Senior Manager Agile Program Manager

Job Description - Senior Manager - Agile Program Management

Domain: Program Management

Job Purpose • Lead the overall delivery setup and execution, people and financials management for the assigned software services projects/ program work streams in order to realize defined business outcomes with mid-sized, globally distributed teams • Partner with other delivery leads, clients and other internal/ external stakeholders to drive effective adoption of best practices, deployment of processes, methodologies and tools, execution of ceremonies and to drive continuous improvement on delivery engagements • Contribute to pre-sales and works with the legal and operations teams to ensure compliance • Manage relationships & status reporting within the organization, with clients & applicable third parties • Manage internal and external dependencies for the project or program • People management responsibilities for team members, track leads, scrum masters and product owners • Participate in Delivery Management and (or) Agile communities • The Scrum Master is trained on practicing Scrum and helps a team adopt Scrum in order to deliver quality releases quickly to market • Expertise with various Agile Methodologies –Scrum, Scrum with XP, Kanban, Scrum ban etc. • Expertise with various Agile Tools - Jira, Xplanner, Confluence, RTC, TFS, Rally etc and ensuring adoption in consistent manner. • Act as servant leader and shield the team from external interference and distractions to keep it in group flow • Create self-organizing teams, build consensus and resolve conflict • Responsible for the team to follow processes, establish and actively facilitate the cadence of all scrum ceremonies, and remove team impediments or escalate as per defined SLAs • Ability to partner with product owner and manage backlog - backlog prioritization, backlog grooming, ready groomed stories for next 3 iterations • Responsible for Definition of Done, Definition of Ready, Sprint Dashboard, Burndown Charts, QA Metrics (Quality/Technical Debt; Cycle Time/Lead Time), Story Quality Metrics, Escalation Plan, Sprint Start and Closure activities, Team working Agreement, push for Automation, Story Estimation techniques (like planning poker) etc. • Ability to manage and increase team velocity, measure efficiency at team and individual level • Articulate the overall project risk and risk mitigation plan and make it transparent to the relevant stakeholders • Good to have functional understanding of project and business value being delivered • Keeps scrum artifacts updated and visible • Knowledge of engineering best practices (XP, Refactoring, Clean code patterns, CI/CD – DevOps, TDD/BDD/DDD, Trunk based development) • Ability to run Scrum at scale using scaled agile solutions like Scrum of scrums, SAFe, DaD, LeSS or other industry frameworks • Enable continuous improvements around engineering maturity, product management and agile processes via facilitating assessments, reviews and retrospectives • Track project quality in real time using dashboards and metrics • Owns the empirical governance process across multiple scrum teams • Articulate project metrics including leakage, DOP, revenue & margins etc. • Ability to build relationships and manage Stakeholders, get periodic feedback from clients and derive corrective actions to make clients successful through realization of business outcomes for a large project or program • Collaborates closely with Product owner on product roadmap, release planning and business prioritization • Mentor and provide oversight to Scrum Masters. • Build strong relationship with internal stakeholders (Capability teams, IT, people success, Office Services, Business Operations, Finance including DAT (Deal acceptance team)) and external stakeholders (vendors and external teams) • Partner with Agile coach(es) and other senior leads within and external to drive compliance and delivery maturity improvement • Contributes to the Organization’s Agile community Mandatory Skills & Experience • Over 6 years of experience as the lead project manager for full lifecycle delivery of mid-sized (>6 months in schedule and >600 person days in effort) software services projects or programs with globally distributed teams • Strong “hands on” project management experience from inception to closure phases • Experience with 3 or more engagements as a lead (scrum master, product owner, Kanban lead, etc.) on delivery or consulting projects/ programs based on Scrum/ Kanban framework • Experience of delivering one or more fixed time, fixed price or SLA based managed services engagements • Delivery experience with scaled agile engagements • Over 3 years of lead experience in a direct client facing role (preferably in the US or UK) as part of a consulting/ services organisation • Knowledge of 2 or more effort and cost estimation methodologies/ frameworks • Direct people management responsibilities for 10 or more people (including track leads/ other leads) and indirect responsibility/ span of 25 or more people as part of a cross functional team comprising of business analysts. Creative designers, developers, testers and other support functions • Strong commercial acumen i.e. understanding of pricing models, delivery P&L, budgeting, etc. Basic level understanding of contracts • Industry experience on Retail, Financial Services, Energy & commodities, Travel & Hospitality, Automotive, Consumer products is preferred. Nice to have Experience & Credentials • Diverse experience across more than one service offering such as application development and maintenance, application/ product support, systems integration, product engineering, package implementation, project management consulting, etc. • Practitioner experience as an Agile Coach • Certifications: SAFe or other scaled agile related certifications About US Publicis Sapient is a digital transformation partner helping established organizations get to their future, digitallyenabled state, both in the way they work and the way they serve their customers. We help unlock value through a start-up mindset and modern methods, fusing strategy, consulting and customer experience with agile engineering and problem-solving creativity. As digital pioneers with 20,000 people and 53 offices around the globe, our experience spanning technology, data sciences, consulting and customer obsession – combined with our culture of curiosity and relentlessness – enables us to accelerate our clients’ businesses through designing the products and services their customers truly value. Publicis Sapient is the digital business transformation hub of Publicis Groupe