Kenneth Smither

In 2000, my first exposure to Agile Scrum was called Rapid Development (company renamed). I started as a software developer, than moved to a quality assurance technician, and then to a team lead. In 2004, I became a Scrum Master to deliver software, hardware, security, and data center move projects. In 2007, I took the role of a Scrum Manager at a new company where I brought Agile Scrum philosophies to use with programming teams. The company was already heavily invested in PMP and was missing deadlines and budgets. With a small team of programmers, I was able demonstrate how an Agile team could deliver more effectively in a fraction of of the time. Company executives liked the fact they could view our storyboard and the progress of the project at anytime. The team appreciated involvement in the process and the company appreciated their return on investment. During this time, I also assumed the role of Product Owner. In 2009, I joined an electrical company where Agile Scrum was already present. I assumed the position as Scrum Master. The Scrum teams included AIX/Unix Administrators, software developers (vendors), hardware technicians, network engineers, firewall administrators to manage their environment. A more diversified Scrum team was used to run their critical systems projects. Sprint planning meeting, with the team, stakeholders, product owner, and scrum master to look at epics, themes and stories to create a storyboard. Storyboards were essential to display dependencies and order-of-implementation. Symbols on the post-it were used to depict dependency grouping and implementation phases. An out-of-order implementation would cause 1/3 of Texas to go dark. In 2014, I joined my current company as a Senior Security Program Manager (Scrum Manager or Product Owner) to guide scrum teams to assess and deliver security projects for major companies with Agile Scrum methodologies. Client contracts deliverable are assessed and planned. Storyboards and burndown reports are reviewed by the client to see how the project is progressing. A daily standup is conducted to discuss accomplishments and impediments do I need to resolved. Every Thursday or Friday review meetings are conducted with the client and adjustments are made. We’ve successfully deliver a $70 million and a $20 million project over the last two years on time.