Product Owner Agile Coach

EZEKIEL A Ekukanjuh

Dallas, TX 469-***-**** ***********@*****.***

Accomplishments

Over Seven years of IT Project Management, Business Intelligence, Project Management, Computer Networking Management experience, and strategic Planning/Change Management. I have facilitated agile practices, in the delivery of enterprise applications through multiple release cycles. Strong ability to lead teams, Coach/Mentor, develop User Stories, and establish lightweight software configuration management. Experience in defining projects/initiatives with clear goals, objectives, and protocols. A good mastery of collaboration with multiple team members across different geographic areas alongside tracking progress against timeline, milestones, and budget revise as needed.

Methodologies, Frameworks & Tools

Agile

SAFe

Lean

Scrum

Kanban

Pair Programming/Mob Sessions

Salesforce (CRM)

Root Cause Analysis

JIRA/Confluence

Rally

Microsoft Office packages

Microsoft SQL Server,

Oracle-NetSuite Administration

Professional Work Experience

Artech - JPMChase

Kforce - USAA

Teksystems Inc - Verizon

Agility Lead

January 2021 to Present

Guide teams in the use of velocity as an effective tool for forecasting in subsequent iterations.

Agile transformation coach and a change catalyst for the team and organization.

Facilitates agile methodology within the team and organization flow including running scrum, planning, demo and retrospective meetings.

Facilitate alignment and assists Product Owner and delivery team with making appropriate commitments.

Detail-oriented, with strong organizational skills, able to work under deadlines in a changing environment, and ability to manage and prioritize multiple projects simultaneously.

Proven leadership skills, ability to prioritize, communicate clearly, a consistent track record of delivery, and an obsession about the customer experience.

Ability to interact with executives, managers, subject matter experts, and product owners in matrix structure of product management team.

Experience working with JIRA as management tool of scrum events and backlogs.

Fosters an environment that emphasizes knowledge sharing and group participation

Collaborate with the team in scheduling work, including defect remediation and refactoring, guarding against the accumulation of technical debt.

Take the lead on resolving conflicts within the team and removing any roadblocks to collaboration.

Recognizes changes and assists team in adapting.

Support teams in their Agile transformation and coaching them to higher levels of maturity.

Escalate issues and risks in a timely manner.

Keep the flow of execution on track including checking in with each team member on a regular basis and providing value to the team as needed

Help guide the team and organization on how to improve Agile practices and values to increase productivity and overall team satisfaction.

Sr. Scrum Master

March 2020 to May 2020

Build and develop high-performance teams that deliver technology solutions, through effective application of the Lean/Agile principles and frameworks including Scrum, Kanban Method and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)

Ensures the team follows standard agile processes while identifying opportunities for improvement. Facilitates team in defining Working Agreement, Definition of Ready, Definition of Done and then ensures those agreements are upheld.

Facilitate Scrum ceremonies: Backlog refinement, Sprint planning, Daily scrum, Sprint review and or Demo, Sprint retrospective. Understand and use a variety of techniques to continuously optimize ceremonies and team participation and engagement.

Facilitates seamless collaboration and maximizes team and program performance by driving continuous improvement across multiple technical and/or non-technical team(s) to ensure rapid and timely delivery of business value (experience, product, and/or service) and achievement of goals. Ensure cross team coordination.

Mentors and coaches’ teams and program teams and other Scrum Masters in Agile practices and mindset. Fosters a growth mindset and spirit of continuous improvement and learning. Coaching them to higher levels of performance.

Work with the team to value delivering and coordinating within and outside of the team to facilitate the completion of the team’s backlog as well as guiding the team to adding stories to backlog appropriately.

Identifies and helps to remove impediments to team whether internal or organizational in nature. When necessary, escalates high priority issues or impediments as appropriate to facilitate rapid resolution. Supports efforts to resolve systemic impediments that continually block teams within their organization.

Supports and educates product owners especially with respect to refining and managing the product backlog and decision making.

Ensure effective communication within and across teams and Programs; schedules and facilitates cross-functional meetings, and ensures appropriate progress tools, information radiators(burndowns, velocity chart, etc), dashboards and demos to effectively provide transparency on teams (or multiple teams) or Programs progress/productivity.

Ensure using Agile and Scrum approaches for appropriate, complete and timely team achievement of all documentation, tracking and reporting on user stories, project progress, resources utilization, change requests, issues, risks, risk management plans, test scripts and results.

Acts as Agile SME to teams, departmental teams, product owners, and management. Participates in Scrum Master community of practice and mentors other Scrum Masters.

For technology related efforts: Understands release-when ready, test-driven development, continuous integration, product demonstration and other technical engineering practices and guides team on leveraging them.

Leading SAFe Sr. Scrum Master

July 2019 – March 2020

Build and develop high-performance teams that deliver technology solutions, through effective application of the Lean/Agile principles and frameworks including Scrum, Kanban Method and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)

Make visible sprint and release progress through visual information radiators.

Coach teams through Agile routines, events and ceremonies including Iteration Planning, Daily Standup, Backlog Refinement, Iteration Demo, Retrospective, and PI Planning - transitioning responsibility to the team over time.

Promote a collaborative team environment that fosters experimentation, creativity, innovation and continuous improvement mindset.

Partnering with the Product Owner, Development team members and Business stakeholders on user story sizing and acceptance criteria definition, facilitating the definition of minimal viable product, and leading grooming and prioritization of the product backlog.

Working with JIRA as ALM tool for management of scrum events and backlogs.

Guides the team and organization in effectively employing Agile/Scrum practices and principles to create value and increase customer and stakeholder satisfaction

Guide teams in the use of velocity as an effective tool for forecasting in subsequent iterations.

Develops methodologies and tools to monitor performance and prepares Executive Summaries such as burn-down chart, Epic and Release burndown chart, and burnup chart.

Creates Survey questionnaire on Forms in Office 365 and send out links to the stakeholders after each Sprint demo to get their honest feedback.

Constantly monitors the Agile/Scrum team’s level of maturity and provides necessary coaching and guidance that will yield desired result of the scrum framework.

Troubleshoot and find solution to problem areas in existing operational procedures.

Guiding multiple teams and the organization on how to use Agile/Scrum practices and values to delight of stakeholders

Guiding the teams on how to get the most out of self-organization

Guiding the teams on self-organizing to fully realize the potential of Agile/Scrum frameworks

Facilitating getting the work done without coercion, assigning, or dictating the work.

Facilitating discussion, decision making, and conflict resolution

Assisting with internal and external communication, improving transparency, and radiating information

Matrix Resources – Atmos Energy

Scrum Master

Jan 2018 – July 2019

Leading, negotiate, and coordinate with technology, and business stakeholders on prioritization of tactical and strategic technology initiatives, as well as monitor the entire project process.

Provide knowledge and history of work completed across Scrum Teams, and support prioritization for work that hasn’t been completed.

Have a technical mindset and business awareness by removing waste and adding value.

Have excellent people-interaction skills and communicate internally and externally to improve visibility

Provide ongoing facilitation and coaching that enables the team to excel at Agile development.

Guide team toward continuous improvement (i.e., how work was conducted previously and adjustments to ensure ongoing success)

Communicate, build rapport and interact with multiple stakeholders, including product owner and technical team members

Agile transformation coach and a change catalyst for the team and organization.

Work with Product Owners and Technical Leads to understand Release backlog content, and ensure epics and user stories are ready for work by Scrum Team.

Genpact - Facebook

Scrum Master

Sept 2017 – December 2017

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Provided guidance and leadership to ensure the team maintains focus on quality and continuous delivery by coaching them on Agile values and principles and Scrum framework to increase effective execution, adoption, and team productivity.

Escalated impediments promptly.

Excellent in developing communications and facilitating conversations, buy-in (convince), and partnership with key stakeholders and customers around progress and team assessment.

I have demonstrated the ability to deliver business values by using the right combination of people, process, and technology while leveraging the Scrum framework as well as other SDLC methodologies.

I have coached the team to adhere to agile values and principles and the Scrum framework.

Couched Product Owners, project managers, and development team on Agile process implementation

Empowered the Scrum team to be self-organized, collaborative, self-managed, attend scrum meetings, and also being cross-functional.

I have protected the team from external distractions

Facilitated the release processes and ensured each release schedule contains its versions, assist in facilitating User Acceptance Testing (U.A.T) sessions, and populated the backlog by creating user stories as required.

Point2point Global

Scrum Master

Aug 2016 – Aug 2017

●Facilitates scrum ceremonies, sprint planning, daily standup, review demo, retrospective, backlog refinement or grooming.

●Utilizes TFS and Visual Studio to track iterative development, creating and tracking issues.

●Empowers team to be self-organized, collaborative and cross-functional.

●Escalates both internal and external impediments in a timely manner.

●Tracks and communicate team’s velocity and sprint progress.

●Efficiently manages issues, risk, follow-ups and escalation.

●Encourages backlog prioritization to meet the expectation of stakeholders.

●Acts as a servant leader to the team.

●Organize and schedule trainings with both internal and remote team members in using scrum framework.

●Help team members and stakeholders to understand scrum framework.

●Use different techniques to facilitate daily standup and retrospective meetings.

●Facilitates discussion, decision making and conflict resolution among team members.

Oracle Database Admin/ Jr Scrum Master

Feb 2015 - Aug 2016

Worked directly with the Product Owner to define requirements (epics and user stories), and write user stories

●Coach and mentor team members to elevate their individual and the team’s scrum maturity.

●Monitor project progress and resolve any impediments.

●Support development teams via a servant leadership style.

●Strong independent leadership skills with the ability to lead a large team with minimal oversight including the ability to prioritize work and meet deadlines in a results-oriented, fast-paced dynamic environment.

●Provide creative, out of the box solutions to solving challenging problems.

●Awareness and experience with widely successful Agile techniques: User Stories, ATDD, TDD, Continuous Integration, Continuous Testing, Pairing, Automated Testing, Agile Games

●Facilitate daily stand-ups, Iteration/Sprint planning, mid sprint reviews, Iteration/Sprint demos and retrospective meetings for multiple teams.

●Facilitate decision-making, issue resolution and consensus among the team with full understanding of time/cost/scope impacts.

●Track metrics of team progress, productivity and success.

●Shield the teams from external interference to enable optimal functionality and productivity.

●Encourages collaboration and proactively seeks opportunities to improve collaboration.

●Good skills and knowledge of servant leadership, facilitation, situational awareness, conflict resolution, continual improvement, empowerment, and increasing transparency.

●Proactively monitor and identify areas that need to be improved in the application and database using Statspack, AWR, ASH, ADDM and OEM Grid Monitoring.

●Created blackouts in OEM to disable alerts from OEM while performing database maintenance activities such as PSU patching.

●Utilize Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor (ADDM) to reduce DB time by diagnosing key problems.

●Daily health checkup of the database and SQL Queries using AWR, ADDM and TKPROF and Tuned the SQL's using TKPROF and STATSPACK reports.

●Helps the team stay focused by removing obstacles, minimizing distractions, and keeping team meetings concise and efficient.

● Clarifies roles and responsibilities and offers motivation and support, as necessary.

● Assesses the Scrum maturity of the team and organization and coaches the team to higher levels of maturity, at a pace that is sustainable and comfortable.

● Facilitates "self-organization" of the team to accomplish objectives and continuously improve processes.

●Creates and maintains information radiators and team tools, to include: sprint board, burn-down charts, burn-up charts, progress dashboards, etc.

●Tracks metrics that are important to the team in order to deliver success and continuous improvement.

●Experience working as a Scrum Master for multiple scrum teams, including distributed teams.

Education/Certifications

●Bachelor’s degree in Law and Political Sciences.

●Associate degree of Science in Network Support and Administration (CCNA Track)

●Certified SAFe 5 Agilist

●Certified Scrum Master (CSM) – Scrum Alliance

●Oracle 11g database Administration/SQL

●AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate

●Certified SAFe 5 Product Owner/Product Manager

●ICAgile Certified Professional-Agile Coach-ICP-ACC

Volunteering

Agile Co-Mentor (MAXI SERENITY)

Member – Action Group against Adolescent Health.

President Cameroonian Youth Manyu Youth Association USA

North Texas Food Bank (Food sorting and packaging)under Cameroonians Dallas FC group

Habitat for Humanity-Garland Area (Building Houses for the less privilege)under Cameroon Dallas FC group

Hurricane Harvey(Provided first aid for those affected)under Cameroon Dallas FC group

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