Scrum Master Program Manager

Rob Hinton

Kansas City Area

Email: *******@*********.***

Summary Award winning CSM servant leader with ability to solve problems, implement reliable products and deliver appropriate value to clients utilizing extensive experience in Agile, SAFe, Kanban, Lean principles and hybrid frameworks. Relentlessly pursues team transformation from initial, disorganized adoption of Agile into high-performance CI/CD groups capable of delivering valuable increments multiple times daily to PROD. Keen focus on managing risk profile and tracking risk injection/removal within production environments. Extensive experience working in 100% fully remote environments with team members spread across all time zones.

Specialize in using Agile framework for rapid prototyping, product delivery, business transformation or solving any other challenge that may be presented along the journey.

Intense focus on delivering valuable working software by every team, every sprint. Always searching for ways to accelerate delivery of value for business and clients to allow winning within their market area. Over time this sustained effort will allow the company to pull far enough ahead they can’t be caught and will also act as a market disruptor, furthering competitive advantages. Actively practicing and very hands-on Agilist, Senior Technical Program Manager and Senior Certified Scrum Master since 2005, significant experience leading small to large scale, geo-distributed enterprise-level projects and teams, SAFEe trained

Ability to manage multiple teams (4-6), used to working in fast-paced, dynamic environments of all sizes. Extensive experience working at enterprise level, assisting with Agile and SAFe transformations, planning and executing Program Increments, delivering major releases on time Always driving to ensure alignment with business roadmap(s), providing transparency throughout organization, building quality into processes and daily work

Willing to challenge business leaders to adopt Agile mindset outside of just ENG teams. Agile, and by derivation, Lean concepts of efficiency and removing waste must percolate through the entire company for optimum success. Limiting Agile concepts and implementation to “an IT thing” will not yield best results. A high performance, gelled set of Agile teams will significantly stress other areas of the business – upstream and downstream. Plan for that - it will happen.

Proficient with all aspects of Agile, Scrum, SAFe, Hybrid implementations including:

• Execution of all ceremonies (Daily Stand-ups, Sprint Planning, Retros, Backlog Refinement, Scrum of Scrums, Sprint Demos), tracking team progress against commitments (burn down, velocity, Resume for Rob Hinton

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estimation, projection of work completion)

• Comfortable using time or story points for work estimates

• Intense coordination with PO and business stakeholders, including forward looking planning, coordination of PI events, delivery against commitments

• Removing impediments and challenging teams to do better while continuously improving each Sprint

Comfortable working with all levels of business to ensure company is delivering what customers need, when they need it and with an acceptable level of quality. Ability to report engineering and team status to large cross- functional groups including executive team

Servant leader who constantly coaches teams to improve their practice of Agile principles. Works to develop gelled high performance teams delivering reliable products while maintaining a good work-life balance Proficient using Jira and Confluence as reporting tools of record (“single source of truth”), including Structure, scripting, tuning to maximize team efficiency and providing stakeholders reliable information about work commitments

Constantly manages and tracks defects, run triage meetings as needed going into release increments, help teams develop Definition of Ready (DOR) and Definition of Done (DOD)

Able to operate in more traditional project management environments. Competent with full life cycle development processes, analysis, design, risk analysis, business process re-engineering and quality assurance Always engages with Security Champions to develop engineering practices ensuring secure software design through entire product lifecycle Work with DevOps teams on transformation, implementation of CI/CD, automated build processes and rule set checking for basic violations. Delivered companies first zero defect medical device system meeting ISO and FDA certification requirements in full life-cycle development environment A core tenant of Agile is to work at a sustainable pace long term. In other words: “Make work fun again!…”

Skills • Actively practicing senior Scrum Master for 20 years

• Agile Certified Scrum Master since 2005, trained directly by Jeff Sutherland, including management of large projects

• Proficient in all aspects of Agile and Scrum: Ceremonies, Metrics, Alignment to Business Roadmaps, Creating, tracking Release Trains, Building Jira and Confluence to represent current real-time

“single source of truth” available to business at large Resume for Rob Hinton

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• SAFe framework transformation, implementation (3+ yr.)

• Hybrid environments “Agile-Fall” (10+ yr.)

• Jira Server(8+ yr.), Jira Cloud(2+year), Confluence (8+ yr.), including customization of Jira via new ticket types, creation of new workflows, testing in Sandbox and migration to PROD

• Enabled Aha! – Jira integration for Product and Business support

• Always focused on management of a project’s scope and timeline

• Drive teams to always seek improvement every sprint

• Seek ways to increase transparency within teams and cross- functional organizations

• Apply Lean development principles where appropriate, specifically to remove friction around teams to allow velocity of delivered software to naturally increase over time

• Encourage migration to DevOps mindset where possible

• Plan and organize demos for all work products to various audiences

• Responsive approach to removing impediments and obstacles with stated goals of 24 hour resolution and ultimate goal of 1 hour resolution

• Coaching team(s) to grow in their knowledge of Agile framework

• Proactive approach working with Product Owners (PO) to manage and prioritize backlog(s), new requests, product increments

• Push teams to mature, within constraints of organization

• Manage and resolve conflicts, escalate as required

• Work with team(s) to develop ownership of the product they develop

• Project Management (20+ yr.), Full SDLC, Waterfall, Agile, Hybrid frameworks

• Extensive experience with new product development, maintenance and maturation of existing products

• Experience working with business from inception of new products through entire life cycle using Waterfall, Agile and Hybrid methodologies

• Used to working with advanced technology teams

• Experience with mobile, web, B2C, B2B product focus

• Comfortable in high stress, challenging, turnaround environments

• Success building high performance teams aligned with company roadmap and vision

• Full software and hardware life cycle development processes (15+ yr.) including ISO certified systems for medical device development

• FDA compliant medical device development for embedded systems containing hardware and software

• Developed FDA compliant medical device and ISO certified Quality Assurance testing programs

• Hazard/risk analysis and mitigation (5+ yr.)

• Formal software and equipment quality assurance, medical (5+ yr.)

• Web/content development (5+ yr)

• Business continuity planning and disaster recovery (5+ yr.)

• On-time/ahead of schedule delivery on large projects, matrix management environments, working with cross-functional teams, multiple projects under management (10+), large team management experience (100+)

• Experience working at all levels of management (Executive, Director, Staff)

• Experience building high-performance teams, collaborative team Resume for Rob Hinton

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player, comfortable with scheduling, budgets, proposals, managing distributed/virtual teams (national and international), customer requirements gathering, requirements management, analysis, implementation, testing, defect and issue management, process development, process improvement

• Proficient in MS Project/Office Suite, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, MS Project, Visio, Jira (Server and Cloud), Confluence, Rally, some knowledge of Aha! Integration with Jira

• Reetro for interim retrospective tool (1 yr)

• Launch Darkly (2 yr)

Experience Timely Care, LLC

Senior Scrum Master

Jan. 2023 – Nov. 2024

• Number one hire out of 400 applicants

• Product is a series of mobile apps (iOS, Android) in the Higher ED field, delivering online mental health care to college students.

• Developed, planned and executed complete ENG transformation in 18 months

• Continuously worked with ENG team, Product, Business Units to educate and inform about Agile Principles and Framework. Built trust based on actually delivering what was promised and stressed “communication over contracts” as a core tenant of Agile to get people working together

• ENG went from lagging Business needs to running so far ahead of Product, Marketing and Design that they could not provide enough DOR work for teams. This allowed ENG to substantively tackle Tech Debt, Security work, reducing risk posture in PROD and completing Accessibility requirements

• Helped ENG mature from initial, disjointed Agile implementation to smoothly running, highly productive teams that met business objectives and delivered value every sprint, every time

• Matured teams in 18 months to CI/CD model where multiple teams transitioned from 2-week delivery cadence to daily PROD deployments. Teams were delivering over 150 deployments per month with very low defect rate.

• As ENG matured I worked with ENG leadership and directors to start the move to domain driven design and event storming as a way to harmonize communication between disparate business units that typically struggled to work together. The goal was to develop a common vocabulary across all units related to products. In parallel ENG started re-organizing teams and dividing the products into unique domains with well defined interfaces. One goal here was to reduce “cross-contamination” between domains so that teams could work independently and not have to worry about bringing entire platform down with their changes.

• Built out new Jira projects to support transition to DDD along with migration of active WIP as needed

• Worked with ENG leadership to implement Nexus integration daily calls to ensure coordination between teams. Very productive and much better than running Scrum of Scrums particularly as team velocity increased and Resume for Rob Hinton

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daily deployments became the norm

• Helped teams mature to delivery of very small increments frequently to get value into hands of users as soon as possible

• Built and maintained Jira Server implementations to support rapidly changing team dynamics. About every 4 months major updates to Jira were implemented to support maturation of ENG

• Worked with DevOps, Security and ENG managers to develop Jira implementations integrating outputs of scanning tools for Vulns and Tech Debt backlog into team backlogs for review, estimation and development

• Developed and implemented a solution within Jira to assess Defect/Bug risk and calculated severity. This allowed development of Jira dashboards that showed current risk posture – rate of new defect injection, rate of defect remediation and overall calculated risk in platform by month, quarter and year (this was done with help of ENG management)

• Worked with Product to streamline Aha! Integration and ensure there was a real-time single source of truth available to all business units and ENG

• Upon starting immediately re-structured all ceremonies, streamlined Jira as implemented and got the correct people to the correct ceremonies. This included all Agile ceremonies. All meetings happened as planned – starting and ending on time. Re-started company-wide sprint demos that became a big hit with the company as they got a chance to see what value had been built during the last sprint. Retros were significantly re- worked and streamlined so that the time was spent in constructive and positive conversations

• As teams stabilized (about 5 sprints) velocity stabilized and over the next year organically doubled. There was no focus on velocity itself. As teams gelled, impediments were removed, processes streamlined and waste eliminated velocity drifted higher

• Regained trust with rest of organization as teams started delivering on promises and commitments every sprint with a very high level of quality

• Sprints started and finished on time

• Worked with QA group to integrate their work into the standard sprints and prevent end of sprint “Quality Crush” as well as eliminated a one week delay every sprint due to final testing prior to scheduled deployments

• Developed a sprint calendar, publicized to everyone and helped ENG become more forward looking regarding quarterly planning and key date activities (ex: Accessibility and Security obligations)

• Worked collaboratively with Product to develop a six-sprint (approx. one quarter) refined backlog tied directly to Executive Team Goals/Wigs. This was done on a rolling basis. Provided a huge benefit to ENG as now the entire organization had visibility into what work was in progress and approx. when it could be expected. This also went a long way to mitigate the perpetual ENG challenge of the business asking “can we just slip this one little thing in?” With the quarter laid out discussions became much easier as ENG pointed to the backlog and asked what were they willing to give up to get their special thing done

• Constantly implemented waste-reduction improvements so team members could get more work done easily. This included Jira improvements as well as ceremony and process improvements

• Structured Jira and information gathering to eliminate need for custom creation of reports. This allowed Jira to be the single source of truth for ENG and meant that dashboards and reports were accurate in real-time Resume for Rob Hinton

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• Constant focus on Jira “hygiene” to ensure correct information is collected. This is critical to providing business with accurate real-time status of ENG work.

Smart Warehousing

Lead Scrum Master

Dec. 2021 – Dec. 2022

• Promoted to Lead Scrum Master after 4 months

• Responsible for practice development and elevation

• Collaborated with Product Managers to use sprint planning as a tool to build out backlog for next quarter. Utilized team capacity and realized velocity to give early estimates to PM of total work possible against stories so they can prioritize MVP releases. This allowed advance planning for meeting company goals and milestones

• Managed up to 6 teams simultaneously

• Implemented Lean Kaizen concepts to organically improve team velocity by 45% in one quarter (over 2 dozen specific friction-reducing improvements)

• Moved/encouraged teams to deliver software every sprint

• Created concept of Release Bundles for scheduled or asynchronous deployment every sprint

• Corrected numerous issues across all teams and helped them get to a point where of generally meeting or exceeding sprint commitments, delivering deployable software frequently, keeping technical debt backlog to a minimum

• Drastically improved all ceremonies, especially sprint planning, backlog refinement and retros

• Worked with senior management to improve practice of resolving blocked issues. Initial goal was to resolve in 24 hours, long-term goal was to resolve in 1 hour. Part of solution was to use Jira notifications sent to appropriate individuals at pre-defined intervals whenever an issue went into a “Blocked” status or the Impediment flag was set

• Helped teams “gel,” build trust, respect and commitment between themselves and other business units.

• Worked with various directors to streamline Jira, use of Confluence and integrate Aha! with Jira correctly

• Educated C-Suite level team members about practice of Agile and how it extends/fits in their world (Exec and 3PL space)

• Streamlined all ceremonies for all teams so that they were productive, efficient and ended on time with the desired results

• Introduced extension of Backlog Refinement sessions called “Slice and Dice” where team worked to develop vertical, deployable slices of working code every sprint. This was difficult.

• Implemented and used Dependency Mapper with Jira to track and manage intra- and inter-team dependencies. Goal was to break any external dependencies that threatened near-term sprints and minimize internal conflicts

• Encouraged experimentation with ideas for continuous improvement. Some worked, some did not.

• Helped institute “Book Club” and “Lunch and Learn” sessions for team and they were a huge success

Resume for Rob Hinton

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HBN

Launch CTO

Wellsville, KS

Sept. 2019 – Nov. 2021

• Assist founders with business and site development

• Helped build/hire development team

• Created forward-looking technology path to go-live

• Implemented Agile framework for team using Jira and Confluence

• Team presently working with 1 week sprints

• Evaluated and selected technology providers

• Currently building out platform and processes to support high-volume HA site

• Executed cost saving efforts and delivered critical infrastructure for 20% of vendor quotes with better performance and reliability

• Supported refactoring of code base to deliver 10x+ performance increase for critical site functions

Dell/EMC/RSA Archer

Consultant Engineer (highest level)

Overland Park, KS

October 2013 - September 2019

• Managed multiple ENG teams through Agile, SAFe transformations

• Managed/tracked Release Train deliverables

• Worked with geo-distributed teams to coordinate development and release efforts

• Developed and implemented processes to deliver enterprise scale releases on time, with promised functionality and acceptable quality levels

• Part of and reported as “Voice of Engineering” to company-wide Core Team containing representatives of all cross-functional groups

(upstream/downstream) impacted by product.

• Eliminated long-standing barriers with cross-functional teams, re-built damaged relationships via transparency, honesty and delivery of results

• Received multiple awards for improving processes, one of only 4 engineers to receive retention bonus during merger, promoted to highest level possible in organization as Consultant Engineer

• Developed Jira capabilities to provide single source of truth to business and provide accurate, real-time tracking of progress of all teams Asurion, LLC (KC, Nashville)

Senior Project Manager

Kansas City, MO

June 2011 - October 2012

Assumed IT management responsibility for first real-time IVR linked systems with external vendor

• Project was struggling to get off the ground due to growth pressures and technical novel technical hurdles

• Turned project around in 7 months to functioning proof of concept

• Coordinated 75+ people on international team

• Involved in all aspects of project from re-scoping, development all the way through QA, UAT and deployment

• System integrated internal/external IVRs, voice reco, real-time Human Intent Analysts to provide complex, real-time responses within the IVR Resume for Rob Hinton

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• Managed project through impacting company-wide infrastructure upgrades including SIP, migration to CVP 8.5+, CUBE configurations, etc. Front office work was being done on an ad-hoc basis with no formal structure. Keep The Business Running (KTBR) work was done outside scope of all normal development/delivery channels. Lowest priority given to these projects meant no predictable effort/delivery dates could be provided

• Created and implemented Agile Framework to track all activities, tasks and individuals

• Worked on a two-week cycle

• Integrated strategic vendors into all aspects of the Agile process/Sprints

• Focused team and allowed significant progress on critical break/fix work which was destabilizing multiple platforms and impacting customer experience

• Brought predictability and more reliable deployment cycles which rapidly reduced instabilities in Production (PROD) environment Tornado Alley, LLC

President

Baldwin City, KS

April 2008 - August 2011

• Specializing in high performance system prototyping, product delivery and business transformation for Fortune 500 companies

• Significant work in Financial Industry segment of Fortune 500

• Confidential nature of projects only permits general discussion Recent Timeline of Key Projects

• 04/2008-04/2009 – Large mutual fund company in USA; Built team from scratch and in 6 months out-delivered in-house team that worked on project for 5+ years. Developed/Architected/Prototyped Print on Demand Solution including automated design language. Used Agile Framework for entire project. Company embraced Agile after seeing results and within a year trained over 500 staff (subject to non-disclosure)

• 04/2009-1/2010 – Midwest Company, Kansas City, KS. Managed technical projects to align with business goals (subject to non-disclosure)

• 1/2010-1/2011 – Consulted with numerous medical firms on IT, HealthCare related projects (subject to non-disclosure, HIPPA)

• 5/2011-8/2011 – Short term consulting/assistance with small start-up companies (subject to non-disclosure, HIPPA)

Rapid Solutions Group (NY, KC, CHI)

Senior Project Manager

Kansas City, MO

March 2005 - April 2008

• Assumed IT management responsibility for flagship product

(RapidPublisher)

• Accomplished complete turnaround of development team, rebuilt them into a high-performance, high-productivity group, team exceeded ALL company expectations using Agile framework

• Team accomplishments during 1st tenure (9 months) exceeded those of previous 4 years

• Created and implemented plan that provided annual cost savings/avoidance in excess of $800K/year

• Eliminated risks associated with year-end processing peaks within 3 Resume for Rob Hinton

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months of assuming team responsibility

• Increased throughput of processing platforms in excess of 900% over 6 months

• Developed and deployed processes to stabilize code base (SCM, QA)

• Eliminated failed releases and roll-backs

• Developed and implemented new code promotion procedures to eliminate promotion risk and potential down time associated with processing client data

• Developed streamlined life cycle development processes to align with business unit strategic goals

• Developed and deployed interim solutions to bridge market gaps with integrated suppliers

• Re-established strong working relationships with all company departments and business units

• First non-employee to be nominated multiple times and receive Extreme Value Award for accomplishments

• Developed innovative solution for key client within budget and within aggressive timeframe (archive solution)

• Trained developers and business unit staff on development practices to ensure success

• Developed and implemented streamlined QA processes to minimize code promotion delays

• Assessed and developed optimization strategies to reduce bandwidth between facilities

• Assessed and deployed new functionality to improve efficiency on production floor (Operations Group)

• Team was responsible for 12 out of 26 major corporate-wide accomplishments listed in annual employee newsletter

• Developed forward-looking strategy to improve performance by 5x-10x and eliminate numerous, fixed costs associated with product line Additional

Experience &

References

Available upon request

Relevant Education SAFe, CSM Training, Implementation Workshop 2022, CSM Refresher, Accelebrate

2016-2017, Construx

Distributed Agile

Jeff Sutherland, 2013

Managing Large Agile Projects

Jeff Sutherland, 2006

Scrum Master Training/Certification

Jeff Sutherland, 2005

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

University of Kansas, 1981

Resume for Rob Hinton

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Recent Readings for Self-Improvement

• Domain-Driven Design, Eric Evans

• Event Storming, Alberto Brandolini

• Accelerate, Nicole Forsgren and Gene Kim

• The Synergist, Les McKeown

• Predictable Success, Les McKeown

• 2-Second Lean, Paul Akers

• The Unicorn Project, Gene Kim

• The Phoenix Project, Gene Kim

• The Lean Startup, Eric Ries

• Nerves of Steel, Tammie Jo Shults

• And Suddenly the Inventor Appeared (TRIZ), G. Altshuller Hobbies • Amateur (Ham) Radio, General Class License

• Model Railroading

• Outdoor Sports, Recreation

• 3D printing, CNC machining

• Embedded Systems/RC Aircraft/Drones

Contact this candidate