VALERIE L. WILLIS

Raleigh, NC ***** 919-***-****

http://www.linkedin.com/in/valeriewillis

SENIOR AGILE COACH LEADER

Leads innovative systematic thinking (SIT) and empowers agile innovation mindset by coaching and mentoring scrum teams and senior product leaders on agile methodologies ranging from Scale Agile Framework Enterprise (SAFe), Kanban to Scrum@Scale. Creates customized agile workshops to develop hyper-performing agile teams.

Demonstrates experience in Information Technology and agile training, coaching and mentoring teams and leaders in geographical regions located in the US, China, Israel, and India. Orchestrates community of practices (CoP) for agile innovation, agile practices, comparative agility capabilities (survey/ assessments), scrum masters, product owners, and agile instructors/trainers.

Agile Coaching Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) Agile Innovation Coached & Mentored Scrum Teams

Agile Methodologies Project Management Process Improvements Stakeholder Relations

TECHNICAL SKILLS: Rally Jira Admin Comparative Agility Fig jam MS Teams Miro

HIGHLIGHTS & CONTRIBUTIONS

Lead and work side by side on agile transformation with leadership and product development teams in making decisions together to deliver high-quality solutions to clients.

Embrace Plan, Do, Check, and Act (PDCA) to continuously improve processes and products.

Proven foundation in consulting Product Management (PdM), Product Owners (PO), DevOps, iDev, and Engineers.

Empowers decentralized decision-thinking and guarantees input from stakeholders is communicated to broad economic decision-makers.

Drive agile coach and release train engineer (RTE) coaching sessions to mentor and collaborate with RTE before, during, and after program increments (PI)

Drive agile innovation iterations to build a culture of innovative thinkers and cross-product team collaboration.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Dell Technologies, Inc., Remote Office, Raleigh, NC 07/2015 – 06/2023

Sr. Agile Coach Leader

Coach, mentor, and train leaders, product owners (PO), product managers (PdM), and release train engineers (RTE) on agile implementation processes and agile mind-shifting growth. Provided agile guidance for scrum and kanban teams ranging from sprint planning, daily scrums/huddles, inspect and adapt, work in progress (WIP), swarming, retrospect product and team backlog refinement and grooming. Created, implemented, and coached agile workflows for hardware and software POs to develop stories and product managers (PdMs) to develop epics/features with business context and acceptance criteria.

Spearheaded other initiatives like innovation planning to instill systematic inventive thinking (SIT) and facilitate a community of practices (CoP) to collaborate cross-functionally with agile champions in the organization.

Created information radiators via Jira to communicate a team’s burn-down effort, any risks of the agile release trains (ART) program increments (PI’s) or executive action team’s (EAT) roadmap, scope changes, and other Objective & Key Results (OKRs) progress dashboards. The impact of the radiators improved communication, workflow progress and meeting PI target dates.

Coached RTEs, PdMs, and POs on preparing, executing, and continuous improvement for ARTs. i.e., Created and facilitated inspection and adapt sessions and developed an innovation planning (IP) workflow for engineers and managers. The outcome from coaching resulted in team members shifting from big planning to incremental planning mindset, team confidence to plan sprints better and managers supporting developers on delivering patents.

Created comparative agility capabilities to benchmark a team’s agile or innovation maturity. As a coach, I saved departments time and money by using the CA tool to benchmark a team’s agile maturity allowing me to focus on what teams needed to become high performing versus using generic training workshops.

As a SAFe SPC, provided classroom training for agile certifications. Completed two years of Dell’s Infrastructure Storage Group (ISG) Leadership Program, networked with executive leaders, received formal leadership training, and attended leadership workshops.

Verisk Analytics, Inc. Morrisville, NC 03/2012 – 06/2015

Scrum Master

Strategic-minded project contributor focused on the direction of a globally diverse software team(s). Focused on optimizing the delivery of highest priority deliverables by facilitating the scrum ceremonies. For example, PI Planning, Sprint Planning, Daily Stand Ups, Sprint Demos, and Retrospect ceremonies. Also, motivating product owners, sponsors, teams, and stakeholders to collaborate, communicate, and maintain a constant pace without burnout while focusing on delivering customer value.

As a Certified Scrum Master (CSM) and PMI Agile Practitioner (PMI-ACP) with 10+ years’ experience in the IT industry, implemented agile workflows ranging from scrum to kanban.

As a software quality assurance analyst (QA) engineer, focused on developing front-end and back-end testing by manipulating data, analyzing data, and validating data via SQL scripts, SOAP UI and QTP.

Improved software development life cycles (SDLC) and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) as a scrum master by driving continuous improvements, removing impediments, and ensuring quality completion within project timelines.

Itron, Inc. Raleigh, NC 08/2010 – 03/2012

Scrum Master

Coordinated the time boxing for enterprise data warehouse (EDW), user stories, and story pointing via RALLY against product owner(s) acceptance criteria to confirm transparency. Communicated via Scrum of Scrum (SoS), scrum daily stand up (DSU) to track integration backlog, retrospective, burn down, sprint review, and sprint planning. Overall, collaborated with developers, product owners, quality assurance analysts (QA), and database administrators (DBA) to remove the agile “smell” and certify the delivery of valuable software.

Encouraged discussions, empowered the team(s) to self-organize, and earned leadership and team respect and trust while adhering to agile and scrum concepts and principles.

Reviewed via SQL Developer and TOAD queries per QA tasks, reviewed business intelligent (BI) reports via Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise 11g, (OBIEE) BI per developer tasks, reviewed DMExpress jobs for SCD1, SCD2 dimension and fact tables for ETL per developer tasks and encouraged product owners to clarify acceptance criteria in user stories.

Designed and incorporated framework(s) to communicate the team’s velocity, cycle time, dependencies, impediments, and defects (bugs) to management and scrum team(s).

Railinc, Inc of Cary, NC 03/2010 – 07/2010

Scrum Master

Developed user stories, and ran daily stand-ups, sprint planning, and demo events. Reviewed and updated QTP automation test scripts, developed and executed manual test cases via Rally software.

ADDITIONAL RELEVANT EXPERIENCES

Electronic Data System (EDS) of Plano, TX, System Engineer

Sabre, Inc. / NC Department of Human and Health Services (NCDHHS) of Raleigh, NC, Quality Engineer Manager

EDUCATION & CREDENTIALS

Masters in Technology Management – Southern College of Technology (Kennesaw State University)

Bachelors in Business Administration (BBA) – North Carolina Central University, NCCU Concentration: CIS

Scrum@Scale Registered Agile Coach; RAC Scrum@Scale Registered Scrum Master & Product Owner; RSM/RPO

Scrum@Scale Registered Practitioner; RS@SP SAFe Practitioner Consultant; SPC 5.X

Agile Coach; ICP-ACC SAFe Agilist; SA Agile Practitioner; PMI-ACP Scrum Master; CSM

Contact this candidate