Scrum Master

Basirat Odenike

Celina, TX m: 214-***-**** **********@*****.*** LinkedIn

Vision-driven change agent with 9 years career-long record of Scrum master as well as project and program management expertise cultivated within leading organizations

An accomplished, results-oriented Senior Scrum Master and Agile Project Manager with extensive experience managing high-performing teams in the aviation, financial services, telecommunications, and technology sectors. Tactical thinker who champions innovative solutions that integrate best practices, drive continuous improvement, and mitigate risks. Proven ability to drive Agile transformations, facilitate Scrum ceremonies, and remove impediments to ensure smooth project execution. Recognized for superb communication skills, with the capacity to lead, coach, and mentor diverse individuals while fostering a collaborative environment that drives business value and enhances productivity.

Core Competencies

Agile, Scrum, SAFe, Kanban, and Lean Methodologies

Team Leadership and Development

Software Project Management

Sprint Planning and Execution

Stakeholder Engagement

Requirements Gathering

Backlog Management

Change Management

Process Optimization

CI/CD and DevOps

Risk Management

Professional Experience

Southwest Airlines, Remote, October 2023 to Present

SENIOR SCRUM MASTER

Organize and facilitate Scrum ceremonies with a focus on maintaining structured, time-boxed discussions that drive collaboration and meaningful progress.

Partner with the Product Owner to refine requirements, align development priorities with stakeholder expectations, and improve backlog management, leading to a 15% reduction in requirement ambiguity and a 20% increase in sprint predictability.

Manage team workflows using Jira and Jira Align to strengthen accountability, transparency, and visibility to task completion rates by 19% and reduce carryover work by 20%.

Collaborate on feature breakdown and refinement through all phases of Program Increment (PI) planning, to improve requirement clarity, facilitate incremental delivery, and ensure alignment with business objectives. This process reduces ambiguity in user stories and leads to a 15-20% improvement in sprint efficiency.

Administer change requests and associated documentation to support fault-tolerant Production (Prod) and QA deployments.

Utilize GitLab and Jenkins to manage deployment pipelines, merge branches, and build version tags, ensuring seamless software releases.

Identify and remove blockers that hinder workflow efficiency, ensuring smooth sprint execution and continuous team productivity.

Leverage the Traffic Flow Management System (TFMS) to share key aviation data and facilitate seamless communication between Agile Teams and the FAA, ensuring 100% compliance with applicable regulations.

Monitor key team metrics to assess performance trends, identify areas for improvement, and enhance incremental delivery of value to stakeholders.

U.S. Bank, Remote, November 2021 to October 2023

SCRUM MASTER/ PROJECT MANAGER

Piloted the development of cloud migration roadmaps and collaborated with teams, management, and cloud providers to ensure seamless transitions from on-premises infrastructure.

Facilitated all Scrum ceremonies, including sprint planning, backlog refinement, daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives, ensuring structured discussions and productive outcomes.

Acted as a liaison between the Product Owner and development team tasked with refining user stories, prioritizing the backlog, and improving overall workflow efficiency by 30% reduction in backlog refinement time and a 25% increase in feature readiness before sprint planning.

Assisted in defining project scope adjustments, tracking action items, and ensuring alignment with business objectives.

Monitored all epics, features, user stories, and defects, proactively following up to ensure timely resolution and continuous progress.

Tracked sprint progress, ensuring deliverables aligned with scope, budget, and stakeholder expectations while promoting transparency and efficiency.

Evaluated sprint performance metrics such as velocity and burndown charts to enhance team efficiency, identify bottlenecks, and optimize delivery cycles.

Shielded the Scrum team from external disruptions, balanced workloads, and ensured equitable task distribution to maximize team productivity.

Guided a Waterfall team through a transition to Agile by fostering a mindset shift, overcoming resistance, and managing the successful release of deliverables, achieving a 40% improvement in delivery speed and a 35% increase in stakeholder alignment.

Promoted Agile best practices across internal, remote, offshore, and vendor teams to drive the development and release of high-quality products in a fast-paced environment.

Spectrum (Charter Communication), Columbia, SC, February 2019 to November 2021

SCRUM MASTER/ PROJECT MANAGER

Led two Agile teams in delivering telecommunication technology solutions; implemented Kanban principles for one team, which reduced cycle time by 20% and significantly improved throughput in under eight weeks.

Partnered with product owners, Scrum Masters, developers, and architects to coordinate project planning and execution, ensuring the delivery of high-value solutions aligned with company objectives.

Helped teams define Acceptance Criteria, conduct effort estimations using relative sizing techniques, as well as navigate team discussions, complex decision-making, and conflict resolution efforts.

Championed Agile, Scrum, and SAFe methodologies, fostering seamless communication and collaboration between development teams, engineers, product managers, and key stakeholders.

Strengthened Agile adoption by refining Scrum ceremonies, including daily stand-ups, sprint planning, and sprint retrospectives, to optimize team performance.

Demonstrated expertise in identifying, prioritizing, and mitigating risk by developing action plans to address issues while improving software quality and minimizing technical debt through best practices like Code Review, ATDD, BDD, CI/CD, and TDD.

Mediated conflicts and cultivated a structured, high-performing team environment that enhanced organization, efficiency, and productivity.

Served as a servant leader, fostering a culture of continuous improvement by maintaining team agreements, refining best practices, and supporting the adoption of Agile tools and methodologies.

Fifty Third Bank, Indianapolis, IN, June 2017 to January 2019

SCRUM MASTER

Oversaw all aspects of Scrum ceremonies, including sprint planning, backlog refinement, daily stand-ups, sprint reviews, and retrospectives, ensuring structured discussions that enhanced productivity and team cohesion.

Engaged with the Product Owner (PO) to refine user stories, ensuring they adhered to the INVEST criteria, prioritized effectively, and aligned with business, risk, and technology considerations.

Enhanced sprint planning and capacity management by identifying hidden tasks and eliminating blockers, leading to improved team commitment and higher customer satisfaction.

Managed project timelines and team engagement, ensuring active participation from all members while maintaining adherence to schedules, requirements, and quality standards.

Championed Agile principles, reinforcing collaboration, accountability, and transparency across teams to create a culture of continuous improvement and efficiency, contributing to a 30% increase in Agile adoption and a 20% improvement in cross-functional team collaboration.

Provided regular progress updates to management, negotiated resource allocation, and secured necessary support to keep projects on track within deadlines and budget constraints.

Acted as the team’s representative in Scrum of Scrums (SoS) meetings, providing key updates and ensuring seamless cross-team coordination for better project execution.

Valmont Industries, Omaha, NE, April 2016 to January 2017

SCRUM MASTER

Managed and coached two software development teams, guiding Waterfall teams through an Agile transformation using Scrum and Kanban to enhance efficiency and adaptability.

Trained cross-functional teams on the effective application of Scrum ceremonies while proactively identifying and resolving team impediments.

Delivered hands-on support to Product Owners in the creation, prioritization, and refinement of user stories, maintaining the product backlog, and ensuring alignment with project objectives.

Tracked team velocity and sprint progress, offering coaching and individual support to team members to optimize performance and accelerate delivery timelines.

Advocated for Agile best practices, reinforcing principles of collaboration, prioritization, accountability, and transparency to create a high-performing team environment.

Ascendix, Austin, TX, February 2014 to March 2016

AWS SOLUTION ARCHITECT

Designed and implemented Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) to establish secure, scalable environments for web, application, and database servers, supporting development and testing teams with both public and private subnet configurations.

Developed Auto Scaling Groups from launch configurations to dynamically adjust instance capacity based on real-time traffic and demand, integrating SNS notifications to respond to CPU utilization and other performance metrics.

Configured AWS CloudWatch for proactive system monitoring, setting up alerts for EBS, EC2, ELB, RDS, S3, and SNS, ensuring timely responses to predefined event triggers and optimizing application performance.

Facilitated seamless communication across customer, service engineering, and support teams, driving operational excellence and enhancing the overall customer support experience.

Leveraged AWS App Mesh to streamline service-to-service communication, providing greater visibility, traffic control, and reliability for microservices within the application architecture.

Education and Credentials

Master of Science in Financial Management

Middlesex University, London, UK

Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) in Economics

University of Abuja, Abuja, Nigeria

Certifications and Training

Certified Scrum Master (CSM)

Professional Scrum Master (PSM1)

Certified SAFe 5 Scrum Master

AWS Cloud Practitioner

AWS Certified Solutions Architect

Associate Certified Architect Associate (Oracle)

Tableau Consumer Certified

Technical Proficiencies: MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, Jira, Jira Align, Azure Dev Ops, Rally, Version One, Confluence, AWS, Azure, GitHub, Python, SaaS, CI/CD, Tableau, SDLC, TDD, ATDD

Contact this candidate