Abiola FANIMOKUN ad40sm@r.postjobfree.com 954-***-**** CSM PMP

Release Management, Agile Practitioner, SAFe Agilist

CAREER SUMMARY

●Expert in conducting agile ceremonies in a SAFe environment.

●Experience in facilitating program and team-level meetings across cross-functional teams regarding product and sprint backlog management.

●Proficient in JIRA and expert in writing queries (JQLs) for metrics and progress-tracking.

●Proficient in Microsoft TFS in facilitating agile ceremonies.

●Strong analytical, interpersonal, communications and problem-solving skills necessary for building self-organizing teams.

●Effective liaison between teams and business units necessary in a matrixed environment for reporting regular status updates.

●Comprehensive and advanced management knowledge and expertise for excellent team building practices, decision-making, mentoring, communicating and motivating agile project teams.

●Experience with program and product management.

KEY ROLES

●Scrum Master

●Release Manager

DOMAIN EXPERTISE

●High-Tech

●Government

CERTIFICATIONS

●PMP

●CSM

●SAFe Agilist (SA 6.0)

Universal Administrative Service Company (USAC), Washington, D.C Aug 2018 – Present

Release Train Engineer

USAC administers, under the direction of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), about $10 billion for the provision of high-speed internet to schools, rural health care providers and low-income phone and internet subscribers. I support the business intelligence (Pentaho/Tableau) and java-development teams on multiple feature and infrastructure projects and enhancements, including big data and web application projects. Project teams use sprints on a 3-week cadence while business intelligence and operations teams use the Kanban framework. Projects include the

●Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which provides subsidies for low-income subscribers for high-speed internet, phone and smart devices.

●Emergency Connectivity Fund (ECF), which supports schools with funding for high-speed internet.

●Open Data projects (using Socrata as a SaaS) which publishes data so that the public and universities etc. may have these for analysis and reporting purposes.

●Web Responsiveness enhancement projects for existing applications.

●Identity Verification projects with the aim of reducing fraud and waste in administering funds.

●Database (migration and upgrades – PostgreSQL, Oracle), infrastructure and technical debt projects (involving Splunk, Kafka).

●Cloud-based (Socrata, AWS SQS, AWS SES) application projects for system efficiencies.

●Cybersecurity projects (e.g., addressing log4j issues, Zero Trust Architecture) to minimize system vulnerabilities and install encryption between databases.

Responsibilities

●Manage the interrelationships across development teams, cybersecurity, network, database teams at the team, project, program and executive levels through coordination, organizing and constant communication.

●Facilitate PI Planning readiness, organize and conduct the PI Planning events, working in conjunction with PMs, Architects, Epic Owners, and Business Owners using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).

●Facilitate meetings (stand-ups, retrospectives, inspect and adapt - I & A sessions, Scrum of Scrums -SoS) to track risks and dependencies and improve the flow of value in the agile release train (ART).

●Engage in constant communication between the customer and teams to ensure features, epics, PBIs (product backlog items) and user stories are accurately documented and understood.

●Support teams’ agile maturity process by instituting agile practices, facilitating scrum ceremonies, and coaching on the use of JIRA (Dashboards, and the Structures add-on).

●Facilitate weekly backlog grooming sessions and ensure work items are estimated and story pointed.

●Facilitate sprint planning, review and retrospective meetings and ensure the team does not overcommit on work items by reviewing team capacity and commitments and sprint scope.

●Facilitate system demos, pre and post PI planning events.

●Generate metrics to track teams’ performance - weekly completed stories, velocity and sprint burndown charts and cycle time metrics and facilitate discussions on ways to improve team performance.

●Produce and present agile release train (ART) - level metrics - flow velocity, flow distribution, flow time and flow load for teams’ review with the aim to improve team performance.

●Ensure that the team has a clear understanding of Definition of Done and how to meet it.

●Work with other Scrum Masters, project managers and Product Owners to ensure alignment of priorities (SoS meetings), and ensure dependencies were delivered in appropriate sprints to support other teams’ delivery commitments.

●Plan for releases by coordinating artifacts for change control board meetings and reporting release statuses (successful, roll back, deployed with issues) back to change control boards.

●Write JIRA queries (JQLs) to create release notes, release versions and update sprint and kanban boards to reflect the most recent work status and work-in-progress (WIP).

●Track project status using Dashboards, JIRA - Structures and JIRA- Confluence and communicating these updates to the business/customer and project managers.

●Coach other Scrum Masters on using JIRA and support them as needed to facilitate smooth work across teams and remove obstacles to work delivery.

●Ensure work items were properly tagged in JIRA (release versions, team and sprint information) so each team has an accurate view of daily work items (WIP).

●Support project managers who need to update MS Project as necessary with status of work.

Inovalon, MD Dec 2017 – Apr 2018

Scrum Master

Inovalon provides cloud-based platforms delivering data-driven transformation from volume-based to value-based models throughout the healthcare industry. I supported the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) transformation effort for the entire organization, moving the teams to new agile norms of software development.

Responsibilities

●Worked with two portfolio managers, ensuring features, epics, PBIs (product backlog items) and user stories were properly written, estimated, and detailed for Product Increment (PI) planning.

●Supported products’ preparedness for PI planning and Pre-PI planning events by reviewing user stories and acceptance criteria with stakeholders and development teams.

●Supported teams’ agile maturity process by instituting agile practices, facilitating scrum ceremonies, and coaching on the use of VSTS (TFS) tools.

●Facilitated weekly backlog grooming sessions, ensuring work items were estimated.

●Facilitated sprint planning, review and retrospective meetings for the Networking team and ensured the team did not overcommit on work items.

●Constantly reviewed the backlog and work-in-process items for the Corporate Cybersecurity team which was using the Kanban process.

●Worked with other Scrum Masters and Product Owners to ensure alignment of priorities, and ensured dependencies were delivered in appropriate sprints to support other teams’ delivery commitments.

●Protected the teams from outside interference and ensured that requested work was delivered to other infrastructure teams such as Big Data, Cloud, and Systems and Storage within specified time frames.

●Supported teams’ adoption of DevOps (Jenkins) for automation.

●Supported efforts on continuous integration and continuous deployment CI/CD.

MAXIMUS Federal, VA Nov 2015 – Sep 2017

Internal Revenue Service (IRS) /Department of Treasury

Scrum Master

I supported multiple projects (Transcripts, IDRS, FSNH, FRR, and Refunds) – two projects at any given time- for the enterprise-wide modernization efforts involving the Customer Account Data Engine (CADE) data warehouse. I facilitated the adoption of an agile framework across remote (geographically dispersed) teams regarding planning releases, establishing agile practices, creating and updating project and task schedules, grooming product and sprint backlogs, running sprints, and providing regular written and oral updates to upper management.

Responsibilities

●Worked with the Product Owners and Release Managers to maintain the Product Backlog and sprint backlogs using Rational Team Concert (RTC).

●Provided coaching to team members to support agile delivery and to establish consistent agile practices.

●Facilitated daily scrum stand-up meetings to monitor progress on software development using RTC.

●Planned and conducted sprint planning, sprint review and retrospective sessions using Microsoft Live and Office Communicator (OCS) for virtual teams.

●Generated the sprint burndown charts and managed the sprint backlog for scrum teams using RTC.

●Generated progress reports- burndown and burnup charts, for sprint review sessions.

●Facilitated retrospective meetings at the end of each sprint, and ensured highest priority retrospective points were followed up on and closed out.

●Represented teams at Scrum of Scrum meetings to resolve dependencies.

●Tracked work progress to keep code transmittal schedule to Production.

●Provided weekly status update to PMO’s MS Project schedule.

●Prepared status reports and provided oral and written reports at weekly status management meetings.

●Communicated teams’ progress, issues, risks and impediments to domain leads, delivery partners and PMO through emails and at weekly meetings.

Nov 2013 – Nov 2015

OST, VA Federal Aviation Authority (FAA)

DRT Strategies, VA Food and Drug Administration/Dept. of Health and Human Services (FDA)

Sevatec, VA FMCSA, Dept. of Transportation (DoT)

Business Analyst

I supported DoT, FDA and FAA projects by fulfilling business analysis tasks of eliciting and documenting requirements and facilitating grooming sessions.

DoT’s project was to maintain custom-based applications for registering and tracking trucks, 18-wheelers, and drivers.

FDA’s project was to maintain an Oracle database with regular enhancements to ensure data integrity, and to provide SAP Business Objects Business Intelligence (BI) support.

Penn State Fayette Aug 2010- Jun 2013

Assistant Professor

Strategy and Business/International Management

I taught business and strategy classes using methods such as lectures, projects and teamwork exercises. We reviewed business cases illustrating strategic thinking, competitive analysis and market dynamics. I also taught international business and cross-cultural management, highlighting the impact of culture, language, and geography on multi-cultural team interactions and negotiations.

TECHNICAL SKILLS

Modeling

LucidChart, Visio

Repository Management

MS SharePoint, Rational Team Concert (RTC), Confluence

Change Management

Project Management

VSTS, RTC, JIRA

MS Office Suite, MS Project, MS Excel

EDUCATION

Ph. D Business Administration - Strategy (2010)

Florida Atlantic University, FL

M.Sc., Electrical Engineering Specialization (2003)

Tennessee Tech University, TN

B.Sc., Electrical and Electronics Engineering (2000)

Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria

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