OBJECTIVE

• Proven ability to work creatively and analytically as an experienced proactive Scrum Master, dedicated to proactively eliminateing development team impediments.
• Project Management Professional with 5+ years exclusively in project management.
• Scrum Master with four years of experience as the resident corporate Scrum and Kanban subject matter expert.
• Certified Scrum Master (CSM) for distributed and collocated development teams.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Confidential, Chicago IL

Senior Scrum Master

Responsibilities:

• Responsible for driving effective scrum ceremonies including daily scrum, Sprint planning, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective, Product Backlog Grooming/Refinement.
• Responsible for tracking and distributing relevant metrics and reports periodically to show team progress and velocity.
• Identify, understand, and track impediments; remove them and drive improvements to optimize how the team works
• Support, educate, and engage the Product Owner, especially with respect to refining (aka grooming) and managing the product backlog. Help Product Owner to manage customer expectations and stakeholder communications.
• 100% dedicated to the proactive elimination of development team impediments.
• Worked with teams to improve estimates by more than 30% with Agile planning games.
• Drove automated unit testing, TDD and continuous integration to reduce technical debit.
• Brought QA into Sprint Planning to begin writing unit tests and acceptance criteria early, reducing overall QA time by more than 20%
• Maximize the use of technology to encourage close collaboration of distributed (on shore and offshore) teams of product managers, developers to resource, define, and schedule activities required to develop and launch new features.
• Demonstrated experience with widely successful agile practices: Scrum, Scaled Agile Framework (SaFe Essential module), Kanban etc.
• Skilled in servant leadership, facilitation, situational awareness, conflict resolution, continual improvement, empowerment, and increasing transparency
• Assess the Agile Maturity of the Scrum team and organization to coach the team to higher levels of maturity at a pace that is sustainable and comfortable for the team and organization
• Help build a safe and trusting team environment where problems can be raised without fear of blame, retribution, or judgement, with an emphasis on problem solving
• Perform as an Agile Coach working across the Program Portfolio to help increase the agile maturity of the software development teams. Helped improve, manage, and grow the agile process and best practices
• Tracked and communicated team velocity and sprint/release progress

Confidential, New York NY

Senior Scrum Master

Responsibilities:

• Consulted with application teams on data modeling and schema design, database coding, and database performance tuning.
• Organized and facilitated daily stand - up meetings, sprint planning, sprint retrospectives, sprint review and other Scrum-related meetings and ceremonies. Scheduled product backlog grooming as needed, and successfully coordinated each one.
• Improved team velocity to 15% by incorporating capacity planning into sprint planning sessions.
• Tracked and communicated team velocity and sprint/release progress
• Assisted technical team with making appropriate commitments through story selection and task definition.
• Collaborated with team, developing and maintaining team standards, tools, and best practices, including working agreements and definition of done.
• Proactively identified and removed impediments and prevented development team distractions.
• Tracked development team progress using metrics such burndown and burnup charts and updated the progress of ongoing increments in JIRA.
• Served as an Agile coach within the organization, while implementing and socializing scrum to newly formed teams.
• Scheduled, coordinated, facilitated, and oversaw numerous backlog refinement and grooming events, by so doing, dramatically improved the outcome of numerous upcoming sprints.
• Spear headed internal and external communication, improving transparency, and broadcasting information, as needed.
• Project Planning, including development of a project plan.
• Led the project team through implementation of the solution.

Confidential, Washington, DC

Senior Scrum Master

Responsibilities:

• Used two innovative information soliciting approaches to coordinate the sprint retrospective, resulting in 100% participation of the development team and into a valuable trove of information for future sprints improvements.
• Successfully implemented a training program that enabled the new scrum team to be a committed, focused, self-managed cross-functional software development team.
• Scheduled a meeting with the product owner during which I trained him, and helped him refine the software development product backlog in time for the next sprint.
• Trained the senior management team, and successfully got the senior vice president to henceforth refrain from reassigning development team members.
• Scheduled, planned, and oversaw the successful execution of 150 development product increments that went on to be approved on the first trial by the product owner.
• Worked with the development team to develop and post a list of daily scrum norms that led to 100% attendance at future daily scrums.
• Successfully talked the company into hiring two new software developers for the scrum team, resulting in a 10% increase in software development and testing.
• Worked with the scrum team to create and post a more comprehensive and a more legible set of information radiators, clearly showing each team member’s role.
• Made daily scrums more effective and productive by posting an upgraded set of norms that were produced and agreed to by members of the software development team.
• Worked closely with, and provided direction to technology leads to support project needs
• Influenced and led large-scale change initiatives and plans and coordinated them to successful conclusions.
• Proactively challenged the performance of current systems and processes and identified risks and developed solutions and/or processes and ensured necessary risk mitigation steps were built into the ongoing processes.

Confidential, Atlanta GA

Scrum Master

Responsibilities:

• Worked with the software development team to identify, assess, and define project scope and deliverables being in constant alignment with software development goals of stakeholders and IT leadership
• Supported technology business partners in formalizing project scope, deliverables, and timelines
• Led the effort to get management to convert three development team members to fulltime employees with full benefits.
• Met with the scrum team to update and revise daily stand-up norms, thus eliminating tardiness.
• Scheduled and successfully coordinated 65 straight sprints which were approved by the product owner.
• Trained new team members in agile scrum norms, and led the effort to upgrade all software development team laptops.
• Proactively eliminated impediments, and this led for the first time, to several weeks of zero impediments
• Trained the new teammates in agile scrum norms and met with the whole team to reinforce team solidarity as need.
• Recommended best practices in software development leading to
• Applied process improvement approaches (Agile, Lean)
• Worked with the team to create and post safety signs in accordance with the software team’s quality and safety standards
• Oversaw all incoming and outgoing project documentation
• Managed large and diverse teams both onshore and offshore, and boosted morale to all-time highs.