Senior Scrum Master

Company: Assurant
Location: Springfield
Posted on: July 16, 2021

Job Description:

Self-motivated, self-reliant Senior Scrum Master will have the ability to achieve broadly communicated objectives under a minimal amount of supervision.  Senior Scrum Masters provide effective collaboration, facilitation, leadership and coaching skills to the agile development process and delivery of applications, as well as enforcing the agile tenants, removing impediments, and promoting empowerment.

Primary Job Accountabilities/Responsibilities:

• Understand the difference between Agile and Scrum and be able to articulate it
• Provide team with resources, information, communication, and practical advice to enable the team to regularly deliver working software
• Facilitates: Daily scrum (stand-up), release and sprint planning sessions, Sprint review (demo) and Sprint retrospective.  Ensure all participants understand the ceremony's purpose and keep to the time-box.
• Track and communicate team velocity and sprint/release progress
• Foster and encourage conversations and collaboration - both inside and outside of team – allowing them to self-organize
• Identify and remove impediments, prevent distractions that interfere with the ability of the team to deliver the sprint goal
• Understand and be able to articulate strategic and product planning and goals in the team's environment and progress toward them
• Supports Product Owner ensuring the product backlog is properly refined – prioritizing to maximize value and using creative techniques for elaborating user stories to be ready for the upcoming 1-2 sprints.  
• Assist team with making appropriate commitments through story selection, task definition
• Ensure team understands the need for clear and concise Product Backlog items and achieve this through techniques such as user story slicing and acceptance criteria
• Proactively manage dependencies
• Update agile tracking systems to provide transparency on Product & Sprint Backlogs
• Recommend improvements and assist in changes to best practice
• Participate in the agile community both internal to Assurant and external with other practitioners
• Enforces the values and principles of Agile by focusing on continuous learning and feedback loops
• Mentor and coach less experienced Scrum Masters 

Basic Qualifications:

• Certified Scrum Master (CSM) or Professional Scrum Master (PSM) Industry certification
• 5-7 years of experience as a Scrum Master for software development teams

Other Requirements:

• Agile experience within a multi-team organization
• Experience working with distributed, virtual teams
• Experience coaching and mentoring other Scrum Masters
• Excellent communication, facilitation, and coaching skills
• Expert understanding and deep toolbox of Agile practices such as: retrospectives, daily standups, sprint planning, burn down techniques
• Experience working with external teams and vendors
• Experience with agile team tools such as Jira, VersionOne or TFS
• Ability to collaborate and exercise influence without authority

Preferred Experience, Skills, and Knowledge:

• Bachelor’s Degree or higher preferred 
• Certified Scrum Professional (CSP) industry certification preferred
• Familiarity with lean principles and Kanban preferred
• Knowledge of other project management methodologies a plus
• Insurance industry experience a plus
• Participation in industry agile communities of practice desired
• Contact Center Experience preferred (Telephony, IVR, Softphone, Cisco)

Keywords: Assurant, Springfield , Senior Scrum Master, Other , Springfield, Ohio