Squad Lead

A Squad Lead (similar to Scrum Master) is part of the Squad Leadership within a Tribe. The Squad Lead has overall accountability for the success of the Squad, acting both as a servant leader and coach for the Tribe. 

Currently, release management forms part of the Squad Lead role which involves collaborating with The Change team, all IT Teams, Business teams and internal IT Support teams to ensure structured processes for releasing code into the production environment with appropriate approvals and quality gates.  

It’s important to note that the Ops Tribe’s journey to agile ways of working is on-going and, therefore, aspects of delivery require a robust Waterfall/ traditional Project Manager/hybrid approach.

Accountabilities

• Maximising Squad’s ability to deliver Sprint goals and contribute to Tribe OKRs.
• Squad level ceremonies integrity, consistency and effectiveness driving Squad value.
• To both the Squad as a whole and each individual Squad member performing as a servant leader.
•  Supporting the Squad to live the following values: productivity, quality, transparency, and openness over internal politics in everything it does.
• Co-ordinating releases across the delivery landscape

Responsibilities

• Ensuring Squad level ceremonies like Daily Huddles, Sprint Planning, Sprint Demos, Sprint Review etc. are conducted focusing on value return.
• Effective and consistent operational performance for the scrum process as the Squad Lead.
• Identifying, tracking, removing and escalating both blockers and impediments at Squad level to maintain both pace and flow of value.
• Ensuring compliance to Guardrails and Squad level activities.
• Owning and managing risks, issues and dependencies at Squad level.
• Managing and resolving intra-Squad dependencies by working with other Squad Leads within the Tribe.
• Timely and effective tracking and reporting on Squad’s progress against Sprint goals to Tribe Leadership.
• Managing Squad capacity including administrating absences for squad members, utilisation and velocity. Actively engages with other Squad Leads in the Tribe and Tribe leadership to discuss resourcing and utilisation strategies.
• Providing Chapter Lead with relevant input for each Squad member supporting each Squad member’s development and performance needs.
• Support the Chapter Lead for Pastoral Care where required.
• Support the Chapter Lead with planning and executing recruitment of staff.
• Support the Chapter Lead to review employee satisfaction and performance.
• Lead the end-to-end system release process.
• Developing, documenting, publishing and maintaining release management standards, plans and procedures (including governance).
• Release assurance and oversight, tracking, monitoring and reporting on the release landscape.
• Working and co-ordinating releases with all parties.

Knowledge and Experience Required

• Agile development techniques like: User Stories, Continuous Integration, ATDD - Acceptance Test Driven Development, TDD - Test-driven development, Continuous Testing, Pairing and Automated Testing.
• Operating within Operations/software development environment.
• Using Kanban Boards including the production of effective and timely squad performance monitoring reporting.
• Operating with an embedded SDLC process underpinned by Lean Agile practices.
• Project management fundamentals with the ability to apply principles, tools and techniques to develop/plan, manage or execute projects to ensure successful completion.
• Ideally 5+ years of Traditional Project Management, and more recently Delivery Management or Scrum Master experience for 2+ years operating with software development team that was applying scrum mastery techniques, lean agile principles and practices resulting in effective ROI.
• Operating within heavily regulated environments including external regulated consumer products and service offerings.
• Use of tools such as: Jira, Confluence etc.

Desirable Professional Training Requirements

• SAFe® 5 Agilist certification
• Agile Management Foundation
• Scrum Master certification (CSM Certified Scrum Master, PSM – Professional Scrum Master)

Interviews

Feedback and interviews will begin w/c 25/04/2022.

Salary, Benefits and Work-Life Balance

We do not have a set salary for this position, as it will be dependent on the successful candidate’s experience. We are happy to see CVs from all candidates who meet the requirements and will be happy to discuss the remuneration package.

At Admiral, we are proud to be a diverse business where we put our people and customers first. We have great benefits to ensure employees have a great work-life balance; it's one of the reasons we're consistently voted one of Sunday Times Best Big Companies to Work For in the UK. We want you to have an element of freedom to define a working lifestyle that supports this, so accommodate flexible hours wherever possible.

You can also view some of our other key benefits here; https://admiraljobs.co.uk/employee-benefits/.

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