Agile Project Manager

Role Summary

An IT Agile Project Manager (APM) is responsible for planning, leading, organizing and motivating agile project teams to achieve a high level of performance and quality in delivering agile projects that provide exceptional business value to users.  An APM may be responsible for managing several concurrent project or product development initiatives in a fast-paced environment that may cross multiple business divisions and vendors.   An APM may play a number of roles in actual practice, blending more traditional project management and scrum master practices to achieve high quality results.

Responsibilities within this Role

Project Management – 50% 
•    Management of full technology development lifecycle in a disciplined iterative project delivery model (DiPD) following applicable VCI SDLC practices, guidelines  and procedures including: 
o    Scope management  
o    Schedule Management
o    Budget Management
o    Change Management and Impact Analysis
o    Communications Management
o    Risk and Issue Management
o    Vendor Delivery Management
o    Procurement Management (provide support to Procurement Management team to fulfill deliverables)
•    Manage vendor and cross-functional team dependencies for product development and integrations to meet initiative objectives  
•    Maintain project and/or program tracking and work breakdown structures (Planview, MS Project, SmartSheet)

•    Understand, advocate and communicate business unit objectives, goals, vision and strategy to team to enable application/technology solutions that contribute towards achieving value 
•    Ability to recognize and mitigate conflict and problems with project, product and team resources and apply escalation appropriately  
•    Environment/Project coordination (balancing multiple project delivery dates with environment constraints)
•    Ensure that application processes (including those of external service providers) are conducted in line with corporate social responsibility, environmental and technical policies and applicable standards.
•    Manage development initiatives with major vendors and service providers to ensure they cost-effectively meet the needs of the organization in a socially and compliant manner.
•    Support action plans where necessary to improve Business Unit satisfaction levels. 
•    Provide inputs to scheduled progress reporting which includes comparing forecasts to actuals (budgets, schedules, scope, etc)  
•    Support Resource Manager in recruiting which includes interviewing, hiring and onboarding
•    Ensure all approvals are captured as required through the development lifecycle
•    Coordinate application production support for defined products 

Scrum Master – 50% 
•    Ensures a minimum a two sprints worth of user stories are ready in the team backlog 
•    Sprint planning and tracking
o    Agile tracking tools (i.e. JIRA, TFS, )
o    Manage story progression in lifecycle (wall status within a sprint)
o    Burndown 
o    Velocity
o    Capacity planning
o    Release planning
•    Facilitate the daily standup meetings
•    Facilitate the sprint planning meetings
•    Facilitate the sprint demo reviews
•    Facilitate sprint retrospectives
•    Accountable and responsible that the development teams are practicing the core agile principles of collaboration, prioritization, team accountability, and visibility
•    Identify and remove impediments, prevents distractions, reduce/prevent interruptions (protect the delivery team)

Qualification requirements

Required Experience:

    10+ years’ experience in project management role managing a high performing multi-function teams of 10+ resources in application development, implementation and ongoing product support
    Responsibility of managing a $1M+ budget per project investment
    5+ years’ experience in Scrum Master role managing multiple high performing multi-function teams of 5+ resources concurrently
    10+ years of Software / Application Development (Multiple development methodologies)
    5+ years of Auto Finance Experience
    5+ years of Vendor Management Experience leading technology integrations

Required Education:

    B.S. or B.A. in Computer Science or related discipline, Business Administration, Finance, Accounting or equivalent job experience.
    PMP Certification or equivalent

Desired Education:

    Advanced Degree a plus
    Scrum and/or SAFe Agile Certification

Required Skills:

    Agile Software Delivery Lifecyle
    Traditional Software Delivery Lifecycle
    Scrum Master experience:
        Sprint planning and tracking
        Facilitating daily standup meetings, demo reviews, retrospectives, and sprint planning
    Project Management experience in:
        Scope  
        Schedule
        Budget
        Change Management and Impact Analysis
        Communications
        Risk and Issue
        Vendor Delivery
        Procurement 

Desired:

•    Certified Scrum Master