Agile Project Manager/Scrum Master

Job title: Agile Project Manager/Scrum Master

Location: Remote (client location: Madison, NJ)

Duration: 12 Months Contract

W2, Candidates authorized to work for any employer; Cannot Sponsor

Essential Duties:

• Guides and coaches the Scrum Team on how to use Agile practices and principles to deliver high quality products and services to our customers.

• Helps team to achieve a high performing level by recognizing areas of strength and improvement and employing appropriate coaching and development techniques.

• Responsible for ensuring Scrum is understood and the team adheres to Scrum theory, practice, and guidelines.

• Coaches the Scrum team in self-organization, cross-functional skillset, domain knowledge and communicates effectively, both internally and externally.

• Works with Scrum Team, as well as internal and external stakeholders, to influence and drive decision making and support organizational project or product teams.

• Resolves team impediments and limits the external interference the team must deal with.

• Ensure transparency and collaboration across the team and other teams working and works with other Scrum Masters across the organization to facilitate scrum of scrum events

• Works with Agile coaches and other Scrum Masters to grow within the role.

• Contributes to the advancement and improvement of Agile practices within the organization.

• Facilitates and supports all scrum events: Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective etc.

• Facilitates cross team collaboration, and Scrum of Scrum level events

• Assessing the Scrum Maturity of the team and organization and coaching the team to higher levels of maturity, at a pace that is sustainable and comfortable for the team and organization

• Ensure product quality expectations are defined and known across the team.

• Track and monitor progress daily and help the team achieve their commitments and when problems are identified work with team to develop corrective actions.

• Building a trusting and safe environment where problems can be raised without fear of blame, retribution, or being judged, with an emphasis of healing and problem solving.

• Assisting with internal and external communication, improving transparency, and radiating information

• Supporting and educating the Product Owner, especially with respect to refining (aka grooming) and managing the product backlog and road mapping

• Collaborate with the team in scheduling work, including defect remediation and refactoring, guarding against the accumulation of technical debt.

• Manage and report the status of scope, schedule, resourcing, and financials. Including tracking budget and product metrics

Scrum Master Qualifications / Skills:

• Exemplifies and promotes Agile values and principles

• Outstanding communication, facilitation, negotiation, and coaching skills

• Excellent skills and knowledge of servant leadership, facilitation, situational awareness, conflict resolution, continual improvement, collaboration, increasing transparency, and root cause analysis.

• Extensive knowledge of program and project management principles and methods.

• Knowledge of multiple PPM and agile frameworks (i.e. Waterfall, Hybrid, Scrum, XP, Kanban, LeSS, etc..),

• Clear understanding of software development life cycle models

• Adept at understanding requirements, refinement, story splitting, estimation, velocity, retrospection.

• Planning and problem solving with product management and delivery teams.

• Solid understanding of and demonstrated experience in using appropriate tools, such as Jira, Confluence, Microsoft Project, Visio, ServiceNow and all MS Office Tools

• Understanding of financial controls needed in project management and consulting work, experience with budget tracking.

• In-depth understanding of how to scope and estimate work.

• Understanding of execution metrics and how to leverage for teams’ continuous improvement and reporting.

• Experience working with multiple teams in a variety of different contexts (different team sizes, different organizations, different cultures, co-located vs. distributed, etc)

• Proficient in Visio, MS Excel, PowerPoint and other Office applications to build process flows and presentations.

Education, and Certification Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree and 7 years of product/project development experience on an Agile Team

• Must have first level PM and Scrum Master certification PMI-PMP, (CSM ) (PSM), PMI-ACP

Preferred Certification Requirements (Any of these is a plus):

• Lean Six Sigma certification a plus.

• PMI- PgMP®

• Second or Third level Scrum Master certification (A-CSM, PSM II, PSM III, CSP, CTC)

• CSPO or equivalent

Track record of continued and recent education in Project/Program Management and Agile/Scrum, including training, conferences, user groups, self-study, etc.