John C. “Chris” Meredith

Loxahatchee, FL *****

857-***-****

ad4749@r.postjobfree.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jcmeredith1csm/

SUMMARY

Collaborative IT Project Manager with exceptional communication skills to help IT teams set and achieve goals in a sustainable way that maximizes quality and the value delivered to customers.

Selected Accomplishments:

Recognized by Monster Worldwide as an “All Hands All Star” Q2, 2021 for excellence in guiding the Data Engineering, Data Science and Business Intelligence teams in their efforts to convert raw clickstream data into valuable decision-making dashboards.

Played a key role in three successful agile transformations, resulting in massive ROI in all three cases.

Skills:

Certified Scrum Master

Scaled Agile Framework

Facilitation and Coaching

Lean-Agile Tactics and Agile KPI’s

Business Analysis

Jira and Confluence

Product Management

User Story Mapping

Kanban

AWS Business Essentials certification

EXPERIENCE – Long-Term Roles

Monster Worldwide, Weston, MA

Feb. 2020 – Feb. 2023 (3 years)

Project Manager

Hired to help Monster launch the “.NEXT” jobs platform.

Concurrently served two to three distributed teams across nine time zones.

Recognized as an “All Hands All Star” in Q2 2021 for helping Data Science, Data Engineering and Business Intelligence teams convert raw clickstream data into data lakes and value-generating operational dashboards.

Guided the Business Intelligence team through a complete Agile transformation.

Coached six teams over three years, including: Job Ingestion, Applicant Tracking System, Sales Reporting.

Technical Environment: Microservices architecture, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, GCP Sandbox, Kubernetes, Github, Splunk, DataDog, TerraForm, Google Big Query and Looker. Backlog management performed via Jira Cloud. Scaled Agile Framework adopted. Participated in 13 quarterly hybrid SAFe P.I. Planning sessions.

Commonwealth Financial Network, Waltham, MA

May 2014 – Feb. 2019 (4 years, 8 months)

Project Manager

Hired as an in-house agile change agent to help an esteemed RIA/broker-dealer with 4,000 financial advisors seated across 40 states. The Waterfall to Agile transformation was so successful that four years later, Massachusetts Mutual Life, a 140-year-old company with 16,000 financial advisors paid over $30 million for a license to access the complete Commonwealth Financial Network SaaS platform.

Served as scrum master for the mission-critical Portfolio Accounting team, which had 30% of the team seated in Russia.

Successfully introduced Lean-Agile thinking to a team deeply opposed to an agile way of working. Instituted Daily Scrum, Backlog Grooming, Sprint Planning, Sprint Reviews, Sprint Retrospectives, Definition of Ready and Definition of Done

Served as a rotating internal agile consultant for five additional scrum teams, including Securities Trading, Advisor CRM and Reports

Helped spearhead the firm’s initial adoption of Scaled Agile Framework practices in late 2018 for a release train serving seven scrum teams. Helped facilitate a hybrid P.I. Planning session for all seven teams.

Mentored rookie project managers seeking to become certified scrum masters.

Technical Environment: .NET running on MS SQL Server, Microsoft TFS for backlog management, automated code promotion, changeset tracking and release management. Automated regression tests developed in C# for Selenium running on Jenkins.

Power Advocate, Inc., Boston, MA

Aug. 2007 – Jan. 2012 (4 years, 5 months)

Project Manager

Hired originally as a Senior Business Analyst writing requirements and specifications documents in a waterfall development system. Became a Scrum Master in 2009 when PowerAdvocate made the leap from waterfall to agile to accelerate solution delivery. The agile transformation was so successful that the firm’s annual SaaS revenues grew by 40% on average for five consecutive years. Served two teams concurrently at all times. Teams served during my tenure: Cost Intelligence, Market Intelligence, Sourcing Intelligence, Supplier Intelligence, Contract Intelligence.

Every developer fully adopted TDD and each team fully adopted Continuous Integration.

Selected to serve an under-performing scrum team. Within four sprints that team received “Most Improved” recognition by the VP of Product Development. That team delivered 128% of its release goal for 2010.

Stood up a new scrum team dedicated to the maintenance of the Hudson continuous integration server.

Served as QA Manager for 11 months without a P1 bug being introduced to Production.

Technical Environment: Java on Oracle hosted by Solaris, dynamic charts generated with EXT/JS.

EXPERIENCE – Short-term Roles

ADT Solar, Boca Raton, FL

9 Oct. 2023 – 29 Dec. 2023

Project Manager (81 days)

Two waves of layoffs were initiated three weeks after my start date. I made the best of an unfortunate situation by coaching the team to adopt Lean-Agile practices. I inherited a large distributed scrum team (distributed across 14 time zones) in the final stages of a year-long, waterfall-style "MVP-1" development cycle. The application supported internal ADT Solar employees navigating a 15-step workflow. During my 81-day stint I coached my teammates on:

Cross-functional skills development to reduce the “siloed skillset” mindset and increase team efficiency.

Paired programming to improve quality and reduce the cycle time for defect fixes.

Test-Driven Development and regular system demos to avoid costly production defects.

Leveraging system demos to enable an iterative release schedule and cut the total cost of production releases.

Technical Environment: SalesForce Marketing Cloud, SalesForce Apex, SalesForce Flow, Copado, Jira for Backlog management and Confluence for team administration. Backlog management conducted via Jira. Scaled Agile fully adopted. Participated in one hybrid P.I. Planning Session.

NextEra Energy, Jupiter, FL

Mar. 2023 – Sept. 2023

Project Manager (6-month contract)

Concurrently served three distributed (nearshore & offshore) IT Nuclear scrum teams spanning 12 times zones. These teammates were responsible for critical aspects of NextEra’s “NEO” application suite, used by over 1,000 internal users to maintain four nuclear power plants. Heavy emphasis on:

Product backlog reorganization, including improved feature tracking

Establishing a Definition of Ready, a Definition of Done, and improved backlog grooming.

Responsible for initiating and managing production change requests.

Technical Environment: AWS, Postgres, Oracle, GitHub, Angular, Node.js. Backlog management via Jira. Test cases managed using QMetry. Scaled Agile Framework adopted. Participated in two hybrid P.I. Planning Sessions.

Tufts Health Plan (now part of Point32 Health), Watertown, MA

Sept. 2019 – Feb. 2020

Project Manager (6-month contract)

Hired to help the Tufts CHRM organization successfully traverse a significant system upgrade from HealthEdge v.5.11 to v.19.9.

Served a team of 11 members (60% remote).

Heavy emphasis on feature validation, release notes analysis, end-to-end test case creation, rewriting online documentation and refactoring compliance reports.

Backlog management via Jira Align. Test cases created and run using HP ALM. Scaled Agile Framework for nine scrum teams fully established. Participated in two hybrid SAFe P.I. Planning Sessions.

Centene/Casenet, LLC (now known as Zyter TruCare), Bedford, MA

Feb. 2019 – Sept. 2020

Project Manager (6-month contract)

Hired to help with the massively successful microservice re-write of TruCare, a legacy app serving 22 million Medicaid patients across 50 states. Heavy emphasis on state and federal regulatory compliance. Directly responsible for the success of two software development teams. To reach our team goals, I facilitated all key team events:

Daily scrum, sprint planning, sprint retrospectives, backlog grooming, user story mapping sessions

Additional focus on coaching development teams in TDD adoption, paired programming, and the art of sustainable delivery.

Technical Environment: Microservices architecture, Java (JSON, Go), Angular, Kubernetes, Flowable dB, Mongo dB, Kafka, Aspose for automated document generation; Automated tests in Java running on Jenkins. Backlog management using Jira and requirements management using Confluence.

Pearson Corp., Boston, MA

Mar. 2014 – May 2014

Project Manager (6-month contract)

Served six scrum teams, two of which were located in Colorado. Brought in to help the firm manage a sluggish agile transformation for their new learning management system program known as “Project Realize.” Heavy emphasis on backlog reorganization. My duties also included facilitating a weekly production issue triage meeting.

Technical Environment: Java running on Oracle 11g, AWS and Puppet.

Omgeo (now known as DTCC), Boston, MA

June 2013 – Dec. 2013

Project Manager (6-month contract)

Hired to improve agile practices for two teams supporting the mission-critical Central Trade Manager system.

Concurrently served one scrum team and one Kanban team

My Kanban team was a rapid response team handling production environment defects.

My Scrum team wrote and supported the application that settles all transactions involving foreign financial institutions purchasing or selling US-domiciled securities.

Re-introduced best practices, focusing on sprint retrospectives and frequent backlog grooming sessions.

Technical Environment: Java running on WebLogic, Oracle 11g and Solaris.

Koko FitClub, Inc., Rockland, MA

Oct. 2012 – May 2013

Project Manager

Recruited to rejuvenate Agile practices across the entire technology group, serving two development teams. Served as Koko's in-house Agile Evangelist. Re-established adoption of scrum practices. Served through a difficult period full of context switches driven by strategic C-level decisions.

Re-vamped product backlog best practices, such as of a definition of ready and a definition of done.

Spearheaded the migration from Pivotal Tracker to Jira with Greenhopper for backlog management.

Stood up an agile team comprised of senior leadership and mar-comm managers to plan the successful launch of “Koko 2.0.”

Technical Environment: Ruby on Rails, with Postgres, Heroku and Ubuntu, .NET (legacy), Team City and Node.js.

Cisco Systems, Inc., Boxborough, MA

April 2012 – Oct. 2012

Project Manager (6-month contract)

Guided the award-winning SocialMiner engineering group through a difficult transition period covering the better part of two quarterly releases. Concurrently served two co-located teams promoting Jave code to the same feature branch. Absorbed the loss of 30% of the combined group but helped them maintain their velocity via the adoption of paired programming, improved TDD practices and reduction in defects found in the staging environment.

Guided an inexperienced product owner through three different release plans in the span of four months. Coached the product owner in the art and science of writing user stories that capture requirements, have an appropriate scope and do not need to be further decomposed during backlog grooming.

Facilitated preliminary backlog grooming sessions between the product owner, the lead architect and the engineering manager. Following the loss of the team's lead architect, coached the product owner and the new architect through a complete product backlog re-organization.

Additional responsibilities: served as scrum master for four scrum teams for two months while their regular scrum master was on personal leave.

Technical Environment: Java paired with Informix; hosted by Cisco VOS and Tomcat; Jenkins CIS; product backlog managed with Rally.

EDUCATION

University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA

Bachelor of Arts, Speech Communication

CERTIFICATIONS

ScrumAlliance.org Certified Scrum Master, Dec. 2009 (Cert. # 000077233)

Scaled Agile Framework: SAFe Certified “SAFe Agilist,” Oct. 2015 (Cert. # 242*****-****)

Amazon Web Services Certification: “AWS Business Essentials” certificate issued Feb. 20, 2024

PAST AFFILIATIONS

Past President, Watertown Youth Basketball Assn.

Past President, Boston Back Bay Chapter, Business Networking International, Inc.

Former Foreign Service Officer, US Department of State (69th A-100 Class)

Volunteer, Agile for Executives program, Agile New England

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