SUMMARY:

• Passionate and Committed Agile/Scrum professional with 9+ years in IT and 6+ years in coaching, training, and effective management of scrum framework
• Lead, mentor and manage multiple teams to successful completion of projects that align with company’s strategic goals
• Expert in coaching and motivating agile transitioning teams, Business Analysts, Managers, Executives, and Stakeholders to adapt agile values and principles to promote continuous integration and improvement
• Championed organizational cultural change on strong ownership, one - team attitude, empowerment, and transparency by collaborating with other scrum masters, leaders, and project managers
• Strong experience in driving, planning, and facilitating releases across several features and products using Agile methodologies
• Expert in driving Agile best practices such as time-boxing, continuous integration, continuous improvement, pair programming, rigorous refactoring, product visioning, Acceptance Test Driven Development process (ATDD), Test Driven Development (TDD), technical debt reduction, and code/design reviews
• Strong experience in mentoring and training Business Analysts, Product owners, and teams to write good user stories, prioritize work based on business value and Minimal Viable Product, relative story sizing/estimation, and Acceptance/Doneness criteria
• Expert in effective utilization of the sprint retrospective meetings, conducting Root Cause Analysis for identifying and resolving team’s performance hurdles, and suggesting techniques for successful completion of agile sprints
• Strong experience in organizing and facilitating Scrum ceremonies/meetings - Sprint planning, Daily stand-ups, Reviews, Retrospectives, Story boarding, Story mapping, Release planning, Product and sprint backlog grooming, and Sprint demos
• Strong knowledge and experience in stakeholder management, conflict resolution, goals setting, and negotiation with emphasis on building relationships
• Excellent team motivation skills with servant leadership qualities to nudge, steer, and help team in fulfilling scrum goals, remove blockers, identify and mitigate risks and issues within the iteration/production release
• Strong experience and knowledge in leading teams to deliver high quality features by setting and enforcing zero significant defect with effective triage, prioritization, allocation, and tracking of bugs/defects

TECHNICAL SKILLS:

SDLC Methodologies: Scrum, SAFe, Scrumban, Kanban, Waterfall-Scrum, Waterfall

Business Skills: Change Management, Impact Analysis, JAD Sessions, Interviews, SWOT analysis, Project Planning, Project Scheduling, and Project Budgeting.

Requirement Management: MS Office suite, JIRA, Rally, StoriesOnBoard

Modeling Tools: Rational Rose, MS Visio, Mocqups Screens, Wireframes

Project Management Tools: MS Project, MS SharePoint Server, Confluence, AHA

Testing Tools: HP QC, HP ALM, Load Runner

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:

Confidential, MI

Scrum Master/Agile Coach

Responsibilities:

• Accomplished servant-leader capabilities of delivering projects on time and on budget by effectively collaborating, facilitating, leading and coaching multiple Agile teams.
• Instructed and modeled core Agile principles of collaboration, prioritization, team accountability and visibility; ensured consistent application of scrum methodologies across the enterprise
• Worked with Business (PO) and Business Analyst on creating user stories, populating a comprehensive Product Backlog and trained them to identify a minimal set of high priority items that can be released
• Delivered hands-on coaching to tech leads, developers, and testers on how to estimate story points, break down stories into tasks and keep track of their hours in JIRA
• Piloted, promoted and coached the use of agile development practices across teams, facilitating shared knowledge and broadening pool of agile-capable development leads
• Improved quality of subsequent iterations/sprints by holding retrospective meetings and incorporating lessons learned at team and release levels, suggested process changes and feedback from previous iterations
• Led strategic Release Planning and tactical Iteration Planning sessions
• Removed day-to-day impediments by locating the right dependency, protected team from outside distractions/conflicts and maintained a focus on delivering the sprint goal
• Radiated team's progress and successes to make sure they are highly visible to team, product owner, and stakeholders utilizing burndown charts and release reports
• Organized and facilitated sprint planning, daily stand-up meetings, reviews, retrospectives, release planning, demos, scrum of scrums, and other Scrum-related meetings
• Completed each release on schedule with full scope and spare capacity in buffer iteration by holding daily standup meetings, and tracking burndown and quality metrics

Confidential, CT

Scrum Master/Agile Coach

Responsibilities:

• Coached team as a servant leader on continuous improvement using Agile values and principles.
• Organized and facilitated Product Backlog refinement, Sprint planning, Sprint reviews, Sprint retrospective sessions, and other Agile meetings
• Laid foundation for the team by planning and executing sprint zero following Agile practices
• Educated Agile teams on adopting scaled agile (SAFe) and Scrum as frameworks for software development
• Coordinated in Agile SAFe Release Train and helped SAFe Agile team to meet its goals and coordinate activities with other teams
• Acted as Agile Coach, Scrum Master and Servant leader for technical cross functional teams implementing Agile SAFe, Scrum, and Kanban
• Educated Agile teams on the use of Kanban for defects to optimize the team’s work and ensure high quality
• Mentored and empowered teams towards making appropriate commitments through story selection, establishing acceptance criteria, story sizing and task definition
• Ensured adoption of Agile engineering practices, DevOps, and Agile architecture
• Ensured a faster flow of value to end user using mechanisms for tighter integration of development and deployment operations (DevOps)
• Facilitated use of Agile practices such as Test-Driven Development (TDD), Continuous Integration (CI) and Pair programming for robust code development.
• Educated the team in how to manage an overall release plan, velocity forecast with agile metrics through standard agile tooling such as JIRA
• Protected scrum team from outside distractions, impediments or team conflicts to help maintain their focus on product backlog and project time lines.
• Ensured delivery of Minimum Viable Product to the Business owners from where the consumption got productionable
• Involved in breaking down the concepts into user stories and streamlining the daily delegation of incoming issues using Issue tracking system
• Resolved impediments/roadblocks to re-create the focus on accomplishing the sprint goal.
• Conducted retrospective meetings to inspect the team’s performance and adapt new changes
• Negotiated with Product Owner in backlog management, scope creeps, and continuous delivery
• Tracked and Radiated team metrics through burn-down charts to higher executives and stakeholders
• Actively contributed throughout the scrum/agile process in daily standups, functional and technical grooming sessions.
• Steered the team to stick to short answers to the three questions; steer them away from discussing problems or details during the daily scrum

Confidential, NJ

Scrum Master­­

Responsibilities:

• Worked with cross-functional teams in an Agile-Scrum environment which transitioned from waterfall methodology
• Help team to overcome impediments as a top priority and ensure relevant team members meet to overcome impediments before doing regular work
• Engaged in Agile program management and created product concepts based on the organization’s strategy
• Audited sprint metrics and conveyed all the data to Product Management teams
• Rendered hands-on supervision and mentorship to a team which was entirely new to Agile Scrum methodology
• Successfully met the goal of managing a project outside the area of technical expertise
• Scheduled releases and kept track of development status, inspected and adapted with the team to constantly improve performance and responsiveness.
• Introduced Hand-shake meeting to facilitate effective transition of work between on-shore and off-shore team members
• Facilitated daily standup meetings and multiple meetings for the development teams
• Facilitated product backlog refinement meetings for the product owner to refine and prioritize the stories
• Conducted Sprint planning A and Sprint Planning B meetings for better understanding of the user acceptance criteria and proper planning of the sprint
• Organized Sprint review meetings for appreciation of the developed product by product owners and other stakeholders
• Helped the product owners to come up with set of stories for better understanding for estimation and development.
• Ensure (help) the Product Owner refines and prioritizes the backlog and ensure the product owner prepares a sprint goal
• Met goal of addressing and resolving issues within 24 hours and managed the lifecycle of code development, from ideation to sprints to deployment
• Facilitated and participated in almost every Scope lock meeting to finalize the Requirements and deliverables of each sprint.
• Communicated with other cross functional teams like Security, Networking and legal & compliance teams.
• Assisted in defect tracking and coordinated with developers to quickly resolve the defects associated with them.
• Provided support to offshore and onsite testing team in defect triaging, analyzing and help identifying the bugs.
• Ensured Scrum Framework is followed including the required meetings and artifacts, worked closely with the Product Owner to ensure product backlog and release plans are clear
• Resolved variety of project issues including Scope Creep and technical challenges
• Worked on documenting the project’s statement of work document and maintained product backlogs, current priorities with business and IT leads.
• Assisted QA team to develop test plan, test design, & test scenarios to perform black box, Regression, & UAT.
• Involved in Defect tracking & management & generating error reports with the testing team.

Confidential, IL

Sr. Agile Business Analyst­­

Responsibilities:

• Conducting story mapping and story boarding session to elicit high level features and goals from the Product owners
• Creating good user stories and tasks using INVEST and SMART Principles
• Developing user stories and grooming them with product owners throughout the agile lifecycle
• Serve as a liaison between product owner and scrum team for communicating well developed user stories
• Assisted with the development of project schedules using MS Project
• Analyzed an efficient production workflow using Microsoft technology
• Grooming well developed user stories with user acceptance criteria and mockups if required for developing a good product backlog
• Creating data flow diagrams and business process flow diagrams for better understanding of the business needs by the scrum team
• Creating the Gap analysis document by analyzing the as is process and understanding the future need
• Negotiating effectively with Product owner on the release priorities and exceptional scope creep.
• Significant contribution to stories development in product backlog, sprint backlog and release backlog meetings.
• Active participant in Sprint planning, Sprint retrospective, Sprint review and Product review meetings.
• Utilizing Sprint retrospective Meetings to understand the impediments and improve the productivity of the team.
• Involving users actively in User Acceptance Tests (UAT) between development team and the end users from the business team
• Participated in daily stand-up meetings and sprint review meetings.
• Developing Business requirement document and responsibly taking the signoffs at each stages.
• Documenting functional requirement documents, use cases, mockups and roles documentation as needed
• Checking the integrity of the newly added features and their effect to the existing ones with integrity testing and regression testing
• Conducting smoke test, black box test, alpha test and beta test along with Quality Assurance teams.
• Coordinate development activities by managing the technical requirements in a requirements traceability matrix