Role title: Scrum Master

Location: Midrand

Duration: 6 months

Role purpose:

• The Scrum Master plays a crucial part in ensuring the success of our Digital Operating Model; helping us to become a leading digital company
• The Scrum Master is a servant leader to the DevOps delivery team, coaching agile methods, and providing support and facilitation to increase velocity and team productivity
• This role is responsible for identifying risks, dependencies, and impediments, leading the team and business in finding a solution, coordinating with other teams and functional partners, and actively escalating when needed to ensure resolution
• This role is responsible for keeping a pulse on needs and insights from stakeholders and other initiatives, regularly communicating status, changes in direction, and relevant metrics to avoid misalignment and roadblocks

Key accountabilities :

• Support the Product Owner in ensuring right-sized story writing, aligning priorities, and planning sprint iterations
• Coach team members on Agile methods and technical practices (e.g., CI/CD, TDD, etc.)
• Track and manage risks and issues of the delivery team
• Track and report on current status of all team members and the delivery
• Facilitating key agile ceremonies, such as daily stand-ups, demos, and retrospectives
• Monitor and optimize agile processes and practices
• Promote continuous improvement through retrospectives and team learning
• Coordinate with other delivery teams, stakeholders, and partners to manage risks, interdependencies, and impediments to the team

Core competencies:

• Is a role model for best practices in Agile process execution, motivating other team members to do the same
• Ability to continue to monitor, learn, and implement industry best practices from the agile community
• Natural "servant" leader, with strong ability to coach and develop others, an inherent entrepreneurial spirit, and focuses on ever-improving team dynamics and performance
• Viewed by the wider organization as an effective and consistent collaborator, influencer, and negotiator, able to highlight internal and external dependencies and break down complex blockers
• Excellent stakeholder management and communications skills, with the ability to inspire, influence, and update delivery teams and senior executives
• Excellent facilitation, organization, and problem-solving skills, helping the team manage conflicts, challenges, escalating only when team processes have failed
• Comfortable with ambiguity and working in fluid, fast-changing environments under pressure
• Strong grounding in traditional project management practices
• Good understanding of the business capability/user journey, wider organizational goals, and desired product business outcomes
• Understanding of both the current Telecommunications, Financial services and digital services market and emerging business and technology trends
• Agile software development environment and methods such as Scrum, SAFe, Kanban, XP. LSD, and FDD
• Agile ceremonies, tools. and artefacts, e.g., retrospectives, demos, increment planning, information radiators
• User story definition and team backlog management
• Backlog item estimation
• Continuous integration and continuous delivery methodologies and tools
• DevOps culture, processes. and tools

Must have technical / professional qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or other related field
• A total of at least five to eight years relevant experience of which at least three years needs to be as a Scrum Master or Product Owner with agile teams
• Experience in designing and delivering complex digital capabilities
• Experience leading teams using agile methodologies in large-scale teams
• Certified Agile coach, Certified Scrum Master (CSM), Professional Scrum Master (PSM), SAFeCertified Scrum Master or similar
• Experience working with agile methodologies, such as Scrum, Kanban, XP, TDD, and BDD
• Certifications in traditional Project Management practices, e.g., Prince 2, PMP preferred
• JIRA/Confluence, MS Project, or equivalent experience preferred