City of Austin - JOB DESCRIPTION

IT Scrum Master

IT Scrum Masters facilitate and champion the agile software development process by coaching and mentoring development teams, identifying and eliminating impediments, and promoting the use of standards and best practices. Ensuring smooth operation of agile processes and activities is critical and this position is responsible for leading daily stand-ups, backlog prioritization meetings, and retrospectives to achieve organizational strategies.

1. Works with stakeholders and technical teams to define/refine scope, ensuring initiative work is aligned with stakeholder outcomes.
2. Facilitates required planning discussions.
3. Proposes level of initiative documentation and definition of “done” and facilitates agreement across stakeholders.
4. Creates and maintains the initiative plan or backlog and schedules and identifies any potential prerequisites.
5. Works with Service/Product Owners to develop release plans, roadmaps and backlog estimations.
6. Optimizes day-to-day operational aspects of one or multiple initiatives or agile teams
7. Organizes and facilitates scrum ceremonies and works to optimize agile processes.
8. Works with Service/Product Owners/Managers to update backlog estimates based on team performance & stakeholder priority.
9. Works to continuously assess and improve the maturity and effectiveness of agile team
10. Works to create regular feedback loop between agile team and stakeholders.
11. Identifies risk mitigating actions in daily standups and other ceremonies and includes in subsequent sprints.
12. Removes potential roadblocks from the path of the initiative team by negotiating conflicts and resolving issues.

May provide leadership, work assignments, evaluation, training, and guidance to others.

• Knowledge of product life cycle, including software development methodologies, design, and implementation.
• Knowledge of Scrum, Lean, XP, Kanban, and other Agile development techniques.
• Knowledge of test automation concepts and methods.
• Knowledge of agile principals across project management, scrum, product management, etc.
• Knowledge of the organization’s mission, values, operations, and goals.
• Knowledge of data and integration architectures to manage, transform, and exploit data across the enterprise.
• Knowledge of the principles and methods to identify, analyze, specify, design, and manage functional and infrastructure requirements.
• Skill in leading scrum, lean process improvement, and reporting.
• Skill in facilitation, test driven development, quality assurance, release and deployment management, and agile estimation and planning.
• Ability to be self-motivated and work independently and perform multiple tasks under minimal supervision.
• Ability to train, coach and mentor the team.
• Ability to resolve conflicts by facilitating discussion and providing alternatives or different approaches.
• Ability to continuously improve by learning new tools and techniques and finding new ways to accomplish work activities and objectives.
• Ability to connect and influence others to achieve team goals.
• Ability to innovate by experimenting, accepting constructive feedback, adapting, and evolving.
• Ability to achieve broadly communicated objectives with a minimal amount of supervision.
• Ability to adhere to required compliance to all change management policies and procedures.
• Ability to adhere to required compliance to all information security policies and procedures.

• Graduation with a Bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university with major course work in a field related to the job, plus four (4) years of experience in a related field
• Experience may substitute for education for up to 4 years
• Master's Degree in a related field may substitute for two (2) years of experience

Scrum Master certification required