Senior Manager, Agile Practitioner and Transformation Lead

This is what you will do:

The Agile Practitioner & Transformation Lead reports to the Director, IT Business Partner, US Commercial IT and is a meaningful role in Alexion IT RDU organization. The focus is to operationalize Agile into Alexion’s Information Technology groups way of working. This individual will be an expert in agile and will partner with teams as they look to shift from standard waterfall ways of working to an agile based mindset and approach (scrum methodology and SAFe)!

You will be responsible for:

• Providing leadership and taking overall accountability for successful implementations of key US Commercial IT projects using the Agile methodology.
• Facilitating the definition and management of the project scope, milestones, tasks, deliverables, and resource requirements; Estimating project costs and managing the budget.
• Guiding and advising the team on formation of Epics, Sprint planning, Story writing refinement, Backlog grooming, Story pointing, and Scrum ceremonies.
• Establishing a communication strategy in partnership with the US Commercial business and IT sponsors and effectively communicating project-related information to team members, IT management, and customers throughout the product/project life cycle.
• Efficiently identifying and resolving project issues; Raising issues that require executive attention via IT Lean Management process.
• Managing and preparing the IT portfolio status report and dashboard for IT-Steering Committee for the US Commercial IT portfolio.
• Ensuring that US Commercial IT projects are conducted in compliance with Alexion standards, policies, and guidelines.
• Performing team management, driving motivation, collaboration, and performance.
• Coordinating and managing any external resources contracted to the project.
• Handling vendor relationships and supervising external resource deliverables.
• Ensuring business inclusion throughout the management of the project schedule, project decision making, training, user story identification, backlog grooming, etc.
• Assessing the current organization and delivery environment; Ensuring Agile is implemented and operationalized into Alexion IT’s ways of working framework.
• Enabling and accelerating Agile adoption within US Commercial IT and partnering Solution Delivery teams by providing training, mentor, feedback, and advice on the Agile methodology and Scrum framework in alignment with the AZ System Development Lifecycle (SDLC) with a specific focus on data management, business intelligence and data science solutions.
• Key contributor to the Agile Center of Excellence, which functions as a community of practice to facilitate collaboration and standard methodology sharing while mentoring different agile roles.
• Serving as a SME for Agile methodologies, defining consistent metrics, dashboards and/or information to drive data-based decisions.

You will need to have:

• 6-8 years of IT business systems experience with a minimum of 4-6 years’ experience in Business Transformation program, Agile methodologies and/or Project management areas.
• Strong understanding and appreciation of business process and difficulties in Commercial within a Pharmaceutical/Biotech setting.
• Previous experience in running data analytics, Digital, MDM, CRM projects, and leading projects for launching new products within Pharma/Biotech setting.
• Demonstrated Agile and project management skills, with a consistent track record of leading broad, sophisticated, and/or strategic Agile projects combined with the ability to implement at tactical project-level activities and tasks.
• Strong understanding of SDLC concepts.
• Demonstrated experience with assessing, rating, prioritizing, assigning story points, and managing IT/Business project portfolio or product backlog in biotech and/or pharmaceutical industry.
• Broad business acumen and understanding of software development processes, outsourcing, and offshoring.
• Validated experience working effectively in a matrix organization and a demonstrated ability to collaborate effectively across geographies.
• Experience in completing Agile transformation roadmaps, building portfolios, facilitating Value Stream, important metric and/or OKR workshops.
• Proficiency in MS Office products such as Project Management software, PowerPoint, and Excel.
• Demonstrated experience with Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).
• 3-5 years of teaching and coaching IT teams to adopt continuous delivery practices via Agile/Lean techniques.
• 2+ years of experience being a team level coach and/or Release Train Engineer (RTE).
• 3+ years of experience with Scrum and Kanban methodologies, Agile product, and portfolio management.
• Proficiency in some of Agile domain products such as Jira, Confluence, Rally, Aha, etc..
• Excellent written and verbal skills with strong interpersonal skills!
• The duties of this role are generally conducted in an office environment. As is typical of an office-based role, employees must be able, with or without an accommodation to use a computer; engage in communications via phone, video, and electronic messaging; engage in problem solving and non-linear thought, analysis, and dialogue; collaborate with others; maintain general availability during standard business hours.

We would prefer for you to have:

• A Bachelor's degree, MBA, or equivalent level of experience.
• 5+ years of Agile transformation experience within biopharma industry with at least 2 years of managing complex transformations.
• Leading SAFe, SAFe Lean Portfolio Management (LPM), SAFe Advanced Scrum Master (or CSM), SAFe Product Owner/Product Manager certifications.
• SAFe Program Consultant (SPC) certification OR Agile Coaching certifications (IC Agile) or Scrum Alliance Trainer certification would be preferred.

#LI-MB1

#HYBRID