You will be expected to:
- Possess exceptional communication skills (verbal, written, listening) and be confident in engaging with stakeholders at all levels
- Build good solid relationships with Business stakeholders, engineering teams and senior stakeholders.
- Facilitate the planning and estimation of a team’s workload
- Facilitate the stand-ups so that the team are aware, of what is happening, what needs to happen and what any issues are
- Promote team ownership of their products and services, empowering the team to self organise and continuously improve
- Be customer focussed, prioritising satisfying the customer through early and continuous delivery
- Promote sustainable development - the ability to deliver at a constant pace indefinitely
- Remove any impediments on the team, both internal and external
- Identify the risk issues and dependencies on the team and mitigate their harm on a team
- Contribute to and lead cross-platform activities and initiatives
- Ensure the team minimise wasted effort
- Have successfully applied agile techniques in a commercial organisation
- Have experience of managing commercial contracts with other suppliers
Skill level: Expert
Agile and Lean practices. You know how to coach and lead teams in Agile and Lean practices. You are a recognised expert that advocates these approaches, continuously reflecting and challenging the team. You can create or tailor new ways of working; you are always innovating.
Communication skills. You can mediate between people and develop effective relationships, communicating with teams and stakeholders at all levels. You can manage stakeholder expectations and facilitate discussions about high risk and complexity even within constrained timescales. You can speak and represent the community to large audiences inside and outside of government.
Team dynamics and collaboration. You can identify problems or issues in the team dynamic and rectify them. You can pull out issues through agile health-checks with the team and encourage the right responses. You can engage in varying types of feedback, choosing the right type at the appropriate time and ensuring the discussion and decision sticks. You can accelerate the team development cycle.
Maintaining delivery momentum. You know how to optimise the delivery flow of teams. You actively address the most complicated risks, issues and dependencies including where ownership exists outside the team or no clear ownership exists. You can identify innovative ways to unblock issues.
Making a process work. You can identify and challenge organisational processes of increasing complexity and those processes that are unnecessarily complicated. You can add value and can coach the organisation to inspect and adapt processes. You know how to guide teams through the implementation of a new process.
Planning. You know how to lead a continual planning process in a very complex environment. You can plan product delivery, enhancement, operation and retirement. You can identify dependencies in plans across services and coordinate delivery. You know how to coach other teams as the central point of expertise.
Skill level: Practitioner
Commercial management. You can take responsibility for complex relationships with contracted suppliers. You can identify appropriate contractual frameworks and identify appropriate suppliers. You know how to negotiate with contracted suppliers. You can get good value out of contracts and suppliers.
Life-cycle perspective. You can apply experience of multiple parts of the product life cycle including inception to live service. You can recognise when it is right to move forward and when it is right to stop. You can recognise the appropriate deliverables and the right people to meet these. You are able to work with other delivery teams throughout the product life cycle. You can plan and engage with the appropriate stakeholders at a particular stage in the project.
Required experience
- Developing technical user stories with appropriate acceptance criteria
- Working with DevOps or data platform engineering teams, ideally in a data focussed environment
- Building consensus in teams and with stakeholders
- Approaching problems creatively and innovatively
- User-centred service design as practised by Government Digital Service
- Working in a Lean, Agile, continuous delivery environment
- Leading multiple teams
- Leading backlog grooming and prioritisation workshops
- Supporting teams in creating a roadmap centred around customer value
- Using data to support decision making processes and continuous improvement
- Creating success metrics that reflect the value the team delivers
Tools & technologies
- Advanced workshop/group facilitation skills, especially working with remote teams and stakeholders
- Advanced scoping and estimation techniques
- Jira
- Confluence
- Collaborative business visualisation tools
- Data querying/exploration tools