Senior SAFe Scrum Master & Agile Coach

SHAHEDA BEGUM SHAIK

New Jersey, ***** ***********@*****.*** +1-609-***-**** LinkedIn

Professional Summary:

Senior SAFe Scrum Master & Agile Coach PSM I Certified SAFe 8+ Years I coach Scrum Masters and Product Owners to build high-performing teams that ship predictably across P&C, financial services, healthcare, insurance, and regulated tech environments. Known for establishing backlog management frameworks, forecasting team capacity for future releases, and translating delivery complexity into clear executive reporting. I don't just run ceremonies, I build the coaching models, common language, and continuous improvement culture that make teams self-sufficient. Currently leading SAFe delivery at BNY Mellon across KYC/AML, IAM, and credit decisioning platforms.

SKILLS:

Agile & Scrum: Scrum Cadence · SAFe · Kanban · PI Planning · Scrum of Scrums · ART Syncs · Sprint Planning· WIP · Product Backlog Management · User Story Refinement · Backlog Prioritization · Pair Programming · DOD · DOR · SDLC· Continuous Improvement · Extreme Programming XP · Story Mapping · OKRs ·

Coaching & Leadership: Agile Coaching · Servant Leadership · TDD · Continuous Integration · ATDD · Team Capacity

Governance & Risk: Release management · Dependency management · Incident management · SDLC compliance · Regulatory & governance frameworks · Risk & impediment escalation

Program Delivery: End-to-end delivery ownership · Multi-team Agile delivery (Scrum + Kanban) · 30/60/90-day delivery planning · Release planning & coordination · RAID management · Backlog readiness & refinement · Sprint & release commitment management

Stakeholder Management: Executive stakeholder reporting · Weekly delivery insights · Stakeholder visibility & confidence · Influencing without authority · Cross-functional alignment

Metrics & Reporting: Velocity stability · Cycle time · Predictability tracking · AzureDevOps · Jira dashboards · JQL/SQL reporting· Confluence ·

Professional Experience:

Lead SAFe Scrum Master/TPM BNY Mellon, NYC February 2024 – Present

Elevated agile maturity across 3–5 cross-functional Scrum teams, measured by improved first-pass story acceptance rates by coaching Scrum Masters and Product Owners on backlog management best practices, user story refinement techniques, and sprint ceremony discipline across KYC/AML, IAM, and credit decisioning platforms.

Improved planning accuracy and reduced meeting prep overhead by 25%, measured by team adoption of AI-powered documentation workflows Facilitated story mapping sessions that reduced backlog ambiguity by 40%, enabling teams to commit to sprint goals with greater confidence and predictability. Embedded pair programming into sprint ceremonies, enabled leadership decision-making on team and program health, as measured by on-time delivery of executive KPI and risk dashboards each milestone, by translating team-level Jira metrics (velocity, cycle time, throughput) into leadership-ready reporting.

Maintained zero delivery slippage across 4 concurrent workstreams, measured by on-time PI goal attainment reported at RTE level by forecasting team capacity and delivery potential each quarter, proactively surfacing dependency conflicts in Scrum of Scrums forums before they reached sprint execution.

SAFe Scrum Master Leap Metrics (State Of NC), Texas August 2023 – February 2024

Reduced manual processing effort by 30–40%, measured by post-deployment productivity benchmarks, by coaching the team on end-to-end GenAI use case delivery including document processing and chatbot automation and establishing user story refinement practices that eliminated misalignment between business requirements and model outputs.

Improved delivery predictability for ML workstreams, measured by consistent sprint goal attainment across non-linear model training cycles, by adapting backlog prioritization techniques and capacity forecasting to account for data dependencies and experimentation patterns in AWS (Redshift, SageMaker) environments.

Maintained zero PI-level delivery surprises, measured by real-time program visibility across all workstreams life science, by integrating transparency and adaptability into daily team processes through Ativo-tracked flow metrics, dependency health monitoring, and proactive risk escalation.

Scrum Master ZapCom Group Inc, Texas July 2022 – July 2023

Led two Scrum teams on modernization projects, ensuring regulatory alignment. Configured and administered JIRA/Confluence to track velocity, burn down, and defect leakage for insurance application features. Embedded SOX and ITGC requirements into agile ceremonies, improving traceability and reducing audit findings related to undocumented changes. Performed retrospective-driven process gap analysis across 6 business lines, identified that undocumented change patterns were creating recurring SOX audit findings, redesigned sprint change control workflows to embed ITGC traceability checkpoints at story acceptance, resulting in zero repeat audit findings in the following audit cycle.

Drove sprint delivery for a Salesforce CRM data migration supporting field operations, aligning data engineering, compliance, and business stakeholders to data migration milestones ensuring validated, production-ready data in Salesforce enabled field users to transition with minimal disruption and zero rollback incidents.

Coordinated cross-team dependencies and release planning to support modernization of enterprise insurance applications. Conducted delivery risk assessments at both sprint and PI level when a SOA integration risk was identified mid-program.

Scrum Master/Agile Coach Huntington Bank, Ohio February 2020 – June 2022

Guided agile adoption for Scrum teams in a digital payment’s modernization initiative, coordinating across multiple business lines. Managed governance, risk, and collaborating with Legal and Compliance teams, removed impediments and mitigated risk to meet strict compliance deadlines. Monitor agile health metrics (velocity, burndown, throughput, predictability) in Jira/Confluence, presenting progress reports and insights to leadership.

Coached teams on Agile maturity and continuous improvement, while managing cross-team dependencies and stakeholder communication for IAM initiatives, improving delivery efficiency, audit readiness, and access compliance outcomes with in Application Modernization. Delivered enhancements to Fixed Income and Derivatives platforms that improved trade processing efficiency by 30% and reduced reconciliation discrepancies, enabling faster and more accurate decision-making for trading and treasury teams.

Drove continuous improvement through structured retrospectives, implementing team-agreed process changes that improved sprint completion rates from 72% to 91%.

Scrum Master USAA Insurance, Texas June 2019 – January 2020

Reduced defects by 20% across Medicaid migration and compliance-driven P&C releases measured by UAT defect rates pre and post process change by establishing user story acceptance criteria and backlog prioritization techniques that aligned regulatory sprint milestones with team capacity.

Maintained on-time delivery across all compliance releases measured by zero missed regulatory deadlines by forecasting sprint capacity against state-mandated change timelines and surfacing delivery risks to Product Owners before they impacted release dates. Coached 4 agile teams simultaneously, lifting sprint velocity by 20% and improving predictability of delivery commitments across quarterly PI planning cycles.

Business Analyst Ventura Technologies, Chennai June 2017 – November 2017

Implemented resource planning at a project level based on project requirements, maintained RAID (Risks, actions, issues and decisions) log and Statement of Work (SOW). Managed financial ERP deployment projects, conducted risk assessment and proactively mitigated risks, collaborated with SME’s to ensure remediation and resolution.

Gathered and documented business and functional requirements, preparing BRDs, FRDs, and process flow diagrams to support ERP implementation initiatives.

Conducted stakeholder meetings and workshops with business users, SMEs, and project teams to clarify requirements and ensure alignment with project objectives.

Performed gap analysis and impact assessment to identify process improvements and support ERP configuration and system enhancements.

Assisted in UAT planning and execution, validating system functionality against business requirements and supporting defect tracking and resolution.

Education & Certifications:

Masters in information science & Technology from Wilmington University, Delaware, USA 2018-2020.

Professional Scrum Master 1(PSM 1) by Scrum.Org.

HIPAA Certificate by Compliance Group.

PMP Certification.

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