Gideon Azaah

San Antonio, Texas *****

EMAIL: ad3oi9@r.postjobfree.com Tel: 210-***-**** Open to relocation

SAFe Scrum Master

CAREER PROFILE

A servant leader and an experienced SAFe Scrum Master with 7+ years of experience in improving processes and complex product deliveries by implementing a scaled agile environment and in building matured and high performing teams. Expert in removing impediments, facilitating scrum ceremonies/events and building a cross functional and self-organized development teams from waterfall, hybrid to adopting agile. Hands-on training teams and supporting product owners in refining and prioritizing the product backlog.

EXPERIENCE

●Leadership & Mentoring teams

●Process Improvements

●Kanban/Scrum/X programming.

●Agile Tooling ( JIRA, Confluence)

●Project Management

●Relationship Building

●Use Agile and Engineering processes

Managing IT Efforts

●Agile team transformation

●Automated testing

●Program Increment (PI)

●Team Agile Coaching (Onshore, offshore and near-shore)

●Training at team level

●SAFe Scrum Master

●Scrum

CAREER HIGHLIGHT

●An experienced and certified Scrum Master with over nine years of supporting and guiding Scrum teams in multiple locations to organize goals, implement and monitor software development processes and reporting to senior managers on project progress.

●Coach and Mentor teams on Agile best practices, scrum values and principles.

●Critical thinker and problem solver, able to find solutions to complex problems through analysis and innovative ideas.

●Ability to work independently, resolve issues proactively and meet timelines.

●Ability to work with cross-functional team, responsible for improving business process and providing value to the functions they support.

●Excellent conceptual and working knowledge of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)

●Ability to communicate with top management, provide reports that demonstrate project progress per sprint using burn-down charts and average story point velocity.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

M&T Bank, Buffalo New York 01/2020 – Present

●Establishing familiarity with scope and project objectives, helping to establish clear roles and responsibilities for project team members.

●Facilitate meetings with team for purposes of idea generation, planning, retrospection, problem-solving, and alignment.

●Work with the product owner and facilitate development of product backlog.

●Work in conjunction with the Project Manager to ensure project management needs are met or impediments, issues and/or risks are resolved or escalated.

●Communicate project status to the team and product owner to ensure common understanding, set expectations, align stakeholders, and project team members.

●Measure project performance utilizing appropriate tools and techniques to monitor progress; identify and quantify variances, complete required corrective actions, and communicate to stakeholders.

●Protect team from over-commitment, manage backlog, prioritize resolution of defects/bugs as evidenced by the on-time delivery of major initiative.

American Income Life, Waco, TX 01/2019 – 01/2020

IT Scrum Master (Contractor with JoinIT Solution)

●Team up with Product Owner/Project Manager to maintain and coordinate communication of project progress to clients throughout each project by visualizing work on Scrum boards.

●Act as Scrum Master for Product teams with a focus on guiding the teams towards improving the way they work.

●Assist team to remove impediments by having an understanding the control and release processes.

●Assist with internal and external communication, improved transparency, and radiated information.

●Assist with prioritization and resolution of software defects.

●Act as the bridge between the Product Manager and the scrum delivery team and helping both parties to align to a common goal while managing stakeholder expectations.

●Teaching, coaching and mentoring agile team members on Scrum processes and provide constructive feedback. Train and transform teams to implement agile and coach and mentor teams on SAFe core values, SAFe principles and agile manifesto.

●Help to build a safe environment and strong relationship within teams so problems can be raised and dealt with professionally.

●Protect team from over-commitment, manage backlog, prioritize resolution of defects/bugs as evidenced by the on-time delivery of major initiative.

●Build relationship with Product owner and other stake holders to facilitate team's interaction with them

●Coach Product Owners in creation and maintenance of Product Backlog

●Facilitate scrum ceremonies including the Daily Stand Up, Sprint Planning and Retrospective Discussions and sprint review as needed.

●Determined the team capacity (velocity) from historical data. Created Work Break down structure (user stories) and corresponding activities (tasks).

●Protected team from over-commitment, manage backlog, prioritize resolution of defects/bugs as evidenced by the on-time delivery of major initiative.

●Work with PO to review PBIs to ensure requirements are accurately captured, stories are well written, and teams have a shared understanding of stories in the backlog.

●Facilitate scrum ceremonies including the Daily Stand Up, Sprint Planning and Retrospective Discussions and sprint review as needed.

●Capture and help teams continuously identify and learnings from retrospectives by tracking and implementing retrospective action items in subsequent sprints.

●Tracked and radiated information on team level metrics to enable discussions on continuous improvement and set team expectations for high performance.

●Help teams execute effective sprints by organizing and facilitating regular backlog refinement sessions with a focus on clarifying an adding detail to PBIs and ensuring that stories ready to be actioned on by the development team.

American Freight, San Antonio, TX 01/2017 – 01/2019

IT Scrum Master (Contractor with Beta Consulting Services LLC )

●Building a trusting and safe team environment to foster collaboration and continuous learning.

●Assisted team to becoming mature and self-organized by encouraging them to facilitate daily stand-ups, sprint planning and sprint reviews.

●Trained and coached teams on conducting backlog Grooming meetings, Scrum Daily standup, Product backlog, Sprint Planning, Sprint Review & Sprint Retrospective meetings and assisting with internal and external communication, improving transparency, and radiating information and help define team health metrics for sustainable team monitoring.

●Identified, tracked and resolved team level impediments with the development by empowering them to own their development process.

●Supported teams to identify and gather requirements for building a CI/CD pipeline to enable frequent deployment to production.

●Facilitated al Scrum ceremonies and served as a servant leader to the teams.

●Used burn-down and burn-up chart to monitor team progress to help coach teams to maintain stable and sustainable space during development.

●Coached team members on Agile principles and providing general guidance on the methodology.

●Continuously learned Agile/Scrum techniques and shared findings with the team

●Facilitated getting the work done without coercion, assigning, or dictating the work.

●Helped team to solve problems rather than provide solutions.

●Interfaced with Program Management Office to ensure project goals and requirements are being met.

●Organized and facilitated project planning, daily stand-up meetings, reviews, retrospectives, sprint, release planning, demos, and other Scrum-related meetings.

●Provided all support to the team using a servant leadership style whenever possible and led by example.

●Removed impediments by finding the right personnel to remove the impediment.

Hitachi, Tokyo Japan 03/2014 – 11/2016

Junior Scrum Master.

●Arrange for daily stand-up meetings, facilitate, and schedule meetings, demo and follow local scrum ceremonies (daily scrum, sprint planning, sprint demo and retrospective, etc.)

●Create a positive and easy communication channel (team, product owner, stakeholders)

●Protect the team from outside interruptions and distractions and remove impediments

●Address team dynamics, resolve conflict and resource constraints

●Foster a culture of collaboration, creativity, and innovation

●Be a servant leader

●Other duties may be assigned as necessary

BICEC Bank, Yaoundé, Cameroon 01/2009 – 02/2013

Continuous Improvement Analyst

●Develop process improvement procedures to improve operational efficiency

●Led and coached Scrum team responsible for developing software products and automated tools for financial services

●Evangelized Agile Methodology throughout the organization to improve communications between IT, Engineering, Product Management, and Business, providing transparency and obtaining great business value

●Increased team velocity by 15% within the first 3 months of Agile adoption by incorporating capacity planning into sprint planning sessions

●Facilitated scrum ceremonies (backlog refinement, sprint planning, retrospectives, daily standups, etc.)

●Enacted change and continuous improvement increasing the productivity of Scrum teams by 15% and the quality of deliverables by 30%

●Analyze current process standards and metrics to provide solutions for improvements

●Perform data gathering, root cause analysis and performance trending to develop appropriate process control changes

●Coordinate with Subject Matter Experts to develop process improvement reports for setting forth progress, adverse trends and appropriate recommendations and conclusions

●Inform respective teams on process improvement and re-engineering strategies.

●Worked closely with the project manager to create compressive action plans concerning resources, time frames and the overall project process.

EDUCATION

University of Buea, Cameroon (Bachelor Degree) 2009

Bachelor of Science ( Anthropology & Sociology)

Akamokai Language School, Tokyo Japan

PSM1

SAfe

CERTIFICATION

Certified SAFe Scrum Master (Scaled Agile, Inc.)

Professional Scrum Master (PSM1) Scrum.org

SKILLS

Operating Systems

Windows operating systems

Reporting tools

Version One, Jira & Confluence

Business Modeling Tools

MS Excel, Outlook, MS Power point, MS Access

RDBMS/Database & Other Skills

MS Access, MS Excel. Scrum Master and Product Owner

Automated Testing, Manual Testing and Mobile Apps Testing (5+ years), SDLC, Project management.

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