.
• Ensures quality is driving all aspects of the delivery lifecycle and defects are driven out as early as possible.
• Supports the user experience design process including requirements gathering, prototyping, user testing, stakeholder management, etc.
• Keeps management advised of any system, hardware or usage problem whereby the integrity and security of any of the Credit Union's systems, and/or the level of service provided to members through such mediums is compromised or otherwise impaired.
  • Performs analysis to determine root cause of challenges and provides solutions for improved operational and process performance.
    • Participates in training activities within the department/branches/human resources, as well as training outside the department; such training helps to ensure staff compliance with Credit Union policies and state and federal regulations and laws.
    • Develops and maintains a productive working relationship with business owners, product owners, project sponsors, stakeholders and vendors
    • Uses historical velocity and planned velocity to assist team with commitments based on capacity - focusing on sustainable pace with reasonable goals that can be delivered with urgency
    • Providing transparency and visibility to scrum team health and progress, by tracking and sharing relevant metrics and reports to show team velocity, value delivery, capacity, cycle time and broader project progress
    • Effectively utilizes progress indicators such as burn-down and burn-up charts
    • In partnership with the scrum teams, create high-value output meeting Definition of Done, Definition of Ready, and helps teams create Working Agreements
    • Maximize use of technology to encourage close collaboration of distributed (onshore and offshore) teams
    • Define and schedule activities required to develop and launch new features
    • Perform other duties and assist other employees, as assigned.Scrum Master II
      • Perform all of Level I duties and responsibilities.
      • Facilitate Scrum ceremonies for up to two scrum teams
      • Ability to deliver thought leadership as an inspiring and confident evangelistic change leader.
      • Develop creative ways to embed Agile ceremonies, practices and values.
      • Coaching the team members in self-management and cross-functionality while challenging them to increase introspection through several different Retrospective techniques
      • Skillful in relationship building and negotiating by using facilitation techniques capable of connecting ideas and people providing positive outcomes.
      • Manage a portfolio backlog of epics and features, and facilitate effective decision making.
      • Provide feedback to management at all levels regarding agile practices and transformation within their teams.
      • Provide insight to new and emerging perspectives and point of views on Agile and related subjects.
      • Use knowledge of various Agile frameworks and techniques as theory to develop effective Agile practices within the MSUFCU organization which complement the highly valued organizational culture.
      • Develop and monitor metrics-led continuous improvement efforts tracking progress of Agile adoption and maturity to aid in accelerating overall Agile transformation efforts.
      • Coach and mentor wide variety of roles on agile fundamentals.
      • Work closely with IT and business leaders, architects, product owners, and scrum team members as an expert on agile methods.
      • Assist Product Owners in managing employee and member expectations, and stakeholder communications.
      • Assist Product Owners in managing/limiting Sprint interruptions ensuring the team is focused on Sprint goals and commitments.
      • Support and educate Product Owners, especially with respect to refining, prioritizing and managing the product backlog and Sprint backlog.Senior Scrum Master
        • Perform all of Level I and II duties and responsibilities.
        • Broad strategic thinker with a passion for Agile values and principles as a strategically critical business philosophy.
        • Guide the organization through change, helping identify and address organizational impediments which limit team productivity and quality; develop strategy for Agile tooling.
        • Develop enterprise Agile guidance, training materials, and content; translate industry best practices into actionable recommendations.
        • Provide leadership in evaluating the maturity of the organizational Agile framework and define improvement opportunities driving continued Agile maturity at a sustainable pace.
        • Educate organization to use a variety of approaches to deliver customer value.
        • Ensure successful delivery of large impact and/or cross functional initiatives by assisting in the identification and resolution to organizational impediments.
        • Implement consistent process and tools, identifies emerging best practices, and works to continuously advance agile methods and practices.
        • Lead cross-functional department teams.
        • Provide scaling expertise to multiple agile teams, facilitating quarterly planning with large groups.Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities RequiredScrum Master I:
          • Bachelor's Degree in software engineering, computer science, or related field preferred.
          • First level Scrum Master certification (CSM, PSM I) preferred.
          • One to three years of experience playing the Scrum Master role for a team diligently applying Scrum principles, practices, and theory, preferred.
          • One to five years of knowledge and/or experience with Agile practices and techniques: Scrum, XP, Kanban, Lean, User Stories, ATDD, TDD, Continuous Integration, Continuous Testing, Pairing, Automated Testing, Agile Games.
          • Must be a team player, able to work collaboratively with multiple departments and personalities.
          • Work requires an understanding and continuous improvement of best practices and principles in: Agile, continuous improvement, continuous delivery, software testing, software development, DevOps, and financial business industry.
          • Must have excellent verbal and written communication skills along with the ability to present information effectively to coworkers, management, and members.
          • Strong organizational and process management skills; detail orientation.
          • Ability to concurrently manage several projects and deadlines across multiple platforms.
          • Experience using Atlassian application suite (JIRA, Confluence) preferred
          • Experience in a waterfall-to-agile transformation a plus.Scrum Master II:
            • All of Level I knowledge, skills, and abilities.
            • Advanced level Scrum Master certification (CSM, PSM, ACP) preferred.
            • Three to Five years of experience playing the Scrum Master role for multiple teams concurrently diligently applying Scrum principles, practices, and theory.
            • Knowledge of numerous well documented patterns and techniques for filling in the intentional gaps left in the Scrum approach (ie: burndown techniques, retrospective formats, defect management, etc).
            • Demonstrated understanding of Unit Test-Driven Development and Acceptance Test-Driven Development and how to integrate it into agile delivery practices.
            • Experience working with DevOps continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines, test-driven development and rapid automated release practices and tools as well as agile transformation frameworks.
            • Demonstrated ability to guide others through the transition from a traditional delivery mindset to an Agile mindset.Senior Scrum Master:
              • All of Level I and II knowledge, skills, and abilities.
              • Six years or more of experience playing the Scrum Master role for multiple teams concurrently diligently applying Scrum principles, practices, and theory
              • Four or more years of professional experience in a software project management or related role preferred.
              • Experience in a waterfall-to-agile transformation required.
              • Strong and demonstrated experience using the fundamentals of Agile development including measurable process improvement.
              • Ability to interact professionally and confidently with colleagues at all levels, including senior and executive management with clear and confident communication and presentation skills
              • Requires excellent communication, interpersonal, organizational and team building skills, business judgment, and proven expertise in supporting the efforts of a technical staff.
              • In-depth knowledge of business functions and extensive understanding of business operations, strategies and objectives.
              • Strong communication, facilitation, presentation, and consensus building skills.Strong skills and knowledge of servant leadership, facilitation, situational awareness, conflict resolution, continual improvement, empowerment, and increasing transparency. Equal Opportunity Employer/Protected Veterans/Individuals with Disabilities The contractor will not discharge or in any other manner discriminate against employees or applicants because they have inquired about, discussed, or disclosed their own pay or the pay of another employee or applicant. However, employees who have access to the compensation information of other employees or applicants as a part of their essential job functions cannot disclose the pay of other employees or applicants to individuals who do not otherwise have access to compensation information, unless the disclosure is (a) in response to a formal complaint or charge, (b) in furtherance of an investigation, proceeding, hearing, or action, including an investigation conducted by the employer, or (c) consistent with the contractor's legal duty to furnish information. 41 CFR 60-1.35(c)

Keywords: MSUFCU, East Lansing , Scrum Master, IT / Software / Systems , East Lansing, Michigan