Ita Wanka
Professional Summary
Value driven Agile leader with extensive experience coaching and mentoring teams to deliver value across small to complex projects
With over 6 years as a Scrum Master and coach, I have led multiple (onsite and remote) teams to embrace the Agile mildest, a proven track record of delivering products and solutions that deliver high priority business value with a customer-centric focus by utilizing software development processes to optimize delivery, foster team collaboration and exceed stakeholder expectations. Coached development teams on clean code techniques, peer reviewing, TDD, along with a continual push towards automation and more robust CI/CD pipeline. Mentored managers on how to operate in an Agile environment and trained product managers on what is good backlog hygiene for their teams.
Industry Experience: Banking, Fintech, Cloud Migration, Telecommunication
Work History
Capital One - Scrum Master
03/2022 - Current
Application Modernization Project
●As a Scrum Master and Coach, I drive value streams/tracks following the Lean Agile process. I lead 3 cross- functional teams to iteratively deliver complex and global-scaled products which resulted in over 35% increase in revenue for the Past five Months. I facilitate and manage the success of each iteration and challenge my teams to refine processes to increase efficiencies and deliver well-polished, working software every iteration.
●Improve transparency and ensure product and project information is easily accessible to the team, stakeholders, and organization in a timely manner.
●Facilitated the creation of teams' definition of done negotiations, leveraging on engineering practices, extreme programming behaviors and DevOps practices (TDD/CI/CD), to deliver higher product quality.
●Ensures team and stakeholders' understanding of agile and Scrum constantly improves from sprint to sprint.
●Facilitate all Scrum Ceremonies including Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Retrospectives, Sprint Demos, Backlog refinement, and Release Planning.
●Protect the team from outside distractions and remove identified impediments.
●Develop, implement and promote Agile best practice standards including the use of boards and tools where appropriate.
Wipro - Scrum Master
Dallas, TX
02/2019 - 03/2022. Led 2 distributed teams migrate client trading applications to cloud to break down monolith applications into microservices of over 13000 Trading components
●Set up Jira Scrum and Kanban boards to help team track ongoing work and release cycles as well as prioritization and refinement
●Evaluated and coordinated data mapping for application integrations
●Enhanced team productivity by coaching the team on proper Agile practices
●Worked to identify and engage appropriate Stakeholders for resolution or until an action plan has been created to remedy impediments. Maintained team Confluence pages for retrospectives, metrics, collaboration spaces, calendars, and PI events
●Coached team members on agile estimation techniques aimed at delivering working software at the end of every sprint.
●Worked closely with Product Owners to ensure product backlog is properly maintained and effectively prioritized to deliver maximum value to customers.
●Facilitated Scrum Ceremonies (including Daily Standup, Retrospectives, Sprint Planning, Backlog Refinement, and Program Increment (PI) events)
●Maintain relevant metrics demonstrating the value of agile practices, work, and quality of product.
●Developed plans and managed dependencies between Scrum teams and lines of business
●Worked to provide continuous improvement for product development lifecycle, realizing 70% reduction in technical debts over 5 iterations.
Luxbill Technologies- Scrum Master
Dallas, TX
05/2016 - 02/2019
Multi-Cloud Migration Initiative
●Scrum Master for 3 Geographically distributed cross-functional teams, stabilized predictability by helping teams achieve 100% on sprint goals and commitments through two-week iterations
●Led the teams to deliver on the successful hybrid cloud migration and tracked the breakdown of monolithic trading applications to cloud-native microservices impacting over 17MM customers
●·Managed successful migration of critical production and contingency servers with no negative impact to business.
●Worked to provide continuous improvement for product development lifecycle, realizing 75% reduction in development bugs over 4 iterations through Lean Agile adoption
●·Assessed the Scrum maturity of the team and organization, and coaches the team to higher levels of maturity, at a pace that is sustainable for the team and organization
●Rolled out innovative Agile mindset training for over 125 Individuals across the organization and toolsets to senior leadership including product owners, development managers & QA managers
●Facilitated the creation of teams' definition of done agreements, leveraging on engineering practices, extreme programming behaviors and DevOps practices (TDD/CI/CD), to deliver higher product quality.
●Facilitated organizational learning, change management, and process adoption of Agile via metrics, benefits realization, outcomes, and retrospective findings
Verizon – Project Manager
Ashburn, VA
01/2013 - 04/2016
●Provided comprehensive training to internal and off-site users to optimize systems maintenance and resolve recurring issues.
●Creating long and short-term plans, including setting targets for milestones and adhering to deadlines.
●Delegating tasks on the project to team members best positioned to complete them.
●Made effective critical decisions when presented with multiple options on how to progress with the project.
●Served as a point of contact for teams and management to ensure team actions remained in synergy.
●Communicated with executives or the board to keep the project aligned with their goals.
●Performed quality control on the project throughout development to maintain the standards expected
●Adjusted schedules and targets on the project as needed with respect to financing.
********@*****.***
Minneapolis, MN 55416
Skills
●Quality assurance
●Project Management
●Agile Coaching
●Conflict Resolution
●DevOps-CI/CD
●Release Management
●Cloud Computing
●Vendor Management
●Lean
●Process Improvement
●Strategic & Operations Planning
●Servant Leadership
●Stakeholder Engagement
●Conflict Resolution
Tools/Framework
●Jira
●Jira Align
●Azure DevOps
●Miro
●MS Word; Excel, Power Point, SharePoint, Visio
Certifications
●SAFe Scrum Master – SSM
●Professional Scrum Master - PSM 1
●Certified Scrum Master – CSM
Education
University of Buea
Bachelor of Science in Geography
.