What’s Our Dish

Announced in May 2018, Peapod Digital Labs (PDL) is an Ahold Delhaize USA company that powers the eCommerce and digital strategies for the Great Local Brands of Ahold Delhaize USA. Accelerating growth in digital and personalization capabilities, PDL is an innovation lab focused on meeting the changing needs of customers, regardless of when, where, and how consumers choose to shop.

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The Agile Transformation Office Director is a new role required to support growth and adoption of Agile ways of working in PDL. As a member of the PDL eCommerce leadership team this person will play an integral role transforming the way PDL delivers value to its customers. The Director will be responsible for improving existing practices and establishing new practices in support of the growth, stability, quality, and speed-to-market goals of PDL. The role will include facilitating appropriate Agile practice adoption and partnership in Retail Business Services.

This senior Agile leader will be accountable for Agile training, coaching and development of engineering, product, and project teams, consisting of over 350 technical professionals. Ensuring these PDL delivery teams are aware of the roles, responsibilities, practices and processes that must be followed in the PDL SDLC, tracking adherence and reporting performance as input to a continuous improvement program.

The Director will manage portfolio delivery processes and practices, ensuring that best practice software delivery and policy adherence across an expanding number of Scrum teams and ensuring continual service improvement in software delivery process.  It will collaborate with the RBS Program Management Office to align and integrate appropriate governance process, metrics and financial reporting.

The person in this role must have a strong background in Agile software delivery at scale and a deep understanding of applicable frameworks and best practices. They will possess a balance of applied agile expertise, coaching/training experience and strong interpersonal skills acting as PDL’s evangelist for accelerated adoption of Agile ways of working.

Recipe for Success - What's “in store” for the role

• Conduct organizational agile health assessments
• Help establish governance structures that align strategy formulation with enterprise execution
• Ensure that teams and programs are well managed through the creation of controls that optimize delivery, minimize risk, and maximize throughput
• Facilitate cross team, cross department initiatives and manage complex dependencies
• Ensure continuous improvement by establishing quick feedback cycles and leveraging data-driven metrics to identify areas of improvement
• Ensure that PDL software delivery Scrum teams are aware of the processes and practices that must be followed in the PDL SDLC, track the adherence and report performance
• Lead coaching workshops & training sessions to educate individuals and teams on Agile Values, Principles, and Practices
• Monitor performance and drive improvement plans through coaching and mentoring on team roles, tools, processes and ceremonies
• Be a thought leader, assess the current organization's delivery environments and recommend optimal Agile practices tailored to each area of the organization
• Establish appropropriate Program & Project management practices for PDL initiatives working closely with Project Managers and PMO on large cross IT and AD group projects
• Work in partnership with Software Delivery and DevOps leadership to fine tune Agile delivery methods and provide training opportunities for Scrum teams and DevOps
• Establish collaborative partnership with key stakeholders to facilitate greater adoption of Agile work practices and achieve greater transformation success in areas outside of PDL (ie RBS)
• Coaches senior leaders in Agile & Lean practices. Enable them to be effective Agile Champions
• Serves as Subject Matter Expert (SME) on Agile development methods and processes
• Lead workshops based on roles or specific topics
• Assess the agile maturity of existing teams and coaches to higher levels of maturity
• Expert in visualizing flow of work, controlling Work in Progress (WIP), managing queue sizes and batch optimization of work
• Promote a risk-aware culture, ensure efficient and effective risk and compliance management practices by adhering to require standards and processes
• Ensure teams are ‘being Agile’ and not just ‘doing Agile’.

The Essentials in Your Cart - The required ingredients  

• Degree level educated, preferably in Business (eCommerce), IT or Software Engineering.
• Agile Framework certified (SAFe), SAFe Program Consultant (SPC) strongly preferred
• Certified Scrum Master (CSM) certification or equivalent preferred.
• 15+ years as an IT professional, ideally in software development environment
• 5+ years of experience as a Scrum Master and/or Agile coach with an Agile practitioner mindset understanding common Agile practices, service-oriented environments, and iterative development practices.
• 5+ years of experience in IT full development life cycle.
• 5+ years of experience at Director level in an Agile Transformation
• Background working with senior leadership to recommend and develop organizational structures to support Agile ways of working
• Experience of software delivery utilizing Scaled Agile Frameworks
• Experience with Agile product and portfolio management (including Agile Metrics).
• Experience in agile methods such as DevOps, Agile testing, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, Agile development, XP practices and Agile architecture.
• Demonstrable experience of leading complex business and technology initiatives within an Agile delivery model
• Hands-on experience participating in and training teams in Agile methodologies
• Leader and expert in utilizing agile methods and practices to improve overall busines agility
• Knowledge of Agile Software delivery ideally with experience of eCommerce systems/engines, Microservice architectures and Web Technologies (JS/CSS/HTML/JSP, etc.)
• Continuously knowledgeable about Scaled Agile tranformation frameworks (eg SAFe, DaD, LeSS), Scrum, and supporting tools (eg Kanban, JIRA).
• Comprehensive understanding of Agile technical practices and DevOps and testing concepts (CI/CD, TDD, BDD, ATDD)
• Executive level interpersonal/communication skills are required in that this role will communicate with eCommerce leadership. 
• Expertise in transforming teams to adopt frameworks and concepts to pivot teams from traditional project delivery to methods using Agile Frameworks
• Expert knowledge of JIRA (or similar) ALM tools.
• Skilled at building trust with development leads, developers and also other stakeholders who will be encouraged to adopt Agile practices (eg RBS).
• Able to provide coaching and training at the program and team levels in Agile ways of working at scale
• Strong presentation skills with ability to present to small and large groups
• Ability to establish immediate credibility with stakeholders, and use influence to build consensus to  achieve goals.
• A talented and influential leader who collaborates naturally with all levels in an organization and who can be an evangelist for Agile ways of working to accelerate the growth of Agile work practices in PDL.
• Flexibility to work with teams, individuals and executives.
• At ease discussing product development and implementation with the technical teams as easily as discussing product strategy with the business stakeholders.
• Pragmatic in the application of best practices tailored to the unique needs of PDL given current agile foundation.