Scrum Master

Required Skills

• Scrum Master / Agile Experience: 5+ years of Scrum Master or Agile facilitation experience, including 2+ years managing multiple concurrent development teams.
• Business & Technical Acumen: Ability to quickly understand business and technical requirements, government acronyms, and technical jargon; able to communicate effectively across all organizational levels.
• Agile Tools: Proficient with VersionOne, Agility, or comparable tools for managing boards, dependencies, impediments, and lightweight roll-up reporting.
• Ceremony Facilitation: Proven ability to run purposeful, timeboxed, and engaging Agile ceremonies (planning, daily stand-ups, backlog refinement, review, retrospective).
• Delivery & Improvement: Demonstrated success in reducing carryover, aging blockers, and decision latency without introducing heavy process.
• Backlog & Sizing Coaching: Ability to coach on backlog readiness (thin vertical slices, clear acceptance criteria, limited WIP) and hold teams accountable to sizing activities to project reliable end dates.
• Meeting & Team Management: Skilled in managing over- and under-talkers, scheduling, tracking, and running meetings effectively.

Day-to-Day Responsibilities

• Agile Facilitation: Lead core Agile events and lightweight cross-team syncs; maintain clarity on sprint goals.
• Ceremony Engagement: Make Agile “feel useful” with energetic, varied, and participatory ceremonies rather than rote compliance.
• Impediment Management: Track and drive resolution of blockers across environments, integration, data, and approvals.
• Dependency Coordination: Manage cross-team and cross-platform dependencies, including batch windows, deployment timing, and integration points.
• Transparency & Metrics: Maintain visible radiators such as sprint goals, impediment logs, experiment trackers, and simple metrics (goal attainment %, carryover, blocker aging).
• Coaching: Guide Product Owners, BAs, and tech leads on prioritization, backlog slicing, and readiness.
• Continuous Improvement: Drive 1–2 small improvement experiments per team per sprint and ensure completion.
• Team Culture: Foster psychological safety, inclusive participation, and sustainable pace.

Engagement & Culture

• Creative Retrospectives: Use rotating formats and lightweight recognition of small wins.
• Gamification: Introduce tasteful micro-gamification (e.g., “blocker bust streaks”) to energize teams without distraction.
• Inclusive Participation: Encourage rotating spokespeople and silent ideation rounds to amplify quieter voices.