Senior Lead Scrum Master

ntrs; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Northern Trust in Chicago seeks an experienced Agile Coach/Scrum Master to empower self-organizing teams and advance engineering practices. You will mentor the Product Owner and teams, facilitate planning and delivery, and promote continuous improvement, transparency, and cross-functional collaboration across programs and partners.

You will coach teams on Agile methods, help establish Definition of Done and Ready, and drive adoption of engineering practices to achieve faster, higher quality

Qualifications

• Advanced understanding of Agile principles and practices (Scrum, Kanban).
• Experience coaching teams to improve delivery, quality, and velocity.
• Ability to facilitate planning, reviews, and retrospectives with stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Lead empowering, self-organizing, high-performing teams as a servant leader.
• Coach Product Owner on maintaining a prioritized backlog and clear acceptance criteria.
• Facilitate sprint planning, daily standups, reviews, and retrospectives; remove impediments.
• Promote transparency, continuous improvement, and effective risk/issue management.
• Foster cross-functional collaboration and education on engineering practices to accelerate delivery.

Skills

Agile/Scrum

Servant leadership

Facilitation

Coaching

Stakeholder communication

Cross-functional collaboration

Job description

About Northern Trust

As a global leader in innovative wealth management, asset servicing, asset management and banking services, Northern Trust (Nasdaq: NTRS) is proud to guide the world's most successful individuals, families, corporations and institutions.

Since 1889, we have aligned our efforts with our three guiding Principles That Endure: Service, Expertise, and Integrity. Together, they reflect the three cornerstones of business conduct which we strive to instill in our employees, whom we call partners, and to provide to our clients and the communities we serve worldwide.

With more than 135 years of financial experience and over 24,000 partners, we serve the world's most sophisticated clients using leading technology and exceptional service.

Major Duties

• Create empowered, self-organizing, high-performing teams by serving as the team's servant leader
  • Mentor the team and the Product Owner on Scrum and Agile best practices
  • Continuously improve team productivity and facilitate completion of work
  • Educate the team, Product Owner and stakeholders on the business value of engineering practices, and promote the use of engineering practices to provide faster delivery, better quality, and fewer defects
  • In collaboration with the team and Product Owner, regularly assess the Agile maturity of the team, identify improvement opportunities, and implement the improvements at a pace that is sustainable and comfortable for the team and the organization
  • Coach the team on the value and methods of developing cross-functional skills
• Facilitate planning
  • Coach the Product Owner on creating and maintaining a continuously prioritized Product Backlog of stories with clear acceptance criteria and high-level estimates
  • In collaboration with the team, facilitate the creation of team agreements which minimally include a Definition of Done (DOD) and a Definition of Ready (DOR)
  • Facilitate regular Release Planning workshops
  • Ensure updates to the plan are communicated to stakeholders
• Facilitate delivery
  • In collaboration with the team, identify and mitigate risks, issues and dependencies internal and external to the team
  • Remove impediments that prevent the team from delivering work and continuously improve
  • Facilitate sprint execution including elaborate planning sessions, sprint planning preparation sessions, sprint planning, daily stand-ups, sprint reviews and sprint retrospectives. Team coaching on:
    • I. Creating small stories with thin slices of end-to-end functionality
    • ii. The value and use of relative estimation
    • iii. Executing Design/Build/Test activities daily
    • iv. Testing early and often during each sprint
    • v. Incorporating engineering practices
    • vi. Completing committed stories in the sprint
    • vii. Completing Potentially Shippable Increments (PSI) in each sprint
    • viii. Correctly and effectively using velocity for planning
• Time box events to effectively manage the team's and stakeholders' time. Create information radiators that automatically and continuously share pertinent information with the team and stakeholders. Increase transparency and aid in internal and external communication and alignment. Read and recommend valuable Lean and Agile books, blogs, articles, etc. to continuously increase the team's Agile maturity.
• Seasoned expertise in Agile principles and practices, with deep technical and/or business knowledge. Provides comprehensive, in-depth consulting and leadership to team and partners at a high technical level.
• Able to facilitate open, fact based discussions, build consensus and reach decisions.
• Carries out moderately complex activities and initiatives which can involve multiple disciplines and/or ambiguous issues.

Knowledge

Excellent oral and written communication skills, time management and individual and team building skills. Advanced interpersonal skills, able to establish strong working relationships and promote bi-directional communication within and across teams and programs.

Strong leadership and organizational skills, skilled in facilitation, continuous improvement, empowerment, transparency, building trust and servant leadership. Able to effectively manage challenging situations through negotiation and conflict resolution.

Strong understanding of all facets of the software development life cycle including planning, development, quality assurance, change management and release management.

Excellent understanding of software development methodologies and fundamentals (Agile, SCRUM, Kanban, Waterfall, etc.) Strong knowledge and experience with Agile techniques such as Continuous Integration, automated testing, test-first approaches such as TDD, ATDD, etc., pairing, Agile games, etc.

Able to organize, moderate and demonstrate Agile industry best practices. Experience with developing and executing plans, meeting deadlines, coordinating timelines and efforts and applying advanced principles, theories and experiences.

Experience

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