Head of Agile Full Time

Hiscox

Working within Hiscox London Market as our Head of Agile, you will be responsible for providing the business with a highly capable chapter of talented people who help to facilitate engaging, positive, and effective ways of working and change delivery across all our value streams and squads within our Business Unit.

The chapter will enable the business and Tech and Change to work in a highly productive and collaborative style – using appropriate frameworks when needed (like Scrum and Kanban) to effectively manage uncertainty and complex change in a manner that delivers value and desirable outcomes iteratively for the business, giving us the ability to fail fast, and continuously inspect and adapt based on what we discover in a transparent manner.

You will be an important member of the London Market Tech Leadership team and report directly into the CTO (Chief Technology Officer).

As part of our leadership team, you will lead and nurture this chapter – ensuring we recruit, mentor, coach, train and retain talented chapter members – both Hiscox and partner members. The chapter is likely to have between 5 and 8 highly capable and skilled people who understand agile ways of working but also understand how to support mature teams that may not require so much in terms of process and framework adherence.

What you’ll be doing:

• Cultivation of a well-run chapter through active and passive coaching and mentoring, maintaining a hands-on delivery focus and proactive leadership approach
• Create an Agile Strategy for the business – how do we further improve and excel at change within London Market
• Provide leadership, guidance and support to the team, whilst taking overall accountability for their delivery and ensuring observation of best practise across the chapter, value streams, and squads within London Market and beyond
• Empower and trust your chapter members to effectively work within autonomous and self-organising squads – ensuring they fully understand business needs and support the delivery of desired and valuable outcomes in a safe, effective, and incremental manner
• Communicate change across the business to wider audiences and key stakeholders not just within the Tech team
• Ensure we have the right people, tools and practices in place to deliver high performant, secure and cost-effective solutions and ensure you and your chapter members work effectively and collaboratively with other tech team chapters
• Ensure Scrum masters help to effectively manage dependencies with other group and business functions that can cause impediments, delays and disrupt squad productivity and flow efficiency
• Help chair and run the Hiscox Agile Community of Practice with other Business and Functional leads
• Interface with Enterprise Portfolio Management team – supporting their maturity in Agile ways of working

Our must haves:

• You will be Social, engaging, and naturally collaborative with the ability to be a servant leader, organising and motivating the chapter without the use of authority within a modern technology team
• The ability to facilitate notable events and meetings throughout the year
• Strong knowledge of Agile and Kanban methodologies and understanding that the approach to effective change will vary depending on squad, work, and context
• Comfortable leading teams working upon the design and build of complex enterprise solutions whilst managing uncertainty with a fail-fast mentality
• Good understanding of finance, budgeting & forecasting, business case production, people allocation, and project/portfolio management tools and reporting
• Capable of communicating with (and occasionally challenging) key business stakeholders and ensuring they both understand how we manage effective change and how they can actively contribute to the overall success
• Good experience in terms of Vendor and Supplier management – especially when working with and having a reliance on System Integrators as part of big change initiatives
• Ensuring our squads continually deliver value to the business and expected outcomes

Diversity and flexible working at Hiscox

At Hiscox we care about our people. We hire the best people for the job and we’re committed to diversity and creating a truly inclusive culture, which we believe drives success. We also understand that working life doesn’t always have to be ‘nine to five’ and we support flexible working wherever we can. No promises, but please chat to our resourcing team about the flexibility we could offer for this role.

We’ve introduced new hybrid ways of working to encourage a healthy work life balance.

We anticipate the successful candidate for this role will be in the office 2 days per week.

We see it as the best of both worlds: structure and sociability on one hand, and independence and flexibility on the other.

Work with amazing people and be part of a unique culture

Why work here?

If you want to help build a brilliant future; work with amazing people; be part of a unique company culture; and, of course, enjoy great employee benefits that take care of your mental and physical wellbeing, come and join us.

Get in touch

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About us

We’re a global, specialist insurer headquartered in Bermuda and listed on the London Stock Exchange. With 3,000 employees and 32 offices in 12 countries we’re a business with lots of opportunity for people with talent, spark and lots of ambition. If you want to build a great career with a company that prioritises strong values – such as integrity and courage – where our people always pull together to do the right thing for each other and our customers, then we’d love to hear from you.