Senior Manager - Agile Practice Lead

At DICK’S Sporting Goods, we believe in how positively sports can change lives. On our team, everyone plays a critical role in creating confidence and excitement by personally equipping all athletes to achieve their dreams.  We are committed to creating an inclusive and diverse workforce, reflecting the communities we serve.

If you are ready to make a difference as part of the world’s greatest sports team, apply to join our team today!

OVERVIEW:

Our Agile Lead is responsible for evolving and supporting our technology organization’s continued adoption, evolution and utilization of agile software development practices. They will establish and foster a broader agile community across our three portfolios Athlete (customer) facing solutions, Teammate (internal team) facing solutions, and Foundational Tech (including elements like infrastructure and support).   Leading our agile practice, they will collaborate with our Way of Working Lead, portfolio leaders and agile practitioners to establish and refine standards for Scrum and Kanban, manage the practice roadmap to align with our operating model and ways of working, prioritize the agile practice backlog, and directly manage a team of agile coaches.  This role requires high activation energy with an ability to translate strategy into delivery. Candidates will be expected to manage through influence and have experience building and managing matrixed teams.  This role is a coach of coaches, other technology teammates and business partners, previous practitioner and coaching experience is required.  While collaboration is a must, this role requires the courage to make decisions, commit and activate across the agile community.   This role directly supports our ongoing technology investment powering our transformation.

Best Practices and Standards:

• Agile Development Team Facilitation: Establish scrum ceremonies, and practices to remove obstacles and facilitate problem-solving, collaboration and conflict resolution to enable the most effective work delivery by development teams on the most complex cross-functional programs.

• Agile Release Planning: Establish release planning methodology and practices. Train agile coaches and scrum masters on how to plan and replan software releases for complex cross-portfolio multi-year programs as they are produced to ensure timely updates and to deliver the planned benefits as early as possible in the project or program.

• Agile Backlog Management Defines backlog standards and practices including: tracking tools, workflow, estimation, prioritization, KPIs and ceremonies.

• Stakeholder Management: Defines stakeholder engagement models and practices including the ability to identify relevant stakeholders, to develop positive stakeholder relationships, and to ensure that each stakeholder has an appropriate share of voice.

• Portfolio Management: Establishes methodologies and scaled practices to be used across all portfolios to assure that intended outcomes are achieved.

• Program Risk and Issue Management: Establishes methods and practices for the identification of risks, issues, dependencies, and constraints.

• Program Resource Management Establish practices on how to manage the deployment of project resources across multiple portfolios, proactively managing project costs, providing forecasts, and presenting variances with narrative at appropriate review points to ensure effective utilization.

• Information and Business Advice: Establishes standards and practices on the interpretation and application of policies and procedures, resolving complex or contentious queries and issues and enabling others to take appropriate actions.

Lead Agile Practice and Strategy to support Transformation

• Community and Center of Excellence Establish and foster an Agile practitioner community between coaches, leads/domains and scrum masters.  Balancing ownership, delegation and empowerment to grow the practice, the practitioners and effective implementation of established standards

• Digital Vision and Strategy Contribute to the definition of digital strategy/digital-enabled business change projects. Develop approaches to deliver successful digital innovation through the advancement of processes and supporting tools.

• Horizon Scanning Influences external and industry developments and / or emerging issues within an area of technology and business function and establishes agile practices for the organization.

Performance Monitoring

• Establish metrics and KPIs to track the effectiveness of new processes or improvements.

• Analyze performance data and provide insights to drive further enhancements.

Ongoing Learning and Development

• Act as subject matter expert in a broad and complex area of technology, policy, regulation, or operational management for the team. Develop and maintain external accreditations and in-depth understanding of current and emerging external regulation and industry best practices through continuing professional development, attending conferences, and reading specialist media.

QUALIFICATIONS:

• Master's Degree

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Information Systems, Business, or any related field

• 10 - 15 Years of experience

• Experience supporting large scale Agile transformations

• 5+ years of Agile delivery experience   

• Agile certifications (including SAFe, PMI-ACP, ICP-ACC, CSM, Kanban) preferred

• Preferred experience in leading Agile Dojos     

• Preferred experience with Jira and Confluence               

• Preferred experience with planning / road mapping tools like Aha and Jira

• Strong skills in Microsoft Office including Teams          

• Preferred experience with Miro boards

• Expertise, and demonstrated working knowledge of, Agile, Scrum, Kanban, DevOps, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Lean Product, and Human Centered Design (HCD)             

• Experience building Agile transformation roadmaps and corresponding action plans.

• Experience integrating Lean Product and Agile methodologies              

• Strong written & verbal communication skills

• Experience with organizational change management frameworks and practices         

• Technology experience within a retail organization preferred