Enterprise Agility Coach/Agile & Scrum Trainer at Merck Pharmaceuticals
West Point, PA
United States

April 2011-January 2012

- Working with management and team in increasing agile adoption in the company. - Program Management using Agile and Scrum approach. Managing program in Clinical Research/regulated space. Facilitating three major projects using Scrum approach while complying with the organizational SDLC process: Protocol Authoring, Registration and Results posting (R2), and Adverse Effects (AE). - Responsible for Release deployment and Service delivery. Completed three major releases in just about 9 months; something that is unheard of in regulated systems. - Managing completely distributed team, and still being successful in delivering the functionality on regular intervals. - Acting as liaison between three major units of software development in Merck: Technical Unit, Business Unit, and Quality Unit. Adhering to the Quality unit requirements, making sure that the proper documentation is done as part of the sprint completion. - Responsible for the information technology operations staff, budget and projects.

Show Details

Program Manager/Agile Process Expert and Coach at Liquidhub
Wayne, PA
United States

June 2007-April 2011

Vanguard, Malvern, PA Enterprise Agility Coach/Agile & Scrum Trainer Agile Expert, Coach, and Mentor: • Working as an Agile Process Expert and Coach, driving the transition to value-driven project methodologies such as Agile, Scrum, and Lean software development. Since very modest start of three teams in 2006, we have increased the agile adoption to 1/3rd of the total project portfolio using Agile with multi-million dollar budget. • Defining and collecting various metrics to manage and increase the percentage of Agile adoption as well the organizational agility. • Increased community involvement and acceptance of Agile by developing, participating, and presenting in Road-shows explaining Agile to the IT and Business community. • Trained and Coached Business people and Management (Product Owners) during the pre-Sprint Zero activities; coaching them on how to create the product backlog, prioritize and sequence features and stories on the backlog, and how to increase Return on Investment (RoI) for their projects. • While coaching various teams, facilitated Sprint Zero, Release planning, Sprint planning, and Sprint Retrospective activities as well. Program Management • Coached a Program containing 5 different teams, four different Product Owners (focusing on different streams of the program), and approximately 60-member development team. This included geographically distributed teams as well. • Lead the sessions with Product Owners on how to create Business Product Backlog; how to identify Epics and Features, how to increase RoI by appropriately identifying Minimum Marketable Features (MMFs) and prioritizing them, and how to decompose these Epics and Features into User Stories. • Worked with Program sponsors, stakeholders to define various metrics, charts, and data points to collect in order to manage Program more effectively and get higher transparency. • Coached teams during the Sprint Zero, Sprint Planning, Sprint Retrospective, Sprint Review, and Daily Scrums. At one point, I was coaching and managing SEVEN different teams through various phases of agile development. • Facilitated Sprint Zero in a Distributed environment using Video Conferencing and other collaboration tools. Training: Developed and delivered training on various subjects: o Writing Better User Stories o Agile Project Management o Agile for Managers o Implementing Agile and Scrum for Teams o Overview of Agile Software development o Core techniques in Agile software development o Overview of Agile and Lean software development o (Introduction to) Agile for Executives

Show Details

Scrum Master at Siemens Medical Solutions
Malvern, PA
United States

December 2005-April 2007

• Responsible for Clinical modules of ‘Soarian’ software in the Soarian Enterprise Database Architecture (SEDA) team. • Managing global team of 10+ developers in Soarian Clinicals (SC). Responsible for managing projects, tracking project milestones, acquiring and assigning resources to the tasks, timelines, and deliverables on various projects within SC. • Responsible for creating and reporting project status to stake holders and senior management. • Primary contact to internal and external customers of the group. To customers, I am the ‘Face of SEDA’. Responsible for attending meeting with stakeholders and senior management on various initiatives/projects. Responsible for organizing and leading meetings for various projects in SC. • Responsible for organizing and leading regular quality review meetings for the database changes. Organized and managed CCB (Change control Board) to review and control quality of database changes. • Responsible for managing change request queue. Managing the queue, assigning appropriate resources to the change requests, and reporting status on various change requests. • Managed and successfully completed several projects/initiatives related SC including: o Reduction of downtime for Client database upgrades. Reduced downtime from 48 Hrs to less than three hours. o Creation of different porting paths for different releases of Soarian software. o Worked with development teams to improve database related activities spanning across different releases of Soarian software. o Designed new process flows for improving development speed, quality, and throughput of database team. • Managing customer issues and acting as 'Client relationship Manager' being ‘the SEDA face’ to internal and external customers. Managing conflicting priorities and assigning resources to get the work completed on time.

Show Details