Scrum Master / SaaS Project Manager for Digital OER Libraries

Description

The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), an education non-profit, seeks a full-time employee to join our services team, as Scrum Master and SaaS Project Manager, supporting our service partners and product team. As an organization ISKME seeks to make education available to all, breaking down barriers to learning through open access digital libraries, professional learning, and educational research studies. The chosen candidate will join our team of developers, product owners, project managers, designers, and librarian staff to ensure that our partner libraries are built in alignment with our organizational purpose and within our prescribed scrum practices. 

The ISKME OER Services team supports a breadth of users and site implementations, all in service of educators and making their work more effective and efficient. ISKME has a collaborative culture, and the candidate should be comfortable providing and receiving feedback on work, and inspiring creative problem solving. This servant leader role will have two primary hats, Scrum Master and Service Manager, interacting with team members across the organization and external partners from around the world with an opportunity to make a big impact in education globally. As Scrum Master, this person will enforce agile values through our prescribed development rules and practices. As SaaS Project Manager, this person will have an outward-facing role, onboarding new partners to our SaaS service (online libraries called Microsites), ensuring that site implementations are completed on time and according to the Partner’s expectations. In this hybrid position, the candidate will bring additional field insights to the team and convey new feature requests to Product Owner (PO). This position will report to the Director of OER Services, and work closely with the Product Owner to manage priorities and milestones on a day to day basis.  

Responsibilities

ScrumMaster Role: 

• Enforces Rules of Scrum, practices and process

• Ensure effectiveness of all ceremonies: prepared and engaged teams, prepared and effective Product Leadership Team

• Facilitates discovery and ensures the removal of obstacles and promotes them in a timely and aggressive way

• Maintains an awesome Scrum Room environment through digital tools like Jira and Confluence

• Identifies team improvement opportunities and looks for and applies best practices

• Ensures team owns the team retrospectives and outcomes

• Ensures the team is focused on sprint commitments and shields team from distractions and hidden work

• Ensures a collaborative culture exists within the team and promotes team building

• Collaborates with Leadership Teams to ensure team success

• Assures there are no commitment changes during the Sprint

• Continuous self education on Agile topics

SaaS Project Manager Role: 

• Owns SaaS Microsite implementations from kick-off to launch

• Responsible for communicating milestone priorities and feature requests to Product Owner

• Determines when a Microsite project will transition to Account Manager

• Responsible for development and implementation of communication plan with Partners, including time-zone appropriate calls, status reports, documentation of regular meetings, and sharing out notes/findings

• Coordinates with PO, and scrum team to ensure services are developed efficiently, on time, and on budget.

• Responsible for discussing new feature ideas with partners and bringing those ideas to the PO for further discussion.

• Performs user acceptance testing (UAT) for Partner implementations, ensuring features and bugs meet initial requirements.

Required Skills

• 3-5 years experience in Scrum Master role, managing complete sprint cadence for an agile team.

• 3-5 years demonstrated experience working within product development teams and participating in/leading sprint planning and backlog refinement

• Experience using Confluence, JIRA, and Smartsheet for maintaining project planning and product development documentation

• Strong strategic thinking skills, with the ability to anticipate and collaboratively remediate blockers. 

• Comfort working in a fast paced environment with shifting priorities

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills. 

Preferred Experience

• Experience with instructional design, instructional technology support, or general digital library services

• Experience managing agile projects with external deadlines and stakeholders

ISKME is committed to Equal Opportunity and does not promote or discriminate against any person, population group, or organization and is committed through its employment and hiring practices as well as in its provision of services to ensure that all employees and applicants as well as others receive equal consideration and treatment, regardless of race, color, creed, gender (including gender identity or gender expression), religion, marital or domestic partner status, age, national origin or ancestry, physical appearance, education background, language, mental or medical disability, sex, sexual orientation, citizenship, military service status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by state or federal law or local ordinance.

If interested in the position, please send: 1) a cover letter summarizing your skills, interest, and background as related to this position, and 2) a current CV or resume to jobs@iskme.org.