Manager Agile Program Management

Job Description:

• Lead the overall delivery setup and execution, people and financials management for the assigned software services projects/ program work streams in order to realize defined business outcomes with mid-sized, globally distributed teams
• Partner with Agile leads, other delivery leads, clients, and other internal/ external stakeholders to drive effective adoption of best practices, deployment of processes, methodologies, and tools, execution of ceremonies and drive continuous improvement on delivery engagements 
• Contribute to pre-sales and works with the legal and operations teams to ensure compliance
• Manage relationships & status reporting within the organization, with clients & applicable third parties
• Manage internal and external dependencies for the project or program
• People management responsibilities for team members, track leads, scrum masters, and product owners
• Participate in Delivery Management and (or) Agile communities
• The Scrum Master is trained in practicing Scrum and helps a team adopt Scrum in order to deliver quality releases quickly to market
• Expertise with various Agile Methodologies –Scrum, Scrum with XP, Kanban, Scrum ban, etc.
• Expertise with various Agile Tools - Jira, Xplanner, Confluence, RTC, TFS, Rally, etc. and ensuring adoption in a consistent manner.
• Act as a servant leader and shield the team from external interference and distractions to keep it in the group flow
• Create self-organizing teams, build consensus, and resolve conflict
• Responsible for the team to follow processes, establish and actively facilitate the cadence of all scrum ceremonies, and remove team impediments or escalate as per defined SLAs
• Ability to partner with the product owner and manage backlog - backlog prioritization, backlog grooming, ready groomed stories for next 3 iterations
• Responsible for Definition of Done, Definition of Ready, Sprint Dashboard, Burn down Charts, QA Metrics (Quality/Technical Debt; Cycle Time/Lead Time), Story Quality Metrics, Escalation Plan, Sprint Start and Closure activities, Team working Agreement, push for Automation, Story Estimation techniques (like planning poker), etc.
• Ability to manage and increase team velocity, measure efficiency at the team and individual level
• Articulate the overall project risk and risk mitigation plan and make it transparent to the relevant stakeholders
• Good to have a functional understanding of the project and the business value being delivered
• Keeps scrum artifacts updated and visible
• Knowledge of engineering best practices (XP, Refactoring, Clean code patterns, CI/CD – DevOps, TDD/BDD/DDD, Trunk based development)

Qualifications:

• Over 3 years of experience as the lead project manager for full lifecycle delivery of mid-sized (>6 months in schedule and >600 person days in effort) software services projects or programs with globally distributed teams
• Strong “hands-on” project management experience from inception to closure phases
• Experience with 2 or more engagements as a lead (scrum master, product owner, Kanban lead, etc.) on delivery or consulting projects/ programs based on Scrum/ Kanban framework
• Experience of delivering one or more fixed-time, fixed price or SLA based managed services engagements
• Over 2 years of lead experience in a direct client facing role (preferably in the US or UK) as part of a consulting/ services organization
• Knowledge of 2 or more effort and cost estimation methodologies/ frameworks
• Direct people management responsibilities for 5 or more people (including track leads/ other leads) and indirect responsibility/ span of 15 or more people as part of a cross functional team comprising of business analysts. Creative designers, developers, testers and other support functions
• Strong commercial acumen i.e. understanding of pricing models, delivery P&L, budgeting, etc. Basic level understanding of contracts
• Industry experience on Retail, Financial Services, Energy & commodities, Travel & Hospitality, Automotive, Consumer products is preferred.