Senior Scrum Master (HIRED)
Lowe’s Companies, Inc. (NYSE: LOW) is a FORTUNE® 50 home improvement company serving more than 18 million customers a week in the United States, Canada and Mexico. With fiscal year 2017 sales of $68.6 billion, Lowe’s and its related businesses operate or service more than 2,390 home improvement and hardware stores and employ over 310,000 people. Founded in 1946 and based in Mooresville, N.C., Lowe’s supports the communities it serves through programs that focus on K-12 public education and community improvement projects. For more information, visit Lowes.com.
Overview:
The Senior Scrum Master will sit within the Management Mobility Group and is responsible for guiding multiple scrum teams through the use of Agile/Scrum practices and values for the purpose of delivering quality software and solutions back to the organization. They are responsible for conducting Scrum of Scrum processes and ceremonies when in a team-of-teams model. This person must build trusted relationships with the team and with their stakeholders (Product Managers, Solutions Managers, etc) to ensure the needs of all team members are being met.
This role performs all prescribed scrum master duties including (but not limited to): removing impediments for the team and/or team-of-teams, inspecting performance through key team metrics and facilitating process improvement discussions to optimize the team’s or team-of-team’s reliability, predictability and output. This position is responsible for assisting in the delivery of software solutions by maintaining information radiators (metrics) and making them transparent to management, by keeping the team is focused on the right priorities and ensuring the team is continuously improving. The unique skills required for effective performance in this job include product and release planning, stakeholder management, risk management, agile ceremony facilitation and an understanding of a variety of software delivery methods.
Additionally, the Senoir Scrum Master is responsible for adhering to overall standards for the Scrum Master discipline, mentoring Scrum Masters to ensure capabilities and skills are growing. May lead the Scrum Community of Practice or a subcommittee of the community of practice. Expected to participate in Enterprise process improvement efforts and be an advocate for change for IT.
Responsibilities:
• Ensures the team follows standard processes while identifying opportunities for improvement. Facilitates team in defining Working Agreements, Definition of Ready, Definition of Done and then ensures those agreements are upheld.
• Facilitates agile ceremonies: daily stand-up (scrum) meetings, retrospectives, demos, backlog grooming/refinement, backlog sizing, sprint planning, scrum of scrum ceremonies, release planning. Understands and uses a variety of techniques to continuously optimize ceremonies and team participation and engagement.
• Helps identify and remove impediments, escalates impediments to the product and solutions manager, recommends ways to resolve impediments and influences leadership to take action on these recommendations.
• Helps team inspect and adapt process through retrospectives, data/metrics tracking and creating a safe, trusting environment with space to grow. Coaching them to higher levels of performance.
• Assists with internal and external communication and improving transparency by creating visible information radiators (burn-downs, velocity chart, etc), dashboards and demos. Supports Product Manager with materials for communication for senior leadership that are clear, concise and visually appealing. Provides metric reports to assist in product roadmap planning.
• Facilitates getting the work done without coercion, assigning or dictating the work directly. Facilitates discussion, decision making and conflict resolution. Observes team interactions and uses emotional intelligence to discuss observations in a safe, trusting environment.
• Support product planning by participating in release planning discussions. Supports during execution through understanding of priority and sequencing required to deliver efficiently. Guides team in commitment making and sprint completion.
• Holds team (product, development, QA, etc team members) accountable for delivery commitments. Helps team identify when commitments are at risk and helps team determine possible solutions to ensure commitments are met.
• Mentors scrum masters to higher skillset and performance. Brings new tools and techniques to scrum community for continuous improvement.
• Be an agile subject matter expert and provide strategic influence with the product / business and other engineering organizations.
• Ensures team’s backlogs are sufficiently full at all times (at minimum 3-4 sprints worth of work defined).
• Practices adaptive-leadership and promotes learning in others by building relationships with cross-functional stakeholders, communicating information and providing advice to drive efforts forward, influencing team members within assigned unit, adapting to competing demands and new responsibilities, providing feedback to others, including upward feedback to leadership and mentoring junior team members
• Conducts or oversees business-specific efforts by applying expertise in subject area, partnering internally and externally to make effective decisions, solving complex problems, escalating high priority issues or impediments as appropriate, monitoring progress and results, recognizing and capitalizing on improvement opportunities.
Education and experience:
Required
• Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration, Computer Science, MIS or related field and 6+ IT or related business experience. Additional equivalent work experience may be substituted for the degree requirement.
• 4+ years of experience providing project, product or team leadership.
• 4+ years of experience performing the Scrum Master for 2 or more software development teams utilizing SDLC.
• 4+ years of experience working in a large matrixed organization.
• 4+ years of experience leading teams, with or without direct reports.
• 2-3 years of experience with Agile methodologies (Kanban, TDD, etc.) and toolsets (Atlassian suite, etc).
• First level Scrum Master Certification (CSM).
Preferred
• 5+ years of experience in software development team.
• 5+ years of experience working with IT solution delivery teams.
• 3+ years of leadership experience with direct report responsibility.
• 3+ years of corporate retail experience.
• 3+ years of experience working on projects or programs requiring the integration of cross-functional technology and/or business solutions.
• Knowledge of Agile Project Management fundamentals as defined by the Project Management Institute in the Project Management Body of Knowledge.
• Second level Scrum Master Certification (CSP).
• ICAgile Certified Expert Agile Coach certification.
• Experience in managing large multi-geography (global) teams.
