Mabel Okonkwo

Professional Scrum Master

Norman, Oklahoma, 73072

405-***-****

ac8tkn@r.postjobfree.com

Summary

Experienced Agile practitioner with over 4 years experience in driving the implementation and adoption of Agile methodology in various organizations, which has spurred formulation of informed decisions, optimal performance, stakeholder satisfaction and high profitability.

Professional Skills

Professional Scrum Master I

Scrum.Org

Telecommunications and IT

Tai Solarin University

Expertise and Core Skills

Top Notch Facilitation Prowess

Non-Directive Servant Leadership

Mentoring, Coaching and Teaching

Attitude of Empowerment

LEAN approach to Improve Process, Tools and People.

Great Stakeholders Management and Helping Others Outside the Team Work Well with The Team.

Makes Work Fun and Help the Team Learn and Share

Empiricism Approach

Methodologies (Scrum, XP, Nexus and Kanban).

Natural Communicator and Influencer

Sound Knowledge with the Ability to Coach on “Writing User Stories” (INVEST & SMART)

Technology Tools (Jira, Confluence & Microsoft Packages)

Employment History

Stash Scrum Master June 2018- present

A fast growing digital-first financial service company that provides investing apps to their customers.

Proficiently organize and facilitate daily scrum, sprint reviews, retrospectives, sprint, demos, release planning and other Scrum-related meetings. Encourages team members to drive meetings themselves to promote self-organizing and less reliant on the scrum master.

Collaborating closely with product owner on backlog grooming to keep product backlog relevant and prioritized, ensuring acceptance criteria are agreed upon and stories are ready for sizing

Facilitate getting the work done without coercion, assigning, or dictating the work

Helping the team to solve problems by consulting always with the team members rather than imposing solutions on them.

Working with the Scrum Team and the Product Owner to negotiate the minimum viable product for delivery

Coaching the delivery teams in agile principles and encourage self-organization

Articulate the benefits of agile throughout the organization by arranging and participating in internal training courses.

Managing impediments and ensure the team can focus on achieving their sprint goals

Use a data-driven approach to understand team capacity and produce forecasts for release planning

Ensure timely and efficient communication with business stakeholders

Produce metrics and charts, for use by internal and external stakeholders, to promote understanding and transparency

Direct Line Group Scrum Master Aug 2015 - Sept 2017

Supported scrum and Kanban teams to reach a higher team and agile maturity whilst achieving sprint goals.

Acted as a great enabler than doer who go every length to find out the team’s biggest frustrations or impediments and help them remove it to increase effectiveness both at team and organizational level.

Suggested useful backlog techniques to the product owner and guided her through implementation of them. I observed how busy she got at a time which began to affect her availability to the team, then I helped to free up her busy schedule and time management by using “what is the value here” technique I coached her to use. This enabled her to have more time to spend with the team.

Coached the product owner to keep the instructions on the user story ticket concise to foster better conversation between the team. This strategy helps the team take ownership of the work and promotes self-organizing and creativity. We used the 3 C’s Model here

Joined alliance with fellow scrum masters to meet weekly in which we highlight organization’s impediments and strategize action plans to resolve them. This motivated us to begin a weekly book club whereby we pick an agile book to read and discuss two chapters every time we meet to analyze what we have learnt and how we can implement this to the organization.

Team empowerment is key to individual growth. Understanding this made me take more steps back to allow the team members to shine more in the limelight. Strategies such as giving the teams’ autonomy to suggest new ways they would like to do ceremonies, events and processes, made them feel more comfortable to think out of the box and empowered them to step up and own it. E.g., team members are motivated to facilitate themselves with little or no supervision.

CBCemea Group Scrum Master Aug 2014 – July 2015

To create a new payment page that enhances customers’ experience, provide easier navigation with improved and faster payment transactions. I facilitated two scrum teams at a time in this organization.

Created a trusting environment and pushed the boundaries such that the team are comfortable involving product owner and everyone else in their daily scrum. This also helped them shift conversation to solution finding rather than a blaming one.

Constantly encouraging the team in proactive planning i.e. prepping ahead for meetings such as refinement, review etc. creating enough time ahead to inspect we have what we need before we go into the meetings. This enabled us cut down on time wasted previously on infrastructure set up, information readiness etc.

Introduced different retrospective techniques to the team. I also encouraged team members to take turns voluntarily to facilitate or suggest new techniques they have learnt.

Shared knowledge and identifies learning opportunities for individuals whilst ensuring to avoid creating a learned dependency. Whenever I come across a useful blog, article or learning material, I do share this with the corresponding function to have a read.

Responsible for guiding the team on how to use Agile practices and get the most out of self-organization, assessing the Scrum/Agile Maturity of the team and coaching them to higher levels of maturity, at a pace that is sustainable and comfortable for the team and organization.

Hobbies & Interests

Playing word puzzles and board games

References

Available on request.

Contact this candidate