Scrum Master

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At McCormick, we bring our passion for flavor to work each day. We encourage growth, respect everyone's contributions and do what's right for our business, our people, our communities and our planet. Join us on our quest to make every meal and moment better.

Founded in Baltimore, MD in 1889 in a room and a cellar by 25-year-old Willoughby McCormick with three employees, McCormick is a global leader in flavour. With over 14,000 employees around the world and more than $6 Billion in annual sales, the Company manufactures, markets, and distributes spices, seasoning mixes, condiments and other flavourful products to the entire food industry, retail outlets, food manufactures, food service businesses and consumers.

While our global headquarters are in the Baltimore, Maryland, USA area, McCormick operates and serves customers from nearly 60 locations in 25 countries and 170 markets in Asia-Pacific, China, Europe, Middle East and Africa, and the Americas, including North, South and Central America

Position Overview

The key purpose of the SCRUM Master is to reinforce and refine agile/scrum ways of working and business processes throughout project life cycles within the Data, Analytics, and Automation team. This role is responsible for ensuring each delivery team runs efficient sprint planning meetings, facilitates sprint retrospectives, and works closely with the Director of Enterprise Digital Transformation & Value Realization. This role operates at the heart of the DAA team, maximizing the project prioritization efficiency and ensuring timely development and management of data-related solutions to deliver value in line with the business’s strategy. This role involves a combination of Scrum management experience, business acumen, technical knowledge, and leadership skills

Key Responsibilities

Agile Delivery & Execution

• Facilitate effective Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Reviews, Retrospectives, backlog refinement and other Agile ceremonies.
• Partner with Product Owners to ensure backlogs are appropriately prioritized, refined, and ready for execution.
• Establish and maintain delivery rhythms that enable teams to meet Sprint and release commitments.
• Monitor progress, identify delivery risks and proactively address issues before they impact business outcomes
• Ensure teams maintain appropriate Definition of Ready, Definition of Done, and quality standards.
• Track delivery against milestones, commitments, capacity, and dependencies.
• Help teams translate strategic priorities into actionable increments of work.
• Protect the team from unnecessary disruption while maintaining transparency with stakeholders.

Team Coaching & Agile Ways of Working 

• Serve as a servant leader and Agile coach, helping teams become increasingly self-organizing, accountable, and high performing.
• Coach team members, Product Owners and stakeholders on Agile principles, Scrum practices and effective collaboration.
• Identify behaviors, processes or organizational conditions that inhibit team performance and work with leaders to address them.
• Foster an environment of psychological safety, transparency, accountability, and constructive challenge.
• Facilitate healthy conflict resolution and improve team communication and collaboration.
• Adapt Agile practices to the needs and maturity of the team while maintaining the principles of Agile.
• Mentor less-experienced team members and contribute to the broader Agile community of practice

Stakeholder & Dependency Management

• Establish strong relationships with Product Owners, business leaders, technology teams and other key stakeholders.
• Identify and actively manage cross-team, functional and organizational dependencies.
• Surface impediments that require leadership intervention and drive them toward resolution.
• Provide clear, concise visibility into delivery status, risks, issues, dependencies and decisions.
• Facilitate alignment between business priorities and team execution.
• Coordinate with other Scrum Masters, Program Managers and Product Managers where work spans multiple Agile teams.
• Help stakeholders understand Agile delivery models, expectations, trade-offs and appropriate engagement points

Continuous Improvement & Performance Management

• Use retrospectives, delivery metrics and team feedback to identify opportunities for improvement.
• Establish meaningful Agile metrics such as velocity trends, cycle time, throughput, predictability, Sprint completion and impediment aging.
• Analyze delivery data to identify patterns and recommend actionable improvements.
• Lead teams in developing and executing measurable improvement actions.
• Continuously assess team maturity and adapt coaching approaches accordingly.
• Promote experimentation and learning rather than rigid adherence to process.
• Identify systemic issues that extend beyond the team and escalate them appropriately

Agile Governance, Planning & Organizational Enablement

• Support quarterly and release planning activities and provide delivery insights to program and portfolio leadership.
• Contribute to Agile governance and enterprise delivery standards.
• Ensure appropriate visibility and documentation of commitments, risks, dependencies and outcomes.
• Partner with leadership to improve organizational Agile maturity and remove systemic barriers to effective delivery.
• Participate in Agile transformation initiatives, communities of practice and methodology improvements.
• Help establish scalable Agile practices across multiple delivery teams and programs.
• Ensure Agile execution remains connected to measurable business value rather than process compliance alone

Secondary Responsibilities

Ability to identify opportunities for continuous improvement, develop CI project goals, and drive team efficiency by applying the discipline of planning, organizing, and managing resources to bring about successful project completion

Required Qualifications

Level of Education and Discipline-  Bachelors in business, project management, Data Analytics, Data Science, Business Information Technology or related field

Experience - functional/industry/commercial knowledge, business acumen 

• 6–8 years of experience in Agile delivery, Scrum Master, Program Management, Product Management, Technology or Digital Transformation roles.
• Demonstrated experience serving as a Scrum Master for complex, cross-functional Agile teams.
• Strong understanding of Scrum, Kanban and broader Agile principles.
• Experience working with Product Owners, technology teams, business stakeholders and senior leadership.
• Proven ability to remove organizational impediments and manage complex dependencies
• Strong facilitation, coaching, conflict-resolution and stakeholder-management skills.
• Experience using Agile delivery metrics and tools, specifically Azure DevOps or equivalent platforms.
• Ability to operate effectively in a matrixed, global enterprise environment.
• Strong written, verbal and executive communication skills. Demonstrated ability to proactively solve problems and multi-task.
• Learn and execute continuous improvement initiatives to improve systems and ways of working.  

Interpersonal Skills - leadership, interactions, communication, influence

• Work closely with functional leadership teams.
• Ability to manage up and mentor peers
• Maintain a sense of urgency to meet scheduling plans and customer requirements.
• Ability to use a systemic approach and tools to identify and drive business value.

Other Skills and HPO Competencies

• Business acumen.
• Strong business perspective; able to merge business questions/needs with available data to provide data-driven insights

Preferred Qualifications

Certification and/or Licenses- Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Professional Scrum Master (PSM), SAFe Scrum Master or equivalent.

Experience - functional/industry/commercial knowledge, business acumen- 

• Experience with Agile at Scale, SAFe or other enterprise Agile frameworks.
• Experience supporting digital transformation, data/analytics, technology or product development.
• Experience managing multiple interconnected Agile teams or complex programs.
• Experience coaching organizations transitioning from traditional project delivery to Agile product-oriented delivery.

Dimension

Facilitate agile ways of working for a global team of ~50 operating across India, EMEA, and the US

At McCormick, we have over a 100-year legacy based on our “Power of People” principle. This principle fosters an unusually dedicated workforce requiring a culture of respect, recognition, inclusion and collaboration based on the highest ethical value