Scrum Master

Overview

Role: Scrum Master

Location: UK Flexible (Hybrid/Remote working)

Job ID: 2023-2088

Salary: £50k to £60k plus benefits

Our vision is to create a safe and sustainable world.

Working here

You will be warmly welcomed into our workplace where every voice matters. We are diverse thinkers and doers, coming together to create a culture of inclusion. We will support you to find your place.

We will encourage you to use your passion and expertise to make a positive impact through the projects you work on.  Your knowledge and desire to bring about change will be invaluable in helping deliver innovative solutions that support communities across the globe in becoming safer and more sustainable.

Work life balance

We offer flexible approaches to work, whether that is working from home, being in the office, or as a hybrid worker. We're happy to discuss flexible working arrangements. Wellbeing is at the core to our culture, allowing employees to flourish and to achieve their full potential.

The role

As a Scrum Master you will help lead and coach scrum teams in delivering a portfolio of complex environmental software solutions. You’ll be commercially experienced in scrum, SAFe and Lean agile methodologies and prepared to collaborate with multiple stakeholders (coming together from across the business) to ensure effective outcomes. The Scrum Master will be responsible for guiding teams through multiple competing projects demands, and able to resolve prioritisation issues calmly and effectively, gaining buy in and confidence from the business. We need a scrum master able to help our business continue its agile journey, whilst delivering successful digital projects, promoting a ‘one team’ culture with our scientific and technical domain experts across the business. You'll have the opportunity to influence agile decisions and coordinate with the wider business and our customers about agile delivery practices.

Key responsibilities

• Quickly gain an understanding of the business: what we do, where we add value and what our digital performance metrics are.
• Align with our technical business analysts to ensure requirements solicitation and refinement sessions are handled in a timely manner.
• Demonstrate gravitas and the ability to protect the development team from disturbances amid a lot of competing requests for developer time.
• Identify and raise risks and issues to senior management as they arise with mitigation plans.
• Identify blockers impeding agile adoption within teams and provide recommendations on how to overcome them.
• Be the go-to-person to contact and initiate resolution of dependencies.
• Adapt tone, approach, communication methods and tools to suit the audience effectively.
• Adapt and apply agile methodology (typically scrum or Kanban) to how we organise and manage our digital projects, including managing backlog(s) and task assignments as appropriate.
• Develop excellent working relationships with our digital delivery teams, which includes professionals in a range of digital and non-digital disciplines.
• Lead the implementation of all appropriate agile team ceremonies – planning, stand-ups, sprints, sprint goals, sprint reviews and retrospectives.
• Gather, analyse and share relevant performance metrics through monthly reports about our digital delivery.
• Communicate well within the business and develop a wide personal network.
• Foster an enthusiasm for the agile approach and continuous improvement.
• Work closely with our clients and help to educate them on the agile approach.
• Ensure a consistent project management approach per project.
• Support the bid writing process.
• Continually improve project financial and operational performance
• Provide coaching and training.
• Prepare and deliver effective communications both verbally and written regarding progress and status for teams.
• Deliver workshops to facilitate and aid our teams to continuously improve efficiency and effectiveness.
• Identify process issues and recommend improvements.
• Document & track lessons learnt in retrospectives and use the outcomes for future analysis.

Key competencies and experience

• A relevant agile qualification.
• Technical software development background.
• Proven Scrum Master background with demonstrable success stories in evangelising agile.
• Experience establishing collaborative partnerships with key stakeholders and team members to help them in their journey of adopting Agile methodologies.
• Experience of task management software. (preferably Jira and Azure DevOps)
• Strong ability to facilitate productive refinement sessions for soliciting requirements and reaching acceptance criteria understood and agreed between development team and product owners.

Skills and behaviours

• Strong commercial awareness and customer orientation.
• The ability to determine the reasons why teams and projects may not be delivering as expected and take effective actions to remedy the situation.
• A responsible attitude - take responsibility for the tasks assigned and deliver them to an agreed level of quality and speed.
• Ability to prioritise work - In the face of potentially conflicting priorities coming from different team requirements.
• Problem solving skills - Needed to find innovative solutions to team requirements.
• Active Listening - Giving full attention to what other people are saying, taking time to understand the points being made, asking questions as appropriate, and not interrupting at inappropriate times.
• Speaking - Talking to others to convey information effectively.
• A ‘Can-Do’ attitude - Taking ownership of challenges and provide effective solutions.
• Attention to Detail – Ensuring task priorities are well planned and sprint planning is effective.

Desirable

• Previous team leadership responsibility including regular 1:1s with team members is preferred but not essential - you will likely have a small team of direct reports.
• Experience in using agile for delivering multiple digital projects concurrently.
• Experience in consulting and/or the environmental sector.
• Software development background.

Benefits

We want you to know how much you are valued. Your remuneration and benefits package will reflect that. You will receive a range of benefits which include support for your physical and mental health.

Our core benefits include 25 days' annual leave, plus 8 flexible bank holidays, a competitive company pension scheme, life assurance and professional subscriptions reimbursement. We also offer a wide range of flexible benefits to suit your lifestyle.

Next steps

Once you have submitted your application a member of our Recruitment Team will be in touch. Please be aware that the timing can vary dependent on the volume of applications that we receive for each role and in some cases, we may start to review applications prior to the closing date.

Ricardo is a Disability confident employer please advise the recruitment team via recruit.ee@ricardo.com if you require any adjustments to support you throughout the recruitment process.