Lead Scrum Master
Absa
n/a - n/a
R800–850 per hour
Johannesburg, City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality
Contract
Scrum Master
Role
Role Purpose
The Lead Scrum Master is a leader and delivery coach responsible for orchestrating portfolio-level delivery across the Group Compliance Data, AI & Analytics Office and business domains. This role will lead a team of Scrum Masters, establishes and facilitates governance committees, optimizes delivery flow, and ensures that data, analytics, and AI products are delivered predictably, compliantly, and with measurable business value.
The ideal candidate must enable cross-functional collaboration among Data Engineers, Data Product, Analytics, AI, Data Governance, Run & Support, and Business teams, while embedding modern agile, Lean, and DevOps practices suited to enterprise data and AI delivery.
Key Responsibilities
1) Portfolio & Governance
- Orchestrate portfolio-level planning (roadmapping, quarterly/PI planning), dependency management, and capacity balancing across data & AI value squads and business domains.
- Establish and chair (or co-chair) delivery and governance committees with clear terms of reference, cadences, and decision rights:
- Portfolio Steering Committee
- Scrum of Scrums / Value Stream Sync / Release & Change forums
- Run portfolio ceremonies: quarterly planning, mid-quarter reviews, cross-team demos, release readiness checks, and dependency risk reviews.
- Partner with Product/Portfolio Managers and Compliance Group Strategy on OKRs, benefits mapping, budgets, and cost transparency.
2) People Leadership & Coaching
- Lead, mentor, and develop a team of Scrum Masters; set standards for agile delivery excellence, career paths, and continuous learning.
- Coach practice squads (e.g Data Product, Data Engineers, Data Scientists etc) on empirical planning, outcome definition, backlog management, and flow.
- Build a culture of customer-centricity, speed of execution and continuous improvement.
3) Delivery Excellence (Data/AI context)
- Institutionalise practices appropriate for data, ML and AI delivery: DataOps, MLOps, continuous integration & deployment.
- Ensure squads apply fit-for-purpose frameworks (Scrum) and enforce WIP limits, definition of ready/done, and quality gates.
- Enable environment readiness and release management across data platforms (e.g., Azure/AWS), analytics tooling, and downstream consumers.
4) Metrics, Insights & Reporting
- Define and standardise portfolio and flow metrics: throughput, cycle time, WIP, blockers, dependency aging, predictability, release frequency, change failure rate.
- Create executive-ready dashboards and reports for the portfolio (Jira/ Confluence-based or equivalent), linking delivery to OKRs and value realization.
5) Risk, Compliance & AI Governance
- Maintain RAID logs across the portfolio; manage escalations and remediation plans.
6) Stakeholder & Change Management
- Act as a trusted partner to business executives, product leaders, delivering teams, and platform engineering.
- Drive communication plans, change adoption, and stakeholder engagement for major data & AI initiatives.
Experience & Background
- 10+ years in agile delivery, with 5+ years as a Senior/Lead Scrum Master, Agile Delivery Lead, or equivalent.
- Proven experience leading multiple teams (6–12+ squads) and coaching Scrum Masters in complex, multi-value stream environments.
- Demonstrated delivery across enterprise data, analytics, and AI/ML initiatives (e.g., data platforms, data products, BI/Visualization, ML models at scale, MLOps).
- Track record of portfolio-level planning, dependency management, and executive stakeholder engagement.
Qualifications & Certifications (Preferred)
- Agile certifications: SAFe (RTE, SA, or LMP) or equivalent.
- Tertiary degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, Data/Analytics, or related field (or equivalent experience).
Technical & Domain Competencies
- Agile at scale: Scrum, Kanban, SAFe (or tailored scaling patterns), Lean Portfolio Management.
- Tooling: Jira, Confluence.
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