Barbara Nzekwe

Lanham, MD ***** (***) *** – **** ad18ml@r.postjobfree.com

PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY

An Agile catalyst and product exponent with 7years’ experience and proven leadership skills with ability to guide, inspire and motivate teams to achieve Sprint/product goals and milestones while delivering values to stakeholders; professional experience with emphasis on best Agile and scrum principles spanning across industries plus 9 years professional experience in banking, insurance and health sector.

SKILLS & CORE COMPETENCE

SDLC Methodologies: Scrum, Agile, Waterfall, Kanban, SAFe, Scrum@scale, Discipled Agile Delivery, Lean, Extreme programming and DevOps

Agile Management Tools:

Jira, Jira Align, Rally, VersionOne, Trello, Roadmunk Azure DevOps and Kanbanize

Remote collaboration: (Microsoft Teams, Webex, Ideaboardz) Tableau, PowerBI,gant chart

Documentation Tools: Confluence, MS Office Suite, SharePoint

Core Competencies: Product ownership, Engaging and fun Facilitation, Capacity Planning, Risk Management, strong communication skills, User Stories and Story Mapping, Quality assurance, Empathy, Emotional Intelligence, Root Cause Analysis

WORK HISTORY

SCRUM MASTER/ AGILE COACH

Fiserv Omaha April/2020 To Current

Served as a scrum master in Agile software development environment for multiple products, responsible for setting up scrum ceremonies like daily standups and backlog refinements, facilitated sprint planning sessions and provided sprint commitment updates to stakeholders/business.

Contributed to team and organization improvement by driving learning workshop and retrospective

Scheduled and led refinements to make sure the teams understand what they are committing to.

Helped the ART in the sequence of activities needed to deliver a product.

Provided timely, accurate, and actionable information to program stakeholders and clients in a structured and transparent way using project reports such as burndown charts, sprint reports and velocity reports.

Ensured results are reviewed after iteration for quality delivery.

Actively participated in requirement gathering and documentation meetings, ensuring PBIs were customer-centric delivering required value

Coached teams in Agile practices and provided necessary training to create positive mindset to Agile methodologies

Developed long-term business strategy by using client feedback to identify necessary process improvements

Coached Product Owner to gather software requirements/business rules and ensure alignment with development teams.

Identified innovative and automated approaches to routine tasks, making suggestions that were widely received

Worked closely with numerous IT teams and cross-domain partners to manage timelines and product deliverables.

Enforced alignment of product strategy with business objectives and made modifications to promote efficient project completion.

Maintained transparency throughout product delivery via daily scrums, weekly meetings, status reporting, action items and meeting minutes.

Encouraged and established Cross functional teams.

Ensured sound Coaching on Agile ways of working for 4 Scrum Masters and catalyzing agile transformation of these Teams

SCRUM MASTER / AGILE COACH May/2018 To March/2020

One Main Financial Upper Marlboro, MD

Effectively coached Scrum and Kanban teams

Creating working agreements, establishing and helping teams to achieve Sprint Goals

Facilitated retrospectives using innovative games.

Took ownership and drove resolution of issues, removed impediments, coordinated with other development/product teams on inter-dependencies leveraging Scrum-of-Scrums events

Educated and coached teams on usage of Jira & Confluence tools

Reflected and radiated the metrics like burn down chart and velocity chart continuously to help teams reflect on performance and areas of improvement.

Prepared various dashboards in JIRA using advanced JQL & Filters

Helped Product owner with effective backlog prioritization.

Ensured INVEST criteria is met for all user stories in backlog.

Ensured teams are adhering to DOR and DOD criteria

Educated teams on usage of Confluence for documentation and as repository

Facilitated continuous improvement initiatives and process reviews

Optimized workflow efficiency and led the ceremonies and ensured smooth delivery

Exhibited confidence and extensive knowledge of emerging industry practices when solving business problems

Transitioned 2 teams from waterfall to Scrum and Kanban

Motivated team members to achieve product goals

SCRUM MASTER January/2017 To March/2018

NASA Federal Credit Union Upper Marlboro, MD

Worked with product owner, stakeholders, customers, and users in identifying and documenting Epics

Prepared various dashboards on Jira using advanced JQL & Filters

Effectively communicated weekly project status using Burndown charts to business leadership, while identifying problem definition as part of continuous process improvement towards business continuity of organization

Educated and ensured Agile/Scrum implementation methodology, practices, values and framework are adhered to by team members, while resolving impediments by coordinating and collaborating with cross-functional team

Coordinated with scrum team in Daily Scrum Meetings, Sprint Planning Meetings, Sprint Review Meetings, Sprint Retrospective Meetings and Backlog Grooming meetings

Worked closely with developers working on Web Orchestration and Java APIs to integrate it with different applications

Created Sprint Burndown, Burn-up and Release Burndown Chart to keep track of team's velocity and sprint progress for forecasting, and any scope changes

Coordinated with scrum team during each Sprint towards shippable product release working closely with Product Owner to make sure each user story in Sprint Backlog was worked on

Worked with well self-organized cross-functional development team (called Developers) to execute roadmap and bring new functionalities to product

Tracked and managed all change requests taking them through complete change request lifecycle Backlog Items (PBIs) using techniques like MoSCoW and estimated Story Points using Planning Poker

Mentored and coached business analysts, developers in applying agile principles and practices to achieve team unity and high performance

Fostered strong team values, created environment where teams were self-governing and continued to explore and implement ways to improve

Assisted

EDUCATION

Masters in IT Project Management (Currently attending)

University of Maryland Global Campus

Master of Public Administration

University of Lagos, Lagos

Bachelor of Arts (BA) English Language and Literature

Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka

CERTIFICATIONS

Professional Scrum Master (PSM)

Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO)

SAFe 5.0

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