To lead and coach Agile teams and enable them to be effective. They manage up and across the enterprise, eliminating impediments and work to improve operations and flow. They build and develop teams, define the mission and vision of the team(s) and help them to achieve their highest potential as a team and as individuals through 1-1 coaching. Managers play a significant role in leading and implementing change.

This role is well suited to a leader who is motivated by having a positive influence on other people and the organisation. They should enjoy making decisions, driving change, continuous improvement and leading team members to enable the efficient build of the software.

Core Responsibilities:

Team contribution:

• Responsible for planning team work to execute and deliver quality software products
• Resource allocation to ensure development work are optimally assigned based on software engineers’ skills and expertise
• Ensuring that appropriate processes and procedures are in place to make sure both development & testing are completed to agreed standard, methods and procedures, supporting through code review processes and testing strategies as a whole-team approach
• Accountable for the quality of the team output

Recruiting and retaining talent, and fostering high-performing teams:

• Responsible for building a strong team culture and developing the capabilities of the teams (and the function more broadly) by attracting, developing, engaging, deploying and retaining key talents
• Works with HR and Finance to manage recruitment, compensation and promotions
• Responsible for setting goals and evaluating performance against them providing input, guidance, and corrective actions - constant monitoring and guidance.
• Proactive around training and mentoring
• Eliminates impediments and evolving systems and practices to support Agile development - works on clearing the way/removing blockers/setting ways of working strategy that is bigger than the team
• Supports the self-organization that leads to team formation; addressing issues that teams cannot unblock; making personnel changes where necessary
• Serving as an Agile coach and advisor to Agile Teams. Remaining close enough to the team to add value and to be a competent manager, while staying far enough away to let them problem-solve on their own. Encourage team independence and self-organization.

Program Execution:

• Help build Agile Milestones and Roadmaps, as well as the plans that enable them
• Help develop, implement, and communicate the economic framework i.e., align everyone to the financial objectives of an engineering initiative and be economical in decision-making processes (consider cost to produce, time to produce, labor and resourcing, cost to run etc.)
• Participate in Inspect and Adapt (I&A) workshops; support teams by helping them remove systemic impediments and implementing continuous improvement backlog items
• Protect teams from distractions and unrelated or unnecessary work
• Assist the Release Train and Solution Train Engineers with PI Planning readiness and Pre- and Post-PI Planning activities
• Participate in PI planning, System Demo, and Solution Demo
• Leverage a Customer-centric mindset and Design Thinking practices to establish the right relationships with customers create solutions that meet their needs
• Provide other resources as necessary for teams and Agile Release Trains to successfully execute their Vision and Roadmap

Continuously assist in aligning teams to the system mission and vision:

• Build partnerships with Suppliers, consultants, partners, and internal and external stakeholders, work with these stakeholders to help ensure alignment and execution of Strategic Themes
• Collaborate across different functions including Product Management, Delivery, Support and Practice Groups
• Work with the System Architect/Engineering, Product Managers, and Product Owners to establish explicit content authority

Transparency:

• Provide freedom and safety so that individuals and teams are free to innovate, experiment, and fail on occasion
• Keep Work in Process (WIP) backlogs and information fully visible to all
• Value productivity, quality, transparency, and openness over internal politics

Responsibilities for Built-in Quality:

• Support infrastructure, culture, organization, and strategy for implementing DevOps and Release on Demand
• Understand, teach, or sponsor the software and hardware engineering skills needed to support the development of high-quality code, components, systems, and solutions

Capabilities

Autonomy:

• Work is often self-initiated.
• Is fully responsible for meeting allocated technical and/or project/supervisory objectives.
• Establishes milestones and has a significant role in helping the team to self-manage tasks and/or responsibilities.

Complexity:

• Performs an extensive range of professional work activities – technical and leadership orientated.
• Upholds and represents their team within the wider organisation.
• Able to work in a dynamic, fast moving and challenging (and somewhat ambiguous) environment. Support the team to operate successfully in such environment.

Influence:

• Builds appropriate and effective business relationships with a variety of stakeholders.
• Makes decisions which impact the success of the team, i.e. results, deadlines and budget.
• Responsible for the allocation and management of resources appropriate to given assignments.
• Responsible for influencing their team’s work in line with the organisational strategy.

Knowledge:

• Actively seeks out new knowledge for own personal development and the mentoring or coaching of others – both for technical and soft skills development.
• Develops a wider breadth of knowledge about the industry and business.
• Applies knowledge to help to define the standards which others will apply.

Business skills:

• Possesses an astute business awareness to understand 'why' we are doing something. 
• Holds budget and works with finance and HR to spend this appropriately.
• Assesses and evaluates risk.
• Proactively ensures security is appropriately addressed within their area by self and others. Contributes to the security culture of the organization.

Collaboration:

• Facilitates collaboration between stakeholders who have diverse objectives.
• Communicates effectively, both formally and informally with a wide variety of stakeholders.
• Regularly and transparently communicates with their team to ensure they have clarity they need to be effective.

Leadership:

• Leads their team(s) through complexity and demonstrates leadership in helping large groups of engineers deliver projects.
• Beyond the day-to-day, they have a bigger impact beyond their team and their immediate projects by acting as a trusted partner for a variety of stakeholders.
• They partner with other managers across teams to create solutions that can be scaled across the business.

Technical skills

Understand and familiar with good Software design and Software Engineering processes/methods such as:

• Architecture design
• Design Patterns
• Expertise in refactoring
• Agile methodologies (Lean, Scrum, Kanban, etc.)
• CI/CD, DevOps and Test Automation
• TDD – Test Driven Development, BDD – Behavioral Driven Development
• Testing principles and automation 
• Automated unit testing (e.g. JUnit)
• Automated functional testing (e.g. TestNG, Cucumber, Selenium)
• Mocking Framework (e.g. JMockit, Mockito, WireMock)
• Familiar with Open Source tools & Frameworks used withing the product, including but not limited to: Ajax, Spring, JSF, Ant, Subversion, Maven, CruiseControl, Hibernate/JPA, Junit, JMS, SOAP, Axis, Bitbucket, Jenkins, Ansible and Cucumber