Scrum Master Senior Analyst

Job Objective:

We are looking for an experienced Scrum Master to join our International Health portfolio in the Global Individual Health (GIH) Agile Release Train. The Scrum Master's primary focus will be to create an environment where the teams can deliver high quality, valuable software with a “one team” approach.  The Scrum Master will typically focus on upholding the values of Scrum, facilitating meetings and discussions, and removing blockers, so that team can focus on product delivery. 

This Scrum Master will serve as the “servant leader” and coach of the Scrum team by removing impediments and helping the team remain successful, on schedule and continuously improve. Must have a sufficient understanding of technology to lead team members and help them overcome their development roadblocks. The Scrum Master must also understand business strategy and objectives and be able to ensure that development work is prioritized by business value and results align with objectives. Exercises considerable creativity, foresight, and judgment in conceiving, planning, and delivering initiatives. Uses deep professional knowledge and acumen to advise functional leaders. Recognized internally as a subject matter expert on Scrum.

 Essential Qualities:

• Empathetic – Support the team by displaying an authentic understanding and concern for a team member’s beliefs or feelings. ​
• Conflict navigator – Supports team members in resolving interpersonal conflicts, problem-solving, and decision-making. ​
• Servant leader – Persuades rather than uses authority. As servant leaders, Scrum Masters focus on the needs of team members and those they serve, intending to achieve results aligned with the organization’s values, principles, and business objectives. ​
• Mentor – Supports the personal development of team members, helping them gain a continuous learning mindset. ​
• Transparent – Help the team provide transparency by ensuring artifacts are inspected, identifying significant differences between expected and actual results, and detecting anti-patterns. ​
• Coach – The Scrum Master understands and educates the team on methods beyond Scrum, such as SAFe, Kanban, Flow, Built-in Quality, and more. ​

Key Responsibilities: ​

• Facilitating PI Planning - They collaborate with other Scrum Masters and the Release Train Engineer (RTE), working actively with the team during PI planning. The Scrum Master assists in the preparation of PI Planning, ensuring that all necessary information is available to the team, writing draft PI Objectives, and identifying ART risks and issues, help teams create team PI objectives and review final plans and business value ensuring that they use good practices such as SMART criteria.​
• Supporting Iteration Execution - Support Agile Teams during the iteration, increasing the likelihood of achieving its iteration goals and PI objectives, facilitating Team Events (Backlog refinement, Team Planning, Team Sync, Review and Retrospective), work within the ART cadence and collaborate with the PO and stakeholders.​
• Improving Flow – The Scrum Master can significantly improve the team’s flow of work, eliminating bottlenecks, delays, and waste. For this purpose, the Scrum Master will need to create, together with the team, a Kanban board that shows the workflow, having metrics to detect points of improvement, always taking quality into account.​
• Building High-Performing Teams - Creating healthy Agile Teams is essential to creating high-value increments of working solutions. Agile Teams are small, cross-functional, and self-organizing. They are empowered to define and execute the work needed to accomplish the team’s objectives and those of the ART. Everyone agrees that all increments should meet a shared and have a scalable definition of done. Creating an environment of psychological safety for team members to thrive.​
• Improving ART Performance – Scrum Master help Agile Teams improve the overall ART performance facilitating cross-team collaboration, providing alignment between teams for objectives, vision and strategic themes and representing the team in the Coach Sync, PO Sync, and ART Syncs.

Preferred Skills/Experience:

• Experience in working in Health Insurance domain.
• At least 4 years of experience in a Scrum Master/Team Coach role.
• Any of the following certification:
  • CSM (Certified Scrum Master)
  • SSM (Certified SAFe Scrum Master)
  • PSM (Professional Scrum Master)
  • Second level Scrum Master Certification (CSP, PSM II)
• Knowledge of other agile frameworks: Kanban, XP, etc.
• Knowledge and/or experience with widely successful Agile techniques: User Story creation including Acceptance Criteria, TDD, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, Pair Programming, Automated Testing, Agile Games.
• Experience applying a wide variety of well-documented patterns and techniques, example: Burndown techniques, Retrospective formats, handling bugs, etc.
• Excellent communication and mentoring skills.
• Hands-on experience with tools like Jira, Confluence, SharePoint, Mural.
• Ability to prepare and track team dashboards and plans in Jira.

About The Cigna Group