Scrum Master Project Manager

ZKAISER ZAFAR

Scrum Master / Project Manager

240-***-**** **********@*****.*** https://www.linkedin.com/in/00zee-k00/

SUMMARY

An outcome-oriented servant leader, with experience in govt and corporate sectors specializing in Agile environments for over 10 years. A Strong believer in solving the right problems for the right people at the right time with compassion and collaboration.

CORE VALUES

MY TIME

CERTIFICATIONS

EXPERIENCE

Scrum Master / Project Manager

SBC Consulting

07/2018 – Ongoing Washington, DC

The Carlyle Group

Coaching on effective value stream creation, budgeting, and delivery.

Building trust and collaboration among stakeholders so everyone can make decisions together as a group.

Building predictability into processes and systems so that teams can know what to expect from each other and how much time they will need to complete tasks.

Coaching and mentoring Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Agile teams, and leadership to enhance release planning, agile ceremonies, continuous integration, and continuous delivery practices.

Transferring knowledge and helping teams continuously reflect and improve, becoming more effective in their roles and increasing the outcome, collaboration, and quality practices.

Empowering teams by guiding and educating them on how to sort through rough cross-team dependencies, inter-team coordination, and department / program level roadmap discussions with business and internal IT stakeholders.

Guiding programs in comprehending and implementing SAFe principles and methodologies. This involves educating teams and leadership on SAFe concepts, roles, ceremonies, and artifacts.

Providing direct guidance and coaching to Agile teams including working closely with Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and teams practicing different Agile methodologies within the SAFe framework (e.g., Scrum, Kanban, XP).

Leading efforts in scaling Agile practices throughout the organization. This encompasses coordinating Agile Release Trains (ARTs), establishing Value Streams, and ensuring alignment across multiple teams and departments.

Playing integral role in orchestrating SAFe events and ceremonies, such as PI (Program Increment) Planning, Inspect and Adapt workshops, Scrum of Scrums, and other cross-team collaboration sessions.

Fostering a culture of continuous improvement by encouraging teams and leadership to reflect on their practices, identify areas for improvement, and experiment with new approaches to enhance efficiency and effectiveness.

Addressing impediments hindering teams or ARTs from achieving their objectives by tackling organizational challenges, technical hurdles, and process inefficiencies.

Delivering training and education on SAFe. Conducted training sessions for teams, leaders, and stakeholders to ensure everyone comprehends the framework and their respective roles within it.

Assisting teams in establishing meaningful metrics and reporting mechanisms by aiding in defining and interpreting metrics aligned with SAFe principles and objectives to track progress and make data-driven decisions.

Internal Revenue Service (IRS):

Helped establish end to end Program level goals to deliver real value to customers.

Developed and presented training materials for leadership, agile and different flavors and emerging technologies.

Facilitated training workshops for Product Development Teams and Product (business) partners on topics such as Agile mindset and principles, best practices, frameworks (Kanban, Scrum), and roles.

Collaborated with Product Development Teams to design and implement agile development coaching engagements.

Facilitate a variety of ceremonies, such as retrospectives, lessons learned, and team stand-up activities, as an objective third party.

Paired with teams or individual team members to teach skills.

Lead by example with personal discipline, collaboration, and continuous improvement practices.

Mentored new Product Managers and Product Owners in their roles, by assisting with the creation and management of Product Roadmaps, coached stakeholder management, and provided tactics and techniques in Agile Product Management

Facilitated transition to a continuous delivery model and stakeholder adoption of an agile mindset (which involves understanding, collaborating, learning, and staying flexible to achieve high-performing results).

Established groups of people who learn from each other (communities of practice) and developed a culture of continuous improvement across teams.

CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services)

Training on SAFe, performed agility assessments on state of agile, applied systems thinking to surface the bottlenecks and dysfunctions.

Influenced the development teams, middle and upper leadership to transform to SAFe.

Attended 4-day classes for SPC (SAFe Program Consultant)

Built the culture of Scrum teams, Kanban teams, roles and responsibilities across the program.

Executed PSI (Potentially Shippable Increments) planning sessions and scrum of scrums for all involved teams.

Worked with UI / UX team to setup CoP and introduce User Centric Deign.

Defined and managed program health and team health metrics to share with teams and leadership periodically.

Acted as RTE (Release Train Engineer) for initial PI meetings.

Involved in the workplace agile community by leading communities of practice, volunteering for brown bags, lean coffees, working groups, etc.

Maintained a trusting and safe environment where problems can be raised without fear of blame, retribution, or being judged

Supported and educated teams in implementing/improving Agile development and engineering approaches such as pairing, mobbing, TDD, ATDD, BDD etc.

Identified and communicated impediments at the multi-team and organizational level

SES Satellites:

Mentored scrum masters at team facilitation skills, scrum framework, conflict resolution and situational awareness, enabled product owners to accurately define the backlog items & leadership on Agile Practices.

Originated Agile Community of Practice and worked with line / resource / delivery managers for a common agile flavor and facilitated CoP Retrospective sessions.

Coached teams on importance of various ceremonies and worked to improve them.

Coached and enabled product Teams. Coached transforming project managers to scrum masters and helped them at different levels of the organization to understand the benefits of working agile.

Introduced backlog-refinement strategies.

Planned, scheduled, monitored, and reported on activities related to the project.

Performed agility assessments on state of agile across teams and programs.

Facilitated Agile Community of Practice Retrospective sessions.

Curiously investigated everything, solved problems analytically, creatively, and collaboratively.

Scrum Master for 3 product development teams.

Worked on organizational readiness towards agile.

Sr. Scrum Master

CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield

12/2017 – 07/2018 Washington, DC

Servant leader for teams of software engineers, Test Engineers and Business Analysts, in multiple Scrum teams, guiding the teams on how to use Agile/Scrum practices and values with the goal of getting the most out of self-organization.

Supported and guided the team to remove impediments by engaging the right stakeholders within the organization and partner organizations.

Provided support to scrum teams using a servant leadership style whenever possible and leading by example.

Followed the Agile playbook and processes at the FEPOC to support agile delivery.

Facilitated release planning, sprint planning, daily stand ups, grooming, retrospectives, product demonstrations and other scrum ceremonies.

Used Jira and Version One as agile tools.

Supported and educated the Product Owner, with respect to refinement and maintaining the product backlog.

Engaged with business stake holders on need basis to educate, learn and provide input to support/improve agile delivery.

Provided coaching to team members who are new to Scrum and Agile practices.

Worked cooperatively with integrated team of FEPOC/ FEPDO/BCBSA Plan staff to successfully address any associated risks and issues.

Moved team towards dev-ops and automated testing with a fully functional CI/CD unit.

Supported agile execution on other projects, by helping teams adapt the methodology to their environment, and coaching Scrum Masters in the company.

Identified gaps in process execution, through proactive engagement with multiple stakeholders and influence changes to FEPOC Agile process to enable continuous improvement.

Facilitated daily scrum meetings, spring planning, spring review, and spring retrospective in the Program.

Managed Product owner expectations On Artifacts Such as Product Backlog, Spring Backlog, Sprint Burn down, and Release Burn down.

Established and maintaining good working relationships with the Product Manager, teams, vendors, and Stakeholders

Facilitated weekly walkthroughs with leadership and other team leads for calling out dependencies and discussing roadmap.

Scrum Master

Impex Consulting LLC

04/2014 – 11/2017 Falls Church, VA

Clients: Broadridge Financials and Wachovia Wells Fargo

Facilitated Agile 101 sessions for the team to make sure team members were on the same page regarding what scrum is and what different ceremonies mean.

Encouraged and helped the Product owner along with the team to break stories into vertical small sliced by facilitating grooming sessions. This overall helped the team to understand and deliver small chunk of work at a faster speed

Coordinated ART Level Sprint Demos and Retro.

Assisted multiple teams to help integration testing and making sure teams called out dependencies and risks.

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

Instructed and modeled core Agile principles of collaboration, prioritization, team accountability and visibility; ensured consistent application of scrum methodologies across the enterprise

Acted as a change agent, fluent in using both Agile and Program Management to resolve conflicts and shift an organization through any resistance to change.

Developed a strategy on how best to structure the program from projects (agile) to releases and coached the program leadership to move towards it.

Defined value streams and aligned program capabilities (based on target operating model) with SAFe Framework.

Stood up multiple Scrum teams, coached the team through various phases of restructuring to align with agile principles.

Coaching teams, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Managers and Executives on Agile values and principles to promote continuous improvement in practices and artifacts.

Coaching product owner on identifying and writing user stories, acceptance criteria, guiding on release planning, identifying dependencies, help understand capacity planning.

Mentored team on agile engineering practices such as TDD, ATDD, CI/CD, Refactoring, etc. and promoting DevOps practices.

Consultant (Business / Quality Analyst)

Xceltech Inc.

08/2007 – 03/2014 Falls Church, VA

Worked as a Quality analyst (manual and automation) and as a business analyst (functional, system, technical, non-functional, user centric)

EDUCATION

Customer Focus

Emphasis on customers, empathize with

them, define & understand the problem,

& deliver to make things better.

Ownership

Bear the flag, and fill the gaps to make

things happen.

Continuous Improvement

Measure and learn from each iteration

and keep the needle moving.

Collaboration

Live by building relationships with

stakeholders and keep them on board.

Developing myself as a leader

Enabling best engineering practices such as CI/CD, automation, TDD, ATDD etc.

Agility Training across board

Users & Stakeholder Management

Aligning teams, programs, roadmaps, and value streams

Coaching Teams

SPC: Safe Practice Consultant

Professional Scrum Master (PSM)

Scrum.org

Agile Team Facilitation (ATF)

ICAgile

Certified Kanban Coach

IBQMI

Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO)

Scrum Alliance

Agile Coaching Certified (ACC)

ICAgile

Change Management

Cornell University

Masters in Business Administration

Stratford University, Class Valedictorian

Falls Church, VA

Bachelors in Computer Science

COMSATS Institute of IT

Islamabad

Contact this candidate