Scrum Master Project Management

Paul D. Smith

Charlotte, NC • 603-***-****

****@*******.***

Executive Summary

Accomplished Scaled Agilest Scrum Master (SASM) with extensive experience in Agile framework and organizational change leadership practices. Displays strong experience in overcoming organizational challenges of transitioning to Agile methodology from traditional project management and development. Demonstrates strong team player and interpersonal skills with the ability to build relationships across organizational levels and effectively mentor and coach teams comprised of both local and offshore team members. Highly skilled in conducting analysis to recognize issues and develop effective resolutions, performing scoping to address business and technical needs. Exemplify strong ability to grasp new things quickly, as demonstrated by seamless transitions made between several technologies, tools, and libraries both in development and project management roles. Effective at coaching teams through the continuous improvement process to maximize deliverables.

Summary Qualifications

•Coach self-organization, cross functionality, and coordination of effective ART events.

•Strong passion for Kanban and SAFe frameworks guiding development teams to higher team maturity through relentless improvement practices and principles.

•Support the team with empathy by displaying an authentic understanding and concern for a team member’s beliefs or feelings. In turn, the team is more likely to build relationships with others, resulting in higher levels of collaboration and performance.

•Persuades rather than use authority as servant leader, focus on the needs of team members and those they serve, intending to achieve results aligned with the organization’s values, principles, and business objectives.

•Conflict navigator – Supports team members in resolving interpersonal conflicts, problem-solving, and decision-making.

•Mentor – Supports the personal development of team members, helping them gain a continuous learning mindset. They guide the team to find solutions to their problems independently instead of being given the answers.

•Help the team provide transparency by ensuring artifacts are inspected, identifying significant differences between expected and actual results, and detecting anti-patterns.

•Demonstrate ways to employ and model a variety of agile methodologies, practices and tools including techniques for improved communication between management and technical teams, methods for evaluating effectiveness by minimizing technical debt, and methods for assessing most effective forms of delivery to the business.

•Reduce technical debt and create transparency across 5 technical teams utilizing Java, Scala, Pyspark, Hadoop, Jira Hive, Spark, JIRA, Confluence, Service Now and Remedy.

•Coaching Scrum teams towards more effective user and technical story creation.

•Establishing a more Agile onboarding process for newly acquired developers normally taking 4 weeks to acquire all accesses to 1 week being fully functional and compliant.

•Collaborated with Product Owner to best reflect business priorities on roadmap for better clarity.

•Maximized PI Planning through personal interactions, games, and engaging processes rather than a computer screen.

•Created a platform for QA to best express concerns and expectations to dev teams, POs, and business clients.

•Trained Scrum team on splitting stories, Definition of ready and Definition of Done practices.

•Increased velocity by 38% through relative sizing, story writing and deploying increments into production more frequently to minimize depreciation and the cost of delay.

•Created transparency during retrospective meetings through games and building trust across platforms and teams.

•Expertise developing and implementing “Best Practice” policies and procedures that provide full operational accountability, ensure ongoing data integrity and continuously challenging development teams to understand all criteria of project goals and expectations.

•Ability to identify needs, explore options and communicate effectively with clients, management, end users, programmers, and technical staff; manage ongoing systems development and facilitate change over process; conduct training and prepare effective documentation.

•Experience with technical writing, editing, testing, and publishing military and civilian systems training manuals and user guides.

•Serve as consultant and technical expert on instructional systems design, adult learning theory, principles of education and training, and concepts of blended learning as a strategy for designing instructional and training delivery systems.

•Analyze clients’ training program for theoretical soundness of design and selection of appropriate instructional methods and learning models currently accepted in the field.

•Lead and participate in design or redesign curriculum development projects to ensure adherence to organizational theory and infusion of emerging technologies.

•Ability to perform detailed process flow analysis while identifying and correcting communication and processing bottlenecks from order entry through final shipment.

•Expert skill level with most business applications including Word, Access, Excel, and Power Point.

•Assisted the Rand Corporation as primary consultant for both congressional and senatorial projects regarding best practice and procedures within several government programs resulting in house floor acknowledgements.

•Defect captain for development teams dedicated to acknowledging and strategizing best practices to eliminate defects and prioritize build quality.

•Risk manager for agile/scrum development teams for all risks discovered up during PI planning, assessing both internal and external factors like budget, time, scope and stakeholder’s expectations.

•Coach teams to use vertical slicing to deliver working and demonstrable software.

Professional Experience

Wells Fargo/Program Governance & Oversight Technology April 2018 – Present

Lead Scrum Master

•Successfully introduce and coach Scrum methodology across extremely sensitive enterprise scaled organization previously utilizing waterfall methodology.

•Introduce, explain and coach scrum tools such as Jira, Confluence and others to maximize effective delivery, tier one quality and cross organizational communication.

•Eliminate up to 17% waste of funding by creating an agile registry of team members allowing for proper charging to specific projects across the ART.

•Build relationships with senior leaders within organizations to allow for a more personalized reporting structure by creating specific dashboards allowing for immediate snapshots of team progress, resolved/unresolved risks & dependencies, and portfolio level release status.

•Assisted three teams through their first successful PI Planning consisting of over 12 teams to include capacity planning, inter team dependencies and updating management consistently.

•Coached teams to have a consistent team agreement which was shared across the ART, leveling expectations and elevating the overall quality of product to the client.

•Enabled pair programming for all my teams to ensure team members were able to build skills, ability to coach and mentor peers, and enhance group participation.

•Coach and mentor two new product owners through the stages of all agile ceremonies, including PI Planning.

•Effectively coach and promote Scrum methodology across enterprise scale risk & regulatory reporting groups while increasing team’s velocity by 23% through promoting cross team communication, enhancing detailed & specific acceptance criteria and minimizing iteration churn through proper story sizing.

•Reduce technical debt for Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition team (OBIEE) by implementing stricter testing guidelines, better resource availability, and including QA through entire process.

•Create & foster a team environment of trust, understanding and respect resulting in effective communication, increased productivity and delivery of the best possible product.

•Facilitate daily stand ups, sprint planning, sprint review, and sprint retrospective meetings for both onshore and offshore development teams utilizing best practice methodologies.

•Coach new product owner on role structure, expectations, and protocol resulting in seamless transition for both team and business.

•Effectively influenced team’s backlog status by reducing stories and epics no longer needed or warranted by business through weekly discussions/backlog refinement meetings and effective communication with end user.

•Track progress of several teams simultaneously through Jira while consistently reviewing defect list, blocked user stories & release status with team, management, and other Scrum Masters within our release train.

•Meet weekly or as needed with management/other Scrum Masters to review defect lists, blocked user stories, scope changes or possible release delivery schedule.

•Tasked to onboard new Scrum Masters to the release train, coach best practice and program initiative to bring them up to speed quickly and effectively.

•Risk manager for agile/scrum development teams for all risks bubbled up during PI planning, assessing both internal and external factors like budget, time, scope and stakeholder’s expectations.

•Defect captain for development teams dedicated to acknowledging and strategizing best practices to eliminate defects and prioritize build quality

TIAA-CREF/Data Cloud & Recovery Platform Technology January 2018 - April 2018

Agile Coach/Scrum Master

•Effectively coach and promote Agile methodology across enterprise scale platform data cloud engineering groups while introducing JIRA, Scrum, Kanban as replacements for waterfall style workstreams.

•Conduct daily stand ups, sprint planning, sprint review, and sprint retrospective meetings for scrum teams utilizing best practice methodologies.

•Facilitate scrum methodologies across multiple petabyte scale teams specializing in backup and recovery for digital repositories/data lakes.

•Configure JIRA/Confluence/SharePoint team sites to enhance visibility across multiple silos within the platform.

•Coach executive level stakeholders on executing tracking processes from Clarity to JIRA and simplifying data.

•Organizing and appropriate new teams’ structure to define and execute organizations’ needs and goals most efficiently.

•Protect scrum/technical teams from distractions by removing impediments at all levels.

•Align with business partners with heavy focus on reviewing, maintaining and maximizing capital markets, teacher union benefits, health care expenditures, and investment strategies.

Bank of America/Risk & Corporate Treasury Technology October 2017- January 2018 Scrum Master (SASM)/SAFe Agilist

•Facilitate Agile adoption for enterprise level financial organization while implementing executive level leadership involvement.

•Conduct daily stand ups, sprint planning, sprint review, and sprint retrospective meetings for scrum teams utilizing best practice methodologies.

•Manage several technical scrum teams consisting of both on shore and offshore developers creating assets, credit risk, expose and loss forecast data for large scale reporting sourcing.

•Coach teams by tracking progress in JIRA daily, burndown charts, recording team’s retrospectives in Confluence and creating a forum to openly address dependencies and impediments.

•Increase end user report data by re-evaluating QA testers productivity and implementing Test-Driven Development (TDD) while also making end of sprint demos mandatory to include both business users and team.

•Coach new product owners on best practice procedures and create transparency across the Agile Release Train (ART) using weekly scrum of scrum meetings.

•Encourage involvement/communication between technical leads, product owners and release train engineers on as needed basis to mitigate unnecessary regular meetings.

Walmart Global Technology January 2015 - October 2017

Lead Scrum Master/SAFe Agilist

•Conduct daily scrum meetings, sprint planning, sprint review, and sprint retrospective for scrum teams utilizing several methodologies.

•Introduce and recommend strategies like Continuous Integration (CI) Pair Programming, Test-Driven Development (TDD), Kanban, and Extreme Programming (XP) to drive and maximize project performance and minimize delivery timeframe.

•Facilitate Product Owner responsibilities when needed while maintaining business alliances and updating management on product roadmap progress and scope.

•Manage 2 technical teams to include 20+ personnel from 3 of the largest technical companies globally to provide on time projected goals for the largest company/retailer globally.

•Reduce technical debt and create transparency across 5 technical teams utilizing Java, Scala, Pyspark, Hadoop, Hive, Spark, JIRA and Confluence.

•Manage 20+ technical experts from three Fortune 100 companies to successfully integrate security nodes and protocols from a 3-billion-dollar acquisition while minimizing technical debt and finishing months ahead of projected goal.

• Support process improvements to better align organizations with fundamental best practices and procedures.

• Facilitate Scrum of Scrum meetings for on and offshore technical and management teams.

• Protect scrum/technical teams from distractions by removing impediments at all levels.

• Collaborate with cross functional teams to manage scrum/technical team dependencies and ensure project goals

are met.

•Partner with Product Owner and Business Analyst to ensure corporate wide understanding of project goals, scope and timetables.

•Delegate workflow evenly among teams for best possible outcome to stakeholders.

Pulau Corporation February 2014- January 2015

Scrum Master/Program Manager

•Initiate protocol for Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) and safety training curriculum for law enforcement agencies across the United States and contributed to Executive Order 13688 of the Law Enforcement Equipment Acquisition Act.

•Format daily stand ups to provide updates to team members regarding workflow.

•Coach team members through sprint retrospectives on how we could improve future tasks.

•Reduced time and money to over 350 agencies through agile coaching, scrum practices and creating transparency.

•Design, implement and instruct Vehicle Safety and Operational Training Protocol to 600+ federal, state, county and local law enforcement entities throughout the United States resulting in POST credit for students.

•Meet weekly to update and collaborate with executive/senior level management to determine course material/curriculum around each agency specific objectives/requirements to include PowerPoints, hands on discussion/explanation, and end of course evaluations.

•Collaborate with state agencies to include 1033 Program Managers and staff, Federal Law Enforcement Standards in Training Managers to assist in across-the-board best practice policies and procedures and safety regulations.

•Aid state government officials in the acquisition of equipment through the 1033 Federal Program by means of statistics, cost value initiatives, and documentation/verification of training.

•Handle equipment transfers logistically from issuing depot to acquiring agency to include routing, roadway maintenance, trouble shooting, and department initiatives.

•Supervise and manage training team with travel, course material, evaluations, policy, and procedures.

•Assist in media relations of several police agencies including two state universities and one large metropolitan school district regarding value/needs assessment of equipment acquisition.

•Direct team movement from home station to client’s location including travel, training, filing required paperwork and meeting quality assurance mandates.

Education

Commission on Law Enforcement Training and Standards Certified Instructor (CLETS)

Field Level Maintenance New Equipment Instructor Training (FLMNET)

Operator New Equipment Instructor Training (OPNET)

MRAP Egress Train the Trainer (MET)

Army Basic Instructor Course (ABIC)

Scaled Agile Framework 4.5 (SAFe Agilist)

Certified Scrum Master (CSM)

Monroe College

New York, New York

Sept 2001 – May 2005

Business Administration

Airman Leadership School

Grand Forks, North Dakota

May 1997 – May 2001

Military Leadership

Supply Systems Analyst School

San Antonio, Texas

May 1997 – May 2001

Supply Systems Analyst Certification

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