Scrum Master Continuous Improvement

Femi Amokomowo

Email: ****.*.******@*****.*** Phone: 817-***-****

Dynamic and results-oriented Scrum Master/RTE with a decade of experience driving Agile transformations and leading high-performing teams to successfully deliver innovative, complex projects. Known for my ability to inspire collaboration, streamline processes, and eliminate roadblocks to ensure teams stay focused on delivering high-value outcomes. With a deep understanding of Scrum principles, I excel at facilitating seamless communication between cross-functional teams and stakeholders to align on business objectives while fostering a culture of continuous improvement. Passionate about empowering teams to reach their full potential, I thrive in fast-paced environments where adaptability, strategic thinking, and relentless pursuit of excellence are key to success. My experience also extends to working as a Release Train Engineer. Experienced in providing support for Product Owners, System Architects and key stakeholders. Proficient in working with IT Infrastructure, Platform, Workforce Management (WFM), Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Data Migration, FinTech, Healthcare, Insurance, Salesforce and ServiceNow implementation Teams.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Transamerica September 2024 - Present

Release Train Engineer/Scrum Master

This project focused on the implementation of Salesforce Sales Cloud and integration to Guidewire as part of a comprehensive transformation initiative, modernizing the company’s policy administration, claims management, and sales operations to enhance efficiency and customer experience.

Lead and manage the Agile Release Train (ART), consisting of multiple Agile teams, ensuring alignment with organizational goals and successful delivery of high-quality products.

Facilitate Program Increment (PI) Planning events, ensuring preparation, alignment on objectives, and effective collaboration between Product Owners, Scrum Masters, and stakeholders.

Support the execution of the PI by removing impediments, facilitating communication across teams, and ensuring that dependencies are addressed promptly.

Organize and facilitate regular synchronization meetings, including Scrum of Scrums (SoS), PO Syncs, and ART Syncs, ensuring alignment and transparency across teams and stakeholders.

Coach teams on Lean-Agile principles, fostering a culture of self-organization, accountability, and continuous improvement within the ART.

Monitor ART progress through metrics and tools like ART Kanban, using data to make decisions that optimize value delivery and eliminate bottlenecks.

Facilitate Inspect and Adapt (I&A) workshops, driving relentless improvement by identifying areas for growth and implementing actionable changes.

Foster collaboration and alignment across cross-functional teams, ensuring that teams meet key milestones and deliver business value consistently.

Engage with stakeholders and business owners to ensure clear communication, resolve issues, and maintain alignment between business goals and technical delivery.

Cigna Health March 2022 - September 2024

Scrum Master/Release Train Engineer

The project focused on improving the customer onboarding and claims management process by integrating an advanced Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and upgrading the claims management platform. The project aimed to enhance customer experience, streamline operations, and reduce the time taken to process claims.

Facilitated Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum/Daily Staup -Up, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective.

Facilitated teams’ preparation and readiness of events including refinement session, System Demo and PI planning.

Help with capacity planning sheet to help team estimate the amount of work they can commit to for the PI.

Created Planning Read Out Dashboard in Jira to reflect teams’ PI objective and Features assigned to the teams.

Support teams’ efforts to continuously improve communications and relationships with other teams.

Supported Product Owners establishing a relationship with them in efforts to manage the backlog.

Active Participant at Community of Practice

Manage expectations with multiple Product Owners (PO).

Interact in client negotiations and interfacing with senior management.

Facilitate horizontal and vertical communication across team members to identify dependencies and risks that may prevent team progress, and provide mitigation plans as needed.

Organized and facilitate SCRUM ceremonies: daily standups, Sprint Planning/Grooming, Sprint Reviews/Demos, and Retrospectives.

Utilize Jira for tracking user stories, burndown, burn-up and velocity charts.

Utilized Confluence as a collaborative documentation tool integrated with Jira per Definition of Done at the story and feature level.

Mentored and coach team members on core Agile values, principles, practices, and processes

Coached and encouraged teams to become self-organizing to achieve their iteration goals.

Work with the Product Management team to develop release plans and ensure product backlogs are well refined, prioritized, and visible to all stakeholders.

Motivate teams to perform and ensure team members are collectively responsible for all aspects of the committed work (analysis, development, testing, documentation, etc.).

Identify, address, and communicate project risks, dependencies, and team impediments.

Ensure the team’s “Definition of Done” is well defined and revised as needed.

Facilitate productivity through discussion, decision making, and conflict resolution.

Shield the team from external interferences.

Assist with internal and external communication and improving transparency.

Build a trusting and safe environment where problems can be raised with an emphasis on problem solving.

Assess the Scrum maturity of the team and coach the team to higher levels of maturity at a pace that is sustainable and comfortable for the team.

Coach a continuous improvement mindset and recommend adjustments to established delivery practices.

Participate in Scrum of Scrum meetings to ensure cross-team collaboration and coordination of release plans and integration of testing activities.

Establish and maintain strong working relationships with all stakeholders, including customers.

JP Morgan Chase April 2018 – April 2022

Agile coach/Scrum Master

The project at J.P. Morgan involved modernizing aging data center infrastructure by migrating to a hybrid cloud environment while standardizing IT operations and service management through ServiceNow to enhance agility, compliance, and operational visibility.

Facilitated all scrum events for co-located/distributed teams in the IT infrastructure space in achieving their sprint/iteration goals.

Foster an agile Mindset and mentor others on various agile practices

Coached Development Team on self-organization and cross-functionality

Ensure all identified impediments/blocks are documented and removed to achieve sprint goals.

Protect teams from distractors by directing them to Product Owner.

Coached Development team and Product Owner on how to write good user stories using the INVEST model and provided format in writing them.

Continue to work with Product Owner to ensure Product Backlog is prioritize and have at least 2 sprints of work available for the teams.

Monitor teams’ maturity from sprint to sprint to identify areas of improvement.

Facilitated User story writing, User story mapping, Definition of Ready, Definition of Done, and Team Agreement sessions across all 4 teams.

Negotiated with Product Owners to commit in attending Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum and also Refinement Sessions to facilitate getting stories ready for future sprints.

Explained and showed the Development Team what a healthy the burn-down chart looks like (and to also show the progress of the sprint).

Continue to mentor all of the scrum masters assigned to me by Community of Excellence

Ensure team rehearse before every Sprint Review (to showcase sprint goals and be ready for any questions our stakeholder may have).

Co-Built a CoP and executed large-scale ceremonies to synchronize dependencies across enterprise ARTs.

Ensured identified issues during Sprint Retrospectives are addressed in the following sprint or as soon as possible.

Helped team to understand the importance of reducing and/or eliminating technical debt.

Collaborate with other Agile coaches in the organization to promote transformation, knowledge sharing and discussion of identified organizational impediments.

Maintain JIRA and other information radiators like confluence for the teams.

Nice Ltd Nov 2016 – March 2018

Scrum Master

NICE Ltd initiated a project aimed at improving customer engagement and workforce efficiency by integrating an advanced Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system with a comprehensive Workforce Management (WFM) platform. The objective was to enhance the performance of contact center operations, provide a better experience for customers, and improve the management of workforce scheduling and performance.

Introduce ideas & practices to create better collaboration & transparency between multiple scrum teams.

Facilitates effective scrum ceremonies, planning sessions at the team and program level, and scrum of scrums, as necessary

Taught Agile frameworks (Kanban, Scrum) through workshops, customized training, and 1-on-1 coaching with Scrum team members.

Established a means of effective communication and Agile engagement practices for distributed teams.

Conduct a quarterly team health assessment to identify the team’s strengths, gaps and opportunities for growth to improve the team’s agile maturity.

Held each other accountable through established working agreement.

Coach the team on self-organization and promotes the culture of transparency and self-management

Protect the teams from external influencers.

Cultivate and promote the of culture of relentless continuous improvement

Remove impediments and escalate issues when needed.

Coaching and mentoring other Scrum Masters on the application of Agile practice alongside using Scrum and Kanban techniques to optimize the flow of work items

Coaching and mentoring Product Owners on Agile product concepts including story mapping and backlog management.

Facilitated an effort in moving Epics, stories, and bugs to a new JIRA system working with our Israeli colleagues.

Meeting with Product Owner and Scrum master in Pune (India) via WebEx to collaborate and proactive identify dependencies and plan on our Sprint reviews.

Works with the Product Owner to create a clear and concise Epics and stories before presenting them to the team for refinement.

Organizes and facilitates the monthly Agile community of Practice to promote the Agile process and discussed highlights of event during Sprint Retrospective.

Encouraged practices that help scrum teams reduce technical debt and improve quality of code (Pair Programming, Code Review, TDD, Refactoring)

Sabre May 2016 – Sept 2016

Scrum Master

Sabre Corporation is a leading technology provider to the global travel industry, delivering innovative software and services to airlines, hotels, travel agencies, and other travel-related businesses. Sabre embarked on a strategic initiative to migrate critical business data from various legacy systems to SAP S/4Hana, a project aimed at enhancing data processing speed, improving business intelligence capabilities, and enabling real-time decision-making for a more agile and efficient operation.

Facilitated all scrum related ceremonies for 3 work streams (Subscribers, Hospitality Solutions and GST)

Helped stabilize and increase team velocity by proactively removing impediments.

Scheduled and facilitated scrum of scrum meeting to focus on integration and end to end testing.

Negotiated with Product Owner on being available to scrum teams during refinement sessions and sprint planning.

EDUCATION & CERTIFICATIONS

Texas A&M (Commerce) Bachelor’s – Business Administration

Certified Professional Scum Master (CSP)

IC Agile - ACC

Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO)

SAFe® Release Train Engineer (RTE) Certification

Team Kanban Practitioner – Kanban University

Certified Salesforce Administration

TECHNICAL SKILLS

Tools & Platforms: Jira, Confluence, Lucid Charts, Microsoft Visio, Microsoft ADO, ServiceNow, SAP, Salesforce, AWS, Guidewire, Jira Align, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Methodologies: Agile (Scrum, Kanban), SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), Waterfall

Systems: ERP, CRM, Claims Management Systems, IVR, WFM.

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