Amer Khawaja

SUMMARY:

Over *+ years of practical expertise as a seasoned servant leader adopting the agile mindset to improve organizational agility. Practical knowledge of how to transform processes, productivity, and communication while creating self-organizing teams utilizing Agile, Scrum, SAFe, Kanban, and SDLC.

● Solutions-driven Scrum Master leading cross-functional teams, influencing change, driving Process Innovations, supporting continuous improvement.

● Expertise in facilitating all Scrum and SAFe ceremonies including daily scrum, sprint, planning, retrospectives, sprint review, Inspect and Adapt, PI Planning

● Ability to influence, persuade, lead, and motivate the team and leaders to achieve the various goals and objectives, excellent interpersonal skills, capable of developing effective relationships across the department and engaging with the people in effective way to deliver outcomes

● Support formation of initiatives into a conceptual backlog described through Epics, Features, and User Stories which translate right level details coming from business to teams

● Manage cross-functional teams, bringing transparency and facilitating events - Sprint Planning, Estimation Workshops, Daily Stand-ups, Sprint Review, Fun Retrospectives, Pre-PI checklist, inspect and Adapt, Workshop. PROFICIENCIES:

Skills

Strong communication skills, excellent problem solving, servant-leadership, interpersonal skills, team building, capacity planning, coaching and mentoring, facilitation, passionate about improvement, strong analytical skills, excellent coach and mentor, ability to prioritize and multitask, conflict resolution, time management, forecasting, risk mitigation, process improvement, backlog refinement, write user stories that meet the INVEST model Certifications SSM (SAFe Scrum Master), CSM(Certified Scrum Master) EDUCATION:

St. John’s University MBA Quantitative Analysis

University of Wisconsin BSc Finance

EXPERIENCE:

HSBC Bank NA September 2015 - Current

Project Manager

● Facilitate building and enabling enduring Agile teams to execute on goals by providing training and support to help escalate and remove impediments

● Coordinate agile ceremonies, manage dependencies for the team, provide visibility into team plans & progress, and enable continuous improvement within the team and organization

● Mentor and coach members to ensure all are focused on a common goal and working with an Agile mind-set

● Facilitate the ART team’s refinement of features to be considered in the next PI planning cycle to meet the Feature Definition of Ready (DOR)

● Foster and ensure readiness for events with pre and post PI planning

● Work with the Product Manager to define the roadmap for teams, and work with the Scrum team and other areas of the business to translate this into actionable user stories and sprint-by-sprint plans

● Serve as the subject matter expert to instill a culture of measurement with respect to both the impact of the change to the business and the effectiveness of the system of delivery

● Work with Business Partners and application SMEs to identify and mitigate risk and execution of the delivery of end-to- end technology solutions

● Ensure adherence to standard controls and drive teams to achieve compliance to the framework, capability management, security controls and technology architecture designs

● Facilitate workshop training on Agile foundations, user story workshops, and inspect and adapt workshops, finding root cause to reoccurring issues trends and developments in current and future solutions

● Direct and enhance organizational initiatives by positively influencing and supporting change management and/or departmental/enterprise initiatives within assigned areas of responsibility HSBC Bank NA September 2010 - September 2015

Manager Risk Analysis and Reporting

● Coordinated and collaborated with the infrastructure team and adhere to the best practice and efficient utilization of the resources

● Facilitated internal team coordination, mitigated impediments and achieved results from other teams and vendors

● Worked across departments to ensure that all stakeholders have input into the final product

● Facilitated the team to self-organize; enabling continuous improvement of change and run activities, aligned to the product roadmap and customer expectations

● Assisted Product Manager in determining best practices for team resource planning and utilization

● Identified and removed impediments, prevented distractions that interfere with the ability of the team to deliver the sprint goal

● Administer designing and developing metrics, complex queries, reports and analysis to support key business decisions.

● Support all functional teams to improve efficiency and data quality by developing tools and automated reports

● Liaison between IT and business for any software/hardware requirements that business need to function efficiently, robustly and with no downtime

● Facilitate and contribute to the identification of business solution

● Support ongoing enhancement, maintain existing solutions, ensuring regulatory compliance

● Develop and manage MIS/financial reports for upper management

● Collaborate with technology stakeholders to communicate business and technical requirements

● Manage and improve KYC tool algorithms to mitigate risk

● Implement strategies to automate workflow by integrating PC-based and mainframe systems

● Develop interfaces and databases for originations, underwriting, servicing and syndication departments to track and manage departmental related information.

● Recommend, develop automated queries to expose the data required for management reports

● Provide strategic input on the tools and applications used for data analyses and reporting AMERICAN EXPRESS July 2008 - August 2010

Scrum Master

● Exhibited strong leadership in planning, leading, and facilitating scrum ceremonies: daily stand-ups, backlog grooming, sprint planning, sprint retrospective, and sprint review and showcase

● Guided the team and organization on how to use Agile/Scrum practices Served the Product Owner and Development Team in their pursuit to do everything possible to fulfill customer needs

● Managed dependencies between other Scrum teams (Scrum of Scrums), third parties, and other non-Agile waterfall teams

● Communicated and presented weekly updates to stakeholders and program managers

● Partnered with the Product Owner, especially with respect to grooming and maintaining the product backlog

● Assisted teams with making appropriate commitments through story selection, task definition, building acceptance criteria, story pointing and prioritization

WASHINGTON MUTUAL February 2003 - June 2008

Business Analyst

● Managed, supported and analyzed $15 billion Commercial Real Estate portfolio

● Administered designing and developing metrics, complex queries, reports and analyses to support key business decisions.

● Supported all functional teams to improve efficiency and data quality by developing tools and automated reports

● Liaison between IT and business for any software/hardware requirements that business need to function efficiently, robustly and with no downtime

● Supported ongoing enhancement, maintained existing solutions, ensured regulatory compliance

● Developed and managed MIS/financial reports for upper management

● Recommend, developed automated queries to expose the data required for management reports

● Provided strategic input on the tools and applications used for data analyses and reporting

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