Data, analytics, and AI (DAAI) are revolutionizing the pharmaceutical industry in helping to enhance efficiency, reducing costs, improving patient outcomes, and ensuring compliance. These technologies are enabling pharmaceutical companies to innovate faster, develop more effective therapies, and deliver personalized care, ultimately transforming the way medicines are discovered, developed, and delivered. For that reason, the DAAI Team is looking for a strong Scrum Manager who can help to lead and drive our projects toward those goals.
**What you'll do**
You will use your facilitation and leadership skills to help teams develop and deliver valuable Data, analytics and AI solutions within Commercial IT. These solutions will contribute indirectly and directly to improve the health of people who use our medicines.
You will embed and role model agile working practices in the DAAI portfolio, ensuring we innovate and deliver maximum value of our platforms and products, and foster the confidence and effectiveness of our delivery teams and senior stakeholders.
Scrum Team management, Agile ways of working and the ability to communicate clear and concisely will be key for this role.
This role will involve the day-to-day management of at least 1 Agile Scrum Team, coaching the team on Agile principles and practices and ensuring the team is able to deliver high-quality products efficiently. This will include, coordination of activity and key Agile events/ceremonies, such as Daily Stand ups, Sprint Reviews, Backlog Refinement, Sprint planning and Retrospectives.
The use of Agile tooling including JIRA, Confluence, MIRO and Team Retro will be required in order to visualise and drive forward key activity.
IT and Business stakeholder communication will be required, ensuring clarity and alignment across teams. Managing of risk and the removal of impediments will also be a key responsibility in this role.
**Key Responsibilities**:
Facilitate all Scrum ceremonies including Daily Stand-ups, Sprint Planning, Reviews, and Retrospectives.
Ensure the Scrum Team adheres to Scrum principles and Agile methodologies.
Manage the product backlog in collaboration with the Product Owner.
- Monitor and report on team performance using Agile metrics.
- Foster a collaborative and high-performance team environment. Ensure everyone is respected, contributes effectively, and is heard
- Facilitate the team's progress toward Sprint goals, commitments and successful delivery
- Protect the Development team from outside interruptions and distractions, surfacing and removing impediments to the development progress, actively coordinating with external teams to resolve dependencies, and timely escalation when beyond the team's control.
- Communicate effectively with stakeholders at all levels.
- Coach and mentor team members on Agile practices and principles.
- Lead continuous improvement efforts to enhance team productivity and quality.
- Coordinate with other Scrum Masters to synchronize cross-team dependencies.
- Communicate through specific reports the project status
- Collaborate with and coach Team members and wider stakeholders on agile adoption, scrum implementation, embracing change and the development of the required processes and behaviours.
- Collaborate with the Product Owner, ensuring their deep engagement, ownership, and ongoing refinement of the Product Backlog - in order to provide clarity of scope and goals to the Development team prior to committing to deliver the work.
- Ensure ongoing and active collaboration between the Product Owner and the Development team for Story definition and acceptance, ensuring the development quality products first time.
- Utilise JIRA as the primary tool for understanding status and progress, measuring the output of the team, detecting variances and adjusting deviations with a focus on continuous improvement. Ensure these metrics improve and translate to greater business value.
**Essential for the role**
- Significant experience as a Scrum Master, performing all or most of the Scrum Master responsibilities described above
- Experience engaging project stakeholders not familiar with Agile ways of working and bringing them along the journey
- Project management basis (e.g., Coordinate release management, create project documentation, manage communications to stakeholders, negotiate schedule with stakeholders, provide status reports to stakeholders not familiar with Agile methods, reporting agile metrics).
- Jira knowledge and usage.
- Excellent Communication Skills
- Experience of co-ordinating Teams across multiple time zones
- Strong facilitation and presentation skills
- Ability to foster a culture of continuous improvement within the team.
**Desirable for the role**:
- Experience in the Life Sciences industry
- Experience of Data and Analytics development projects
- Experience of related practices and techniques - CI/CD, test-driven design etc.
- Agile Project Management certifications