Jobs in Johannesburg, United States

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What We'll Bring:

Transunion Africa is looking for an experienced Release Train Engineer (RTE) who can bring dynamic and critical thinking to our agile delivery processes and partner with business and IT leadership to drive business value.
What you’ll bring:
• As a leader, you will support and coach the Agile Release Train (ART) for success which includes scheduling, coordinating and the management of releases across the enterprise for multiple applications across various domains.
• You will help design, plan and implement the tools and services to help product management and project teams manage and co-ordinate releases into production.
• Facilitate and maintain the ART backlog, prioritization and demand approval processes.
• Facilitate PI (Program Increment) planning readiness and PI planning events.
• Aggregate Team PI objectives into Program PI objectives and publish for visibility and transparency; work with the teams to track progress and mitigate risk.
• Assist with Program execution and feature completion tracking.
• Facilitate Scrum of Scrums and biweekly PI Performance Review sessions.
• Help manage Program risks, issues and dependencies.
• Help resolve and escalate Program impediments as needed.
• Ensure Program governance, cadence (calendars).
• Drive Program level process improvement via PI Inspect & Adapt.
• Monitor the effectiveness of Program processes and performance, and collaborate with the Product and IT teams on changes and improvements.
• Ensure the ART maintains focus on the delivery of business value.
• Ensure the overall cost, schedule, and performance of the program.
• Coach and guide Scrum Masters on agile processes and mindsets. Ensure each scrum team is implementing and following consistent ART processes.
• Coach stakeholders and leaders in agile practices.
• Work closely with GT management to improve the software engineering processes and practices associated with continuously building, deploying, and updating software and environments.
• Managing projects and interdependencies to ensure milestone adherence across the portfolio.
• Responsible for coordinating the DevOps teams to make them deliver the services on time and will manage both IT operations and developers.
• Identify the risks that can delay the release and manage them such that scope, schedule, and quality of the release is not affected.
• Track the progress of execution and raise issues or risks that might impact progress.
• Hand-off to release manager including contribution to and supporting the following:
o Make sure that releases are planned as per requirements.
o Support in release readiness reviews before deployment and milestone reviews after each release.
o Contribute to planning for the implementation and deployment as per the release schedule.
o Contribute to weekly updates on the release activities.
o Contribute to the CAB meeting leading the release schedule discussion.
o Contribute to documentation related to procedures on build and release, various notifications lists, and dependencies.
• Foundational knowledge, understanding and passion for technology born out of a working experience in technology delivery.
• Develop an understanding of how business is enabled by technology and the team’s role in enabling TransUnion and our customers.
• An ability to manage people, direct them, motivate them with clarity and foster a healthy and productive team culture and spirit.
• A business acumen enabling you to listen, understand and concisely and accurately communicate with both business and customer stakeholders on release issues.
• Strong communication skills enabling you to communicate vision and intent with clarity, manage difficult conversations with empathy and firmness, and instruct teams with precision.
• Position of trust, honesty and integrity in the workplace

What You'll Bring:

Requirements:

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science/Information Technology, or other related field
• Equivalent work experience of 5 to 10 years of information technology experience, with at least two years leadership experience in managing multiple, large, cross-functional teams or projects
• A minimum of 2 years of experience managing and facilitating program increment (PI) planning readiness, program increment (PI) planning events, program (PI) execution and program level improvements
• Scrum Master certification with 7+ years’ experience
• Experience applying Lean Thinking and Systems Thinking in large organizations
• Understand the general values and principles of Agile as outlined in the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and be fully aligned to those values and principles
• Experience working in an Agile organization using Scrum, XP, Kanban, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
• Managing scrum teams across domains, skills and geographies in a complex environment
• A strong delivery focus, coupled with the ability to manage and inspire people towards high performance
• Strong strategic orientation with the ability to set direction for multiple teams
• Effective decision making and communication skills
• Effective coordination of plans, timelines and requirements
• Strong experience managing the full SDLC
• Experience in working with DevOps and Agile methodologies
• Strong experience in the use of Application Release Automation tools
• Strong emotional intelligence and managerial skills to lead teams and collaborate for success
• Experience in the Financial Risk or Credit Bureau industry will be beneficial
• Proven track record in delivering complex projects and technological transformations

Impact you’ll make:

At the highest level, the following impact will be sought:

Strategic:

• Serve as the Release Train Engineer for the TU Africa (TUA) Agile Release Train (ART): facilitate planning and execution of the PI for the ART, as well as relentless improvement at the ART level
• Aligns and calibrates the organization’s technology deployment strategy with its business strategy. Incorporates, understands, and blends the functions of the division with the needs and requirements of the organization to effectively achieve goals and objectives.
• Improve existing capabilities by improving processes, tooling or investment in key assets to enable those capabilities to operate more efficiently.
• Knowledge of agile delivery and a vision of what efficient agile delivery looks like and what tools/processes need to be put in place in order to support that vision.
• Drive definition, documentation and implementation of a standard way of work, key agile processes, reporting and tool utilization across the ART
• Drive process improvements for the TUA ART on the Scaled Agile Framework to improve the flow. Optimize flow and establish KPI’s to appropriately measure flow.
• Establish and maintain strong collaborative relationships with internal and external partners and stakeholders.
• Strong communication and management of business and other stakeholders to ensure alignment, prioritization and clarity of objectives.

People:

• Work with and build relationships with clients and business stakeholders including product owners, scrum masters, architects, technology leads, operations leads, InfoSec leads and infrastructure leads.
• Working closely with the Release Manager to build and maintain motivated and high performing agile delivery teams, agree backlog items and work prioritization.
• A customer centric focus – seeking to understand customer perception and experience of our products and services and how to improve this through consistent use of leading technologies, availability of appropriate information and appropriate internal prioritization and focus.
• Identify other teams that will interact closely with or have dependencies to / from the build teams and agree ways of work and roles and responsibilities.
• Manage and maintain both on-shore and off-shore delivery teams to ensure alignment, co-ordination between teams and collaboration.
• Conduct performance reviews, hiring activities and performance improvement programs with support of HR and recruitment teams.
• Market your teams brand and highlight the value you are delivering.

Delivery:

• Empower and guide teams to consistently execute on assignments and meet deliverable timelines.
• Ensure predictable and consistent delivery by managing scope, timelines and tracking / mitigating delivery issues and risks as they arise.
• Provide technical understanding to support and guide teams in way of work and execution.
• Drive and own delivery of new products and feature enhancements in balance with operational concerns such as ticket resolutions, InfoSec remediations and technology upgrades.
• Drive special projects or key initiatives across multiple teams.
• Engage with international TransUnion stakeholders to understand global application strategy, operating models and strategic technology direction. Bring leading thinking and practices from the international TU teams to bear in the local landscape.
• Identify areas for continuous improvement and implement delivery processes to drive incremental improvements over time covering agile methodologies and DevOps capabilities and improve maturity.
• Direct activities, maintaining a balance of tactical and operational focus for critical technical business operations.
• Clear and transparent reporting providing visibility into team activities, capacity and progress.
• You will build a metric driven approach to managing and evaluating team performance, tracking progress and delivery. Identify and agree on a balanced scorecard for measurement of the agile delivery teams.
• Manage vendors, sub-contractors or other providers to ensure their objectives are clear and they are enabled to provide us with efficient delivery.
• Drive the delivery automation agenda and ensure that value is unlocked through automation.
• Acts as industry subject matter expert, keeps abreast of the external competitive environment, compare them to the division operations and assess against the underlying strategy.
• Experience with Lean Portfolio Management facilitation for program, portfolio, or executive-level
• Experience with Lean Portfolio reporting for executive level stakeholders
• Certification(s) in Agile methodologies (e.g., CSM, CSPO, CSP, PMI ACP, SA, SPC, RTE, SSM, SASM) preferred
• Strong understanding of and demonstrated experience in using Rally or a similar Enterprise Agile Tool
• Experience in managing and collaborating on blockers, issues and risks
• Question team’s assumptions and approach to ensure deliverability of scope
• Encourage innovation across the teams to identify and fast track delivery of business value
• Active membership in the RTE Community of Practice helping the organization to maintain alignment, learn new techniques, and improve product, technical and quality practices. Work with RTE community to determine ways to help ARTs across the company relentlessly improve.

Impact You'll Make:

See above.

This is a hybrid position and involves regular performance of job responsibilities virtually as well as in-person at an assigned TU office location for a minimum of two days a week.

TransUnion Job Title

Sr Manager, Scrum Master