Scrum Master Digital
Mission
The Scrum Master is a servant leader and coach and a leading role in the digital scrum teams, together with the Product Owner. The mission of the Scrum Master is to drive Scrum teams to become high performing self organizing teams that meet their goals. The Scrum Master fosters collaboration with other scrum teams and follows up inter-team dependencies using Agile best practices. He/She also helps remove impediments and foster an environment for continuous flow and relentless improvement.
Tasks
Meeting PI Objectives
- Takes ownership to ensure the scrum team’s progress towards team goals - He/She helps the team focus on daily and Sprint Goals in the context of current Program Increment (PI) Objectives, making sure the team can deliver its committed backlog. (Note: this might include safe guarding specific project milestones that fall within PI)
- Eliminates impediments – Many blocking issues will be beyond the team’s authority or may require support from other teams. The Scrum Master actively addresses these issues so that the team can remain focused on achieving the objectives of the Sprint.
- Guards the quality of delivery - He/She ensures the quality standards as captured in the user story Definition of Ready, Definition of Done or other quality standards are met by the scrum team before software is shipped to production
- Helps the Product Owners in their efforts to manage the backlog and guide the team while facilitating a healthy team dynamic with respect to priorities and scope, including attention to IT specific scope.
Manage scrum team collaboration within a bigger Release Train environment
- Helps prepare the PI planning and breakouts in collaboration with the PO and the program team
- Protects and communicates – He/she helps protect the team from uncontrolled expansion of work and communicates with management and outside stakeholders on this. In particular, for any additional or unexpected work that was not planned upfront, the scrum master requests the PO for feature/us creation and re-prioritization
- Helps coordinate inter-team cooperation on release train level. He/She represents the team on the scrum of scrums (or equivalent cross team fora)
Building a high-performing team
- Improving team dynamics – Focuses on ever-improving team dynamics and performance. Helps the team manage interpersonal conflicts, challenges, and opportunities for growth. Escalates people problems to management where necessary, after internal team processes have failed to resolve the issue; helps individuals and teams through personnel changes.
- Helps the team improve and take responsibility for their actions - facilitates the team retrospective.
- Teaches problem-solving techniques and helps the team become better problem-solvers for themselves , more self-steering.
- Facilitates meetings and Agile Rituals – Facilitates all team meetings, including the Daily Stand-up, Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective.
- Helps the team embrace Agile Values – Promotes SAFe quality practices, adopts and applies SAFe Principles selected to be part of Luminus methodology, implement Luminus practices
- Supports the team rules – The rules of an Agile Team are lightweight, but they are rules nonetheless, and the Scrum Master is responsible for reinforcing them.
- These may include the rules of Scrum, Built-In Quality practices, Work in Process (WIP) limits, and any other process rules the team has agreed.
- Drives & helps adoption of new techniques to improve flow and quality - the scrum master coaches the team to adopt techniques like test automation, CI/CD, pair programming, performing good demo's and so forth.
Agile Coach to the wider organization
- Coaching management, leaders, teams and other Scrum Masters in the agile processes and mindsets. Both through day to day evangelization and active participation in the Agile Community of Practice
- Does not manage the team backlog and so does not indicate ‘what’ need to be delivered, this is the responsibility of the Product Owner
- Extended experience in Agile methodologies is required with a preference for SAFe.
- Affinity with IT solutions at all levels and a good general understanding of business contexts and complex IT architectures including different technologies and systems.
- Connect and communicate to engage stakeholders via:
- Storytelling and presentations
- Sharing knowledge
- Critical thinking to improve processes and to boost creativity
- Fluent in English, Dutch and/or French is a plus
