SAMUELAKOWUAH

Scrum Master, Product Owner

adl6mg@r.postjobfree.com·https://www.linkedin.com/in/samuel-akowuah-9a92a1122·269-***-****

CAREER PROFILE

A versatile agile evangelist. Served as part of global teams, working to deliver high quality products & services to internal and external clients. Over 3 years of IT experience including 5 years of scrum and agile experience in deploying and implementing scrum projects and excel in training team members and driving continuous delivery of business value.

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

●Certified ScrumMaster with over 5 years of experience working across multiple teams.

●Solid knowledge of Software Development Life Cycle, (SDLC) with experience helping drive agile transition, adoption, and change management.

●Passionate about high quality software development, the people, processes, and tools that support it.

●Knowledge and experience with Agile Planning tools such as Jira, Trello, and Microsoft Azure.

●Demonstrated experience coaching agile mindset shift and behaviors across multiple scrum teams including Senior Leadership.

●Experience aligning teams’ objectives and mission to an organization’s strategy using OKRs.

●Clear and concise verbal and written communication with deep understanding of group dynamics.

●Knowledgeable and experience in setting organizational improvement boards to drive organizational learning and improvement.

●Knowledge in helping teams with deployment cycles, and release management.

AREA OF EXPERTISE

Operating Systems

Windows, Mac operating systems

Communication tools

MS Teams, Outlook, WebEx, Zoom, Skype

RDBMS/Database

MS Access, MS Excel, Share point, SSMS.

Project Management

MS Project, MS Office, Azure DevOps, JIRA, Trello

EXPERIENCE

02/2020 – 04/2021

SCRUM MASTER, Globadigm Consulting

Successfully work as ScrumMaster with Product Owner/Project Manager to maintain and coordinate communication with clients throughout each project by visualizing project progress on Scrum boards.

Efficiently align work with Business Analyst, Project Manager and teams to help gather both business and functional requirements needed to write user stories and acceptance criteria.

Effectively assisted the PO in creating EPICs and stories with acceptance criteria within JIRA to enable transparency of workflow process needed for product development.

Acting as the bridge between the Product Manager and the scrum delivery team; I align both parties to a common goal while managing stakeholder expectations to achieve the most valuable result.

Optimize workflow by implementing Kanban for one of our front door teams that works on tickets.

Successfully coached and mentored the agile team members to leverage Scrum practices including daily stand-ups, sprint planning meetings, sprint review and retrospectives as mechanisms to embed agile principles within team’s ways of working.

Implemented improvement items identified from retrospectives with the goal of driving continuous improvement.

Coordinated effective utilization of internal resources assigned to our Agile Scrum Team by enabling effective communication channels, creating safe environment, tracking, and radiating team level information such as velocity, burn-down charts to team members.

Facilitated the demo of working prototypes with customers, PO, and stakeholders

Provided accurate feedback on work completed and signoff on work before releases.

Ensured that the scrum team remains in the rhythm of continuously delivering customer and business value.

Motivated team members to own their development process and drive change organically from within the team.

07/2016 – 02/2020

SCRUM MASTER, Richard’s clothing

●Served as a liaison between the Business and the Marketing Department.

●Enhanced communication lines between executives, managers, and peers.

●Worked directly with user(s) and the representatives to gather requirements.

●Facilitated Daily scrum meetings, sprint planning, sprint review, and sprint retrospective.

●Worked with Product Owner and Development teams to create artifacts such as Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog and Sprint Burn down, Release Burn down.

●Managed the overall performance and delivery of cross-functional teams.

●Facilitated sprint planning as Scrum master for multiple teams;

●Publicizing the team's progress and successes to make sure they are highly visible to product owner /stakeholders.

●Keeping the team focused on sprint goals to ensure successful sprints.

●Successfully migrating projects from Waterfall to Agile by implementing Agile values and principles.

06/2016 – 08/2016

CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTETIVE, Morley

Assisted GM dealers over the phone with loyalty rewards, key codes, Google chrome and IE troubleshooting etc.

GM decision making standards

Enhanced listening skills

Cleaning Java Cache

Managing call back for DBC and ACDelco

Created IDs and escalations to the dealer application liaison.

Created escalations to dealer applications.

Uploaded documents for dealer audits.

04/2014 – 02/2015

PRODUCT OWNER, MTN GHANA

●Facilitated team for better creativity and ability to improve the efficiency of the development team

●Organized and facilitated sprint planning meetings

●Removed impediments for the scrum team with strategic methods and leadership

●Organized and facilitated the product release by following all standards necessary and required

●Tracked and communicated team velocity and sprint progress to all affected teams and management

●Defined and managed a well-defined project management process and championed ongoing process improvement initiatives to implement best practices

●Guarded and shielded the team from distractions and interruptions from external interferences

●Identified opportunities for process and tool improvements and drive those from concept to implementation

●Effectively prioritized, clearly described and strategically estimated product backlog items by implementing Fibonacci sequence, cloth size.

EDUCATION

MAY 2021

BSC MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS, Virginia state university

3.4 GPA

Dean’s List of Student Award- 2018

Student with GPA 3.0 or Higher Award- 2018, 2019, 2020

CERTIFICATION

MARCH 2021

PSM 1, SCRUM.ORG

SKILLS

Ability to analyze, model and interpret data

Problem solving skills

Accuracy and attention to details

Excellent interpersonal and communicating skills

Leadership and Facilitation skills

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