SUE YEH JOHNSON

Atlanta, GA 703-***-**** adbsll@r.postjobfree.com

linkedin.com/in/sueyehjohnson

Senior Enterprise Agile Coach and Release Train Engineer (RTE)

An Industry Leader Who Provides Transformative, Innovative, Cost-effective Strategies and Solutions to Help Organizations Stay Competitive in a Technology Disruptive World.

Feb 2017 - Dec 2019 SENIOR ENTERPRISE AGILE COACH AND RELEASE TRAIN ENGINEER ANTHEM, INC., ATLANTA, GA THROUGH PINPOINT IT SERVICES

From Oct 2018 – Dec 2019, Sales Force Automation Agile Release Train (CRM ART)

Leadership Responsibilities

Worked hand in hand with the Release Train Engineer (RTE), we are servant leaders who support 150-member Agile Release Train (ART). To do this, our partnership was like that of "work husband" and "work wife" to align and be the same page for the collective greater good.

Good work is always rewarded with more work. Initially, the CRM ART started with 13 feature teams that span across multiple continents and time zones. After one year, this ART became so large that it had to split into two ARTs wit ending up with a total of 16 feature teams and two different complex large solutions.

Servant Leadership requires that one rolls their sleeves. As an example, the CRM ART dev-ops process had some scaling challenges, especially with the tracking of deployments to upper and lower environments. Daily, 4 to 5 fires waiting to be resolved. Although it is not technically the role of an Agile coach, lean thinking says that that agility comes from optimizing the entire system.

Spearheaded a dev-ops intake process in which we used the JIRA tool to track all development deployment (lower and upper environment) requests from the 13 feature teams (each with 3-4 developers on each team). At the same time, one cannot rely on just the process creation alone. It requires that one has the soft skills to "sell" the strategy to all stakeholders, followed by training of all ART team members on the process. The result was 30% in production defects, production issues, escalation and smoother production checkouts on weekend releases.

Patience is a virtue, especially when one acts as a lifeline for an ART of 150 people. Not all teams are made equal, especially when the teams contain outsourced integration teams. Although some teams may have scrum experience, they may still lack SAFe scaling or Anthem culture experience. It was part of my responsibility to prepare and guide the teams through complex difficult challenges with known and unknown solutions with a combination of on-shore and off-shore team members. Creating an environment that is predictable, scalable, and optimized so the train endures difficult challenges

Leaders use data-driven metrics as their compass to change the behaviors of the ART as a whole. Report data, however, do not always come readily available and most often comes in the rawest of forms. In the SalesForce ART, there were 3,000 open JIRA requests from previous Program Increments (PI's). Taking several months to clean up this data (a tedious and somewhat unrewarding task) resulted in creating a baseline for the ART as a whole. Baseline data is the first step to measure the current and future state of performance for the ART as a whole. Without metric sets, one cannot lead the effort in continuous improvement and propose adaptations of the Agile Methodology for high-performance tuning. support 150-member Agile Release Train (ART). In order to do this, our partnership was like that of “work husband” and “work wife” to align and be the same page for the collective greater good.

Good work is always rewarded with more work. Initially, the CRM ART started with 13 feature teams that span across multiple continents and time zones. After one year, this ART became so large that it had to split into two ARTs wit ending up with the total of 16 feature teams and two different complex large solutions.

Servant Leadership requires that one rolls their sleeves. As an example, the CRM ART dev ops process had some scaling challenges, especially with tracking of deployments to upper and lower environments. On a daily basis, 4 to 5 fires waiting to be resolved. Although it is not technically the role of an Agile coach, lean thinking says that that agility comes from optimizing the entire system.

Spearheaded a dev ops intake process in which we used the JIRA tool to track all development deployment (lower and upper environment) requests from the 13 feature teams (each with 3-4 developers on each team). At the same time, one cannot rely on just the process creation alone. It requires that one has the soft skills to “sell” the strategy to all stakeholders, followed by training of all ART team members on the process. The end result was 30% in production defects, production issues, escalation and smoother production checkouts on weekend releases.

Patience is a virtue, especially when one acts as a lifeline for an ART of 150 people. Not all teams are made equal, especially when the teams contain outsourced integration teams. Although some team may have scrum experience, they may still lack SAFe scaling or Anthem culture experience. It was part of my responsibility to prepare and guide the teams through complex difficult challenges with known and unknown solutions with a combination of on-shore and off-shore team members. Creating an environment that is predictable, scalable, and optimized so the train endures difficult challenges

Leaders use data driven metrics as their compass to change the behaviors of the ART as a whole. Report data, however, do not always come readily available and most often comes in the rawest of forms. In the SalesForce ART, there were 3,000 open JIRA requests from previous Program Increments (PI’s). Taking several months to clean up this data (a tedious and somewhat unrewarding task) resulted in creating a baseline for the ART as a whole. Baseline data is the first step to measure the current and future state of performance for the ART as a whole. Without metric sets, one cannot lead the effort in continuous improvement and propose adaptations of the Agile Methodology for high performance tuning.

Mentoring Responsibilities

Synchronization of a large train requires onboarding of new and existing team members with efforts in training, teaching and guiding towards agility goals. The level of stakeholders in a train includes Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Senior Leadership, Developers, Architects, Business Analysts, and Testers.

Interestingly, not all team members come with IT corporate experience, there may be times where one mentors new college developer hires on how to deal with corporate culture, conduct business communications, and how to integrate themselves into an IT organization. efforts in training, teaching and guiding towards agility goals. The level of stakeholders in a train include Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Senior Leadership, Developers, Architects, Business Analysts, and Testers.

Managing and Facilitating Responsibilities

Managing and Facilitating Responsibilities

The "Herding the Cats" is a good analogy of what an agile leader must do in an ART.

High performing teams in ART requires hands-on daily tweaking with facilitation and management domain skillsets. master of ceremonies for cross ART ceremonies such as PI Planning, Scrum of Scrums (S2), Scrum of Scrum with leadership (S3), and Joint ART demos

To align strategy, a leader must facilitation large cross-functional working sessions to plan incremental work or mitigate changes and risks. Scheduling these additional meetings were often challenging as individual teams have their own set of scrum ceremonies. Every quarter, there was the plan and Run "in-person" Program Increment (PI) Planning with over 150 attendees, including the care of PI Artifacts and Logistics. Analogy resembles "planning a wedding without the dress."

Outside of PI Planning, there were managing responsibilities including onboarding the new team members in JIRA Align and JIRA. Daily, administrate our project in JIRA, Confluence and JIRA Align (formerly called AgileCraft) by adding users, configuring boards, and the configuration of teams.

In addition to mentoring, managing, there were often changes due to outside forces on the ART. For example, other ARTs were using Agilecraft as a portfolio tool. It was my responsibility to set up the ART to use AgileCraft to be used for the first time, also known as a solo effort that included data cleansing, mentoring and training the ART. Support the transition of Large Solution ART to Portfolio ART, while performing impact assessment and supporting the transition into a governance lead portfolio ART.

From Feb 2017 – Oct 2018 Senior Agile Coach Consumer Health Profile (CHP) also known as Consumer Health Insights (CHI), Atlanta, GA

The CHP or aka CHI program is Anthem's artificial intelligence products that use social determinacy data so that Anthem can make health recommendations to save members' costs. Lead two teams, one of the commercial and one on the cloud, all proof of concepts

Responsible for coaching and performing all scrum ceremonies, including quarterly planning which is similar to SAFe PI Planning

Assist with refining the Agile delivery process to reduce areas of uncertainty that become impediments for the team.

Continue to improve knowledge of Agile activities at Anthem as well as in industry

Experience growing agile competencies in dynamic engineering teams under significant delivery demands and pressure

Drive deployment velocity through multiple phases of growth by developing and implementing software engineering best practices to create a robust, predictable technology organization operating in an agile environment.

Feb 2016 - Jan 2017 Agile Transformation Coach and Lead CioxHealth, LLC Alpharetta, GA

Responsible for initiation, adoption, ongoing management and evangelism of the organization's agile practices for 14 product teams, programs and portfolios.

Lead execution of agile transformation initiatives across IT and business operations teams to maximize economies of scale and scope in investment and optimize the effectiveness of new business architecture with 5 scrum master direct reports

Expertly coaching in Agile practices (i.e., Lean, Scrum, Kanban, LeSS).

Expert knowledge of the business implications of an Agile transformation.

Define training plans for new hires and teams (role based, boot camp, etc.)

Create training materials relative to specific agile training needs and conduct the training

Deliver customized training courses for teams to meet the needs of the portfolio(s)

Proven and demonstrable experience (10+ years) in working with agile to architect, design and implement enterprise-wide solutions while always meeting commitments and ensuring high quality outcomes

Health insurance experience and basic claims administration and business process

understanding preferred, as well as experience working with highly confidential information (PHI, PII)

Drive deployment velocity through multiple phases of growth by developing and implementing software engineering best practices to create a robust, predictable technology organization operating in an agile environment.

Partner with senior leadership and line management to cultivate a culture that fosters ongoing excellence in software engineering

Oct 2012 - May 2017 Independent Agile Coach and Trainer

Snapstream, LLC, Metro Atlanta, GA

Independent consultant, who took on several various roles such as agile trainer, senior scrum master, Agile Coach and Public Speaker

Assist PO & Delivery team to self-organize while maximizing sprint value, train the agile processes throughout all levels of the product team

Coach and mentor step by step in the Agile Transformation process

Independent coach and trainer for Public and Private Agile courses

Assist PO & Delivery teams to self-organize while maximizing sprint value

Train the agile processes throughout all levels of the product team

Coach and mentor step by step process in the transformation

Portfolio and Program level Coaching

Group -coaching for Executives and Teams

Non-certified Agile Training and Workshops

The organizer of Alpharetta-Agile User Group Meetup with over 200 members-responsible for organizing corporate sponsors, meeting speakers and overall excellence of the meetup group.

[Clients include the following: The Coca Cola Company, Cox Automotive, Cbeyond,

Continuoushealth, and Cprime]

2010 - 2011 Business Systems Analyst (IT) Comcast Cable, Herndon, VA

Business Systems Analyst Designed and iteratively prototyped designs

Analysis included Conceptwave Velocity 5.1 API- web services

Created agile related artifacts diagrams, workflows, use cases, sequence diagrams and process flows

Merged document baselines and uploaded into Share-Point repository

Created technical design with SOAP UI/Comcast Enterprise WSDL

2008 - 2009 Senior Project Manager & Business Systems Analyst (IT) Sprint Nextel, Reston, VA

Used SQL(TOAD) to research customer data on distributed Oracle 10g billing databases

Continuous learning of J2EE Data Warehouse & Oracle backend payment application

Converted 1 million wireless customers from Converges to Amdocs Ensemble Billing system by performing thorough Impact assessments

Worked on Order Management System (SAGE) and tested for POS systems

2006 – 2007 Senior Project Manager (IT) Sprint Nextel, Reston, VA

Worked with product owner to satisfied multimillion-dollar customer during an RFP

Saved company money by streamlining outsourced operations from IBM to GXS

2004 - 2006 Project Manager (IT) Sprint Nextel, Reston, VA

Project Manager Member of cross-functional IT PMO group that is responsible for compliance, budget and schedule Sponsored weekly internal project status meetings mitigated risks and resolution of issues BSS projects using website and performance tools

2002 - 2004 Business Systems Analyst-Project Manager (IT) Sprint Nextel, Reston, VA

Business Systems Analyst-Project Manager Automated work request for the Sales Operations team Sponsored weekly Change Control Board CCB),

Managed agenda items and issue tracking Performed analysis for OM PeopleSoft application, using the enterprise product catalog

2001 - 2002 Systems Analyst and Project Manager MCI Worldcom, Chantilly, VA

Coordinated issue resolution of cross functional PVCS Trouble Ticket work orders

2000 - 2001 Configuration Management MCI Worldcom, Chantilly, VA

Maintained EDI baselines on HP-UX and migrated software changes administering versioning tool

1997 - 2000 Help Desk Analyst Northern Virginia

Various in the Washington DC/Northern Virginia Area

Onsite Help desk support for users

Skills

Platforms/Architecture

Big Data, Hadoop, Data Lake, Teradata, SQL Server and Data Warehouse

Spark, Hive, Spring Oauth and Get

Predictive Analytics, Model Operations and Data Science

IBM Cloud, AWS Cloud, Google Cloud and Cloud Forge

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and UML

EDI, Vlocity, SalesForce, MuleSoft, QNX Autorabit

HP-UX, Linux, Sun Solaris, Mobile Development (IOS and Android) and Windows

Soap UI 3.5, XML, WSDL, XML Reader, PL/SQL/Toad

Tableau, Microstrategy, Crystal Reports, Business Objects

Programming Languages

JAVA, Bash, J2EE, C/C++/C#, Python, PERL, EDI QNX, .NET, JSON

Agile Toolsets and Concepts

JIRA/Administrator Role and power user, AgileCraft/JIRA Align administrator and, power user and configuration experience, Fun retro, VersionOne, JIRA Greenhopper, Trello, Pivotaltracker, Planning Poker, Github, Cucumber, Selenium, Large Scale Scrum (LeSS), Scale d Agile Framework (SAFe), Test Driven Development (TDD), Acceptance Testing Driven Development (ATDD), Kanban, Scrumban, Delegation Poker (Management 3.0), Lean Startup, Value Stream Mapping, Shift Left, Dev Ops, Continuous Integration, Behavior Driven Development (BDD), Personas, Empathy Mapping, Business Canvas, Wardley Maps, Digital Transformation, Management Consulting, PI Planning, Big Room Planning, Team Bonding Exercises, Agile Team Games, Agile 101, Product Owner Training, Feature Writing and Story Writing Workshops

Markets, Verticals & Segments

Sales, Marketing, Finance, Transportation, Retail, Retail Beverage, IT Billing, Point of Sales, Procurement, Healthcare and Healthcare IT, Telecommunications, Automotive

Certifications

Scrum Alliance: CSP, CSM, CSPO and Large-Scale Scrum (Less); Certified Less Practitioner (CLP), SAFe Certified Release Train (RTE), SAFe Agilist (SA), SAFe Dev Ops (SDP)

Education

Master of Science (MS) in Information Systems, Strayer University, Washington DC

Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Political Science, University of Southern Mississippi

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