The Manager works with the wider IT Team, and is responsible for fostering the development and collaboration of our Agile practices, through facilitating and guiding the work of Teams via the Release Trains, ensuring we deliver on our commitments.

The release manager will facilitate the Release Train processes and execution, helps to ensure value delivery, managing risk, and helps drive relentless improvement. They also participate in the Lean-Agile transformation, coaching leaders, teams, and Scrum Masters in new approaches and mindsets, while also adapting to the organization’s needs, standardising and documenting practices.

Key Responsibilities:

• Establishing and communicate the cyclical calendars for Iterations and releases across all teams and stakeholders, to help ensure both technical and strategic alignment.
• Managing and optimizing the flow of value through the Agile Release Train, using metrics and data, to guide decision making on what the train will deliver and when.
• Own and facilitating planning events, summarising the planning objectives & outputs, publishing them for visibility and transparency across the contributing teams.
• Facilitate periodic synchronization meetings, assist tracking the execution of features and capabilities at a train level - not at an individual story level.
• Unbiased communication of Team, Initiative, and Program health through big visible Information Radiators, Sprint Reviews and Program Reviews.
• Help to manage risks and dependencies, driving teams towards follow-up actions and decisions, and escalating impediments when required.
• Supporting the transition to multi-disciplined release teams and the embedding of new tooling and technology capabilities.
• Provide guidance across the organization on “Continuous Planning” practices to flatten the SDLC
• Drive improvement via Retrospectives/Inspect and Adapt workshops; assess the agility level of the ART, identifying areas for improvement and tracking those improvements.
• Leverage Jira as a central repository for work, to not only help assess the health of a release.
  but show quantitative and analytical insight to assess Team, Initiative, and Program performance.
• Provide input on resourcing to address critical pinch points within the flow of value.
• Foster Communities of Practice and the use of engineering and Built-In Quality practices

Competencies

• Proven track record of similar success in an Agile environment with multiple teams.
• Highly adaptable in world of changing priorities; comfortable with ambiguity.
• Adept at coaching people with open questions rather than use authority
• Thinking beyond day-to-day activities, coming back to the big picture
• Be transparent and appreciate openness and feedback from others
• Support the teams’ commitments and help to motivate them to work together in the most efficient and professional manner
• Able to communicate with all levels of the organization and deliver sensitive or difficult information tactfully and professionally
• A quality-oriented mindset, with a focus on improvement over culpability
• The capability to assess problems and help solve with a sense of urgency
• Ability to effectively analyse data and apply critical thinking
• High level of comfort with the role of a change agent within an organization
• Ability to develop a working knowledge of the technical domain to effectively support technical risks that may arise
• Understand and articulate the difference between “being Agile” and “doing Agile”

• A minimum of 8 years of professional experience in a related engineering or quality role.
• 4+ years of experience using Agile methods (Scrum, Kanban, XP, or SAFe)
• Agile Certification, CSM or PSM, Scaled Agile certification and experience a plus
• Prior experience as a Release Train Engineer, Value Stream Engineer, Scrum Master, Product Owner or Quality role.
• Education/Experience developing, testing and/or integrating real-time software
• Strong technical aptitude and experience leading teams in delivering quality systems or large scale systems involving hardware and software
• Experience applying Lean Thinking and Systems Thinking in large organizations
• Experience working in an Agile organization using Lean, Scrum, XP, Kanban, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), or other scaling model
• Prior experience of working in a organization transitioning to an Agile model an advantage.