Scrum Master User Experience

Waqar Ansari

Summary

CANDIDATE PROFILE

An accomplished and integrity-driven Scrum Master with a strong concentration and enormous success utilizing Agile methodology, with an impressive record of delivering and implementing the project as per scheduled deadlines; extending post-implementation and maintenance support to the technical support team and client. Highly skilled and successful in coaching, mentoring, and leading technical, and leadership teams in adopting Agile/Scrum and Agile best practices with strong business results (E-commerce/Retail, Healthcare, Finance, Fleet management).

EXPERTISE AND CAPABILITIES

●Strong problem solving and technical skills coupled with confident decision making for enabling effective solutions leading to high customer satisfaction and low operational costs.

●Providing leadership, direction, strategy, and vision in the areas of technology and product development to facilitate and enable growth and business agility.

●Managing and leading team members; allocating resources among team members and guiding team members during the project, till final delivery.

●Educated and reinforced scrum methodology and agile framework to team members and key stakeholders.

●Tracking and managing product backlog, burn-down metrics, velocity, and task break-down.

●Expert at driving the adoption and enforcement of Scrum rules, removing impediments and fostering self-management.

●Proactive in sensing a risk, and work on a mitigation plan, Track and communicate updates on sprint/release progress to the project stakeholders and raise a flag in SoS (Scrum-of-Scrums) as warranted.

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS

●Brought in agile best practices such as continuous integration, code/design reviews, transparency, accountability, Jira tracking, product visioning, technical debt reduction, self-management, empowerment and role training resulting in realized velocity improvement of more than 100%.

●Identified problems on teams unable to achieve iteration goals and low predictability by observing and coaching to achieve on average above 85% of planned velocity in future iterations.

●Partner with the Product Owner to maintain, refine and prioritize product backlog.

●Mentored teams leading them to be self-directed with strong accountability, decision making, conflict resolution, and transparency.

●Contributed to resource management, status reporting, onsite-offshore liaison and customer expectation management.

●Performed an active coaching role for a program wide Agile implementation.

Experience

Scrum Master/Project Manager, 08/2022-04/2025

Aon

Project Description

The GRiDS Treaty Broking project will replace the existing placing process and combine Global Sales Management, Placements for brokers and CDMaint functionality into a single modern application with an informative Broker Dashboard useful for both senior and junior brokers .

●Coached a team of 27+ members to higher levels of maturity by improving their process and ensuring they adhered the scrum framework.

●Spearheaded agile ceremonies such as Sprint planning, Daily standups, Story refinement, Retrospectives and Release Planning.

●Interacted with the Product Owner on an active basis to manage product backlog and sprint activities.

●Ensured user stories were 100% ordered, defined and ready to be worked on by the team.

●Facilitated discussion, decision making, and conflict resolution across 4 cross-functional teams.

●Identified complex impediments and assisted teams in identifying a path to deliver on their sprint commitments.

●Ensured 100% of scrum activities were tracked, kept up-to date and reported.

Scrum Master, 06/2019 - 07/2022

Medtronic

The RSM team’s IoT platform is part of an enterprise-wide solution for connecting and managing Medtronic devices within hospital infrastructure. The enterprise platform is applying Hospital IT feedback to provide remote servicing, remote software updates and remote device management. The platform will help increase sales of service support agreements, reduce service burden and improve call center resolution.

●Facilitated scrum ceremonies such as daily scrum meetings, sprint planning, sprint review, retrospective and backlog grooming sessions with development teams managing and implementing projects

●Coached teams on Agile, conflict management, mediation, as well as the values of Scrum in order to create high performance and self-organizing teams

●Guided the team and organization on utilizing and adopting Agile best practices and values

●Communicated with all stakeholders throughout project lifecycles, keeping them informed about project progress, reports, issues and milestones

●Worked with Product Owners to support and maintain Product backlogs

●Helped with writing INVEST ready user stories and ensuring PBI's reflected business needs and values

●Tracked, escalated and removed impediments on a daily basis to allow the team to deliver the sprint goals and deliverables

●Collaborated with the members of Product, Business and Development teams to develop and maintain Product Backlogs

●Established a more trusted and collaborative team environment where my team can bring up the problems without the fear of being blamed or judged

●Maintained transparency throughout the project delivery through string communication, status reporting, stage gates, action items and meeting minutes via internal and external SharePoint workspaces

●Facilitated a Scrum of Scrums with other Scrum masters to identify process changes and mitigate cross-team dependencies

●Used Jira tool for Agile Scrum to track the team activities

●Frequent follow up and friendly reminders to the team on updating JIRA tasks on daily basis for more accurate reporting

●Coordinated and assisted in End to End/UAT testing with the business team.

Scrum Master, 06/2015 - 05/2019

Department of Human Services – MN

Modernizing and implementing Curam Integration Platform ecosystem with Multi-Vendor Services Integration Management which will Minimize risks and optimizes investments made by DHS and its Federal, County and Tribal partners

●Facilitated Scrum framework-, planning, backlog refinement, daily scrums, sprint reviews and sprint retrospectives

●Proactively eliminated impediments and reduced wait times by 70%

●Empower team to make system and process improvements captured in sprint retrospective meetings

●Led and facilitate in PI planning, integrated system demo, inspect and adapt workshops

●Partner with Product Owner to maintain, refine and prioritize product backlog

●Work closely with impediments and coordinate dependencies between multiple Scrum teams during Scrum of Scrums

●Coach team to write and split user stories, estimation, calculating capacity and plan velocity

●Encouraged regular working software demos to product management, stakeholders and users to elicit early feedback

●Motivated and empowered team members to comply to team norms like: (DoD) Definition of Done, (DoR) Definition of Ready, Acceptance Criteria, well-defined smallest level of user stories

●Identify skills and competencies of Scrum team members and encourage pair work to develop T-shaped skills

●Shielded scrum team from external impediments and distractions for optimal productivity and success of Agile process

●Scheduled, conducted and facilitated internal team health benefits audits ensuring conformity with company's policies and procedures

●Used key Scrum metrics such as backlog health, Velocity and burndown charts to show work progress, measure team's productivity and commitment reliability

●Participated in system testing and UAT testing along with the business team.

Scrum Master, 12/2014 - 05/2015

BEST BUY

●Organized and facilitated overall release and sprint planning – including daily scrums, reviews/demos, and retrospectives

●Focused primarily on training the teams to write good user stories, prioritize the work based on business value and handling the tasks by the team

●Placed substantial efforts on team members role training, time boxing and providing strong metrics for all players

●As a Scrum Master for 3 separate teams (20+ people), identified process changes required to accelerate development and remove major impediments

●Facilitated Scrum of Scrum calls following Agile process

●Protected team from over-commitment, managed backlog, prioritized resolution of defects/bugs

●Responsible to remove impediments, as these projects relies on the data from multiple departments, hence requiring constant, effective communication to unblock the team and make sure the team remains on task at hand

●Facilitated meetings to iron out blockers, conducted JAD sessions with the Product Owner and other stakeholders on regular basis and help the team to make better use of time and estimate more effectively, thus ensuring a healthy sprint progress

●Communicated team status/progress via Release/Sprint Burndown chars, Story Acceptance rate and defects and made sure the stakeholders are aware of the progress

●Built the team's Agile knowledge and empower the team to make process improvements captured in sprint retrospective meetings

●Trained and coached development, test and management team to use Agile methodology with Scrum

●Worked with Product Owner during sprint review sessions to make sure all the stories met the Definition of Done and get the stories accepted within the sprint

●Performed an active coaching role for organization wide Agile Implementation and embracement

●Coordinated UAT/End to End testing along with the business and testing team

SR.QA/ (UAT) LEAD, 03/2014 - 12/2014

ECOLAB - Saint Paul, MN

●The Global 360 Program will deliver an intuitive and adaptive global sales and service platform that will be used by the Institutional Field Associates at all levels globally

●The Global 360 platform will enable a global customer protocol, customer service reports, consistency in global customer reporting, territory, and manager dashboard views into their business, planning, routing, and collaboration with each other and corporate accounts in one single platform instance

●The Global 360 platform will provide a complete view of the customer, including service information at a field and corporate account level

●It will also provide Ecolab with ongoing innovation, agility, simplification, flexibility to meet changing customer needs globally

●Worked under the agile methodology, for documenting requirements, use cases, compatibility testing, mitigating issues and documenting solutions

●Participated in JAD sessions to gather requirements from application owners to find how they would

●Like the application to work

●Performed Gap Analysis to identify the deficiencies of the current system and to identify the

●Requirements for the change in the proposed system

●Closely collaborated with UX design team to design the wireframe for Android and IOS platforms

●Worked with the business in identifying and accepting the best practice standards for both mobile Platforms

●Participated in the weekly sprint planning sessions to identify the user stories for the future sprints

●Worked with other project managers on my team to ensure any dependencies between applications

●Were found, documented, and communicated between business areas

●Created and added groups, uploaded latest builds in the test flight application for the G360 mobile

●Application

●Tested Salesforce1 Mobile App, Salesforce custom objects, custom fields, page layouts, custom Tabs, Reports and various other components as per application requirements

●Executed Functional and Regression testing with every subsequent Salesforce app release to make sure the existing features and new enhancements are working

●Created Test plans, wrote test strategies and test closure documents

●Created matrices to show the accurate traction of the project

Education and Training

Master, Mass Communications

Arkansas State University - Jonesboro, AR

Bachelor of Science, Computer Information Technology, Marketing

Arkansas State University - Jonesboro, AR

Certifications

●Certified Scrum Master

Contact

Address : Lake Elmo, MN 55042

Phone : 612-***-****

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

Skills

●Tools/Methodologies:

Agile (Scrum, XP, Lean) and Waterfall, JIRA, Agile Central (Rally), Target Process, Version One, ALM, Quality Center, Polarion, Devopps, Miro, Test Director, Visual Studio, Microsoft Test Manager, Team Foundation, Server, Share Point, SOAPUI, Rational Tools, Clear Quest, Bugzilla, Testopia, Share point, Postman, MS Access, and SQL Server (2000, 2005, 2008), SQL Developer, TOAD Oracle (9i, 10g), IBM, Tivoli, Informatica, SAS/STAT, SPSS 17.0, MS Office, Visio, Web-Ex,Vista Case Create, Vista Case Review, Adobe Photo Shop, Microsoft Publisher, Macromedia Flash MX, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Image Ready, Adobe PageMaker, Networking Telnet, FTP, TCP/IP, SSL,SSH, HTTP, VPN

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