Agile & Delivery Practice Lead

AXA UK; London; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

AXA UK is seeking an Agile & Delivery Practice Lead who will spearhead Agile methodologies across teams in London. The ideal candidate will have a robust background in Agile practices, excellent stakeholder management skills, and a proactive approach to identifying and solving problems. Join a dynamic team focused on continuous improvement and collaborative success.

Qualifications

• Deep understanding of Agile, Lean, and DevOps methodologies.
• Experience in enabling successful delivery across multiple teams.
• Ability to escalate and resolve blockers effectively.

Responsibilities

• Lead Agile and Delivery Management teams efficiently.
• Identify obstacles and propose process improvements.
• Manage and hire Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, and Delivery Managers.

Skills

Stakeholder Management

Agile Methodologies

Lean

DevOps

Team Collaboration

Job description

Agile & Delivery Practice Lead

Department: Software Development

Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time

Location: London

Reporting To: Adam Driver

Description

The Agile and Delivery Practice Lead will create the environment for CFC IT to deliver successfully, provide effective stakeholders engagement and continuously improve. You will coach Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches and Delivery Managers on how to be the best at their jobs, help them identify and solve problems and ensure that we have a continuous improvement approach on every aspect of the SDLC.

You will be the agile lead for IT and the rest of the organisation. You will be able to identify opportunities to create efficiencies or remove impediments/blockers. You will be able to work with delivery teams to create a solution and implement it. Another facet of the role is to lead Delivery Management, and tie this in with good Agile practices ensuring they support each other.

About the role

Agile thought leadership:

• Identify opportunities for improvement. What are the blockers and barriers to better, faster, higher quality delivery? Raise them so that they are visible and can be addressed.
• Further Agile process improvements (reduced batch size, removal of waste, lean thinking, better testing, cross organisational teams, etc.)
• Lead Delivery Management to resolve the things you identified. Propose solutions based on your experience and your Agile mindset.
• Responsible for the incremental transformation of delivery. Get alignment from key stakeholders to chart a course for the department from stable predictable delivery to innovation.
• Pro-actively identify blockers to future scaling and bring together the right people to solve or mitigate.

Delivery management excellence:

• Define the lightweight Agile environment and delivery processes, building delivery team alignment to successfully execute business-valuable outcomes across an increasing number of teams
• Create structures for low-friction information flow
• Ensure these processes are followed or adapted, where they are found to be too onerous

Leadership of the Agile and Delivery teams:

• Hire and line manage a set of Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches and Delivery Managers using an appropriate structure.
• Set the vision for Agile Delivery in CFC, giving steer and direction to reports to achieve the vision.

About you

The ideal candidate for this role will have excellent stakeholder management skills, especially around engaging senior stakeholders. You will have a deep understanding of Agile, Lean and DevOps methodologies and will understand organisations delivery software successfully, including portfolio management and product roadmaps. Additionally, you will:

• Help IT become a highly collaborative part of the business
• You will have experience enabling successful delivery of cross-team initiatives, using lightweight mechanisms to:
• Mitigate cross-team dependencies
• Escalate or resolve challenges, blockers and impediments to efficient delivery
• You will be able to demonstrate that you have helped teams deliver improvements to their own processes
• This must be at both a team level and across multiple teams (both IT and business focused teams).

Core Values

Love what you do:

We show up each day ready to take on the world. Our passion and intensity set us apart and makes the difference to our colleagues, customers, brokers and carriers.

Challenge everything:

We’re never afraid to question the way that things are done and we constantly challenge ourselves and others to makes things better.

Have fun, be good:

Insurance is a serious business, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We make it fun to work at CFC, we welcome all viewpoints, and we treat everyone how we would expect to be treated.