Agile Coach / Project Manager at Bank of America
Rockville, MD 20850 United States
September 2012-Present
Scrum Master for two teams on an enterprise strategic project. Currently, Scrum methodology is practiced. I am also coaching Scrum Masters, Product owners, and project teams on various practices to engage the principles and concepts of Scrum. Sprints are two weeks long. Sprint planning session at the start of Sprint, daily stand-ups for daily visibility to inspect and adapt, Sprint Review session to demo the product and receive feedback and Sprint Retrospectives to inspect and adapt the process and generate 1-2 new ideas to incorporate and discontinue any ineffective practice. Value streamlining is focus after teams are running. Rational Team Concert is being used by all roles: Product Owners, Scrum Masters and the teams for Sprints, Product Backlog, Stories prioritization, planning, execution phase, adapting to various practices like splitting epics into stories, and reporting metrics. Training teams to get effective use of RTC on Jazz Platform for agile practices and concepts.
I am also actively involved in starting up Community of Practice (CoP) and getting teams to understand the benefits of transitioning from waterfall to agile methodologies and project success factors. Focus is on principles and rules to have value driven incremental product delivery compared to following a plan primarily.
Scrum Master and developer at CreamTec at FINRA
Rockville, MD 20850 United States
September 2010-June 2012
Various projects completed during the term successfully. Projects are listed with individual duration below:
May 2011-July 2011:
Project: BETA VfyGenerator
This project was to enhance current Automation Framework application used by user community which
had a very cumbersome manual process for various artifacts that required substantial manual effort.
Team consisted of developers, analysts, testers and couple users. First iteration was iteration 0 where we experimented and found various avenues, reviewed with Product Owner to discuss various prototypes and technical solutions to ensure a well defined "done" state and framework integration strategy was
identified. Then the project stories were elaborated based on the review and retrospective from iteration 0. Four iterations - each of 3 weeks were identified where we delivered feature sets. As scrum master, my role consisted of ensuring team stability, team dynamics and ensuring efficient and effective management of various resources, and communication to stakeholders especially the Product Owner.
The iterations were completed successfully and compressed 3 months of manual process to 3 weeks - a
substantial achievement overall and great ROI!
Aug 2011 - Dec 2011
Project: SQA Regression suite automation framework
This project was focused on automation of SQA Regression suite for 3 applications. A team of
consultants was brought in consisting of BA, developer, manual tester and a Scrum Master. Some team
members being new to Agile-Scrum methodology had initial issues as they were used to working in
silos. However, team worked together and pulled through some of the initial team stability and
personality issues. Iteration 0 was planning where the automation strategies and iteration planning with story cards, story points assignments and planning of various iterations. There were 4 sprints planned; each consisted of 4 weeks duration.
Sprint planning at the beginning, daily scrum standups, and at the end of iteration the review and
retrospectives were completed with working deliverable to the Product Owner.
Jan 2012 - July 2012
Project: Enterprise Desktop Regression Suite Framework
This project was to automation the regression suite using J2EE based in-house built automation tools. As Scrum Master, my responsibilities included ensuring team collaboration, allowing team to be self-improving while removing any roadblocks. During the process, I took on additional role to be the developer where enabling team to achieve the deliverable. I acted as providing various status and communication with stakeholders, conducting daily standup, team communication and ensuring the focus. Though various external factors were influencing to challenge team stability, I worked with clients and Product Owner to ensure team worked stably and efficiently. There were initial 8 iterations where each iteration was 2 weeks long. During the 3rd iteration, major constraints to product was identified by the team and an alternative design evolved. Team communicated this finding to the Product Owner and reviewed further iteration plan. Thus, 8 new iterations with a planning iteration (Iteration 0) were planned and approved. The deliverable were reviewed and accepted as envisioned. Incremental deliverable recovered the investments during the development period during this period itself.
Scrum Master at ATSC at US NRC
Rockville, MD 20850 United States
July 2012-August 2010
Multiple projects were completed for US NRC during the term.
IBM-Rational Jazz platform implementation and agile methodology specific practices using the tools and identifying light weight processes to get teams expedited and transition to agile mindset.
On of the highly visible project I led as Scrum Master had the team brought together and NRC PM contact took on the role of Product Owner. I as Scrum Master performed as Servant leader to ensure all roadblocks were cleared.
First iteration was iteration 0 focused on planning. Having brought the team together, team reviewed the stories with product owner and then assigned points. Then four sprints were planned with evenly distributed points. Each sprint to last 1 week.
Scrum Planning at the beginning of each iteration resulted in not just picking up the prioritized stories but also evaluated any changes due to recent discussions. Daily scrum standup meetings were performed.
Scrum review was performed with Product Owner where we provided our deliverable and received
client sign-off. At the end of each iteration, Scrum retrospective was completed to identify what worked, didn't work, areas of improvement and any improvement ideas for next sprint. We attained efficient and effective process by Sprint 3. Sprint 4 was lightweight. After the review, client acceptance was received. During retrospective meeting conducted at the end of Sprints.
Participated and at times led, Community of practice (CoP) monthly meetings to share insights with other projects following agile methodologies and sharing experiences on Scrum and XP practices ad underlying principles and concepts including Story writing, Splitting stories and backlog prioritization for value driven delivery.
Additionally, for IBM-Rational Jazz platform and other tools support and training program for US NRC, I conducted quarterly trainings for clients on transitioning to tools like Rational Team Concert that implement many practices of Scrum and XP methodologies. Integral part played by Sharepoint and Wiki was also highlighted for offsite teams collaboration.
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