Andrew Kazarinoff

Certified Scrum Professional successfully building the Scrum framework and Lean principles into software development organizations. Achieving high productivity through training and coaching project teams and mentoring executive management.

Scrum Projects in 2008-2011:                                                                       

Current:  “Player Coach” accelerating adoption of Scrum by a pharmaceutical supplier.  Guiding product owners and SMEs in effective product backlog development.  Bringing to life daily Scrums, sprint reviews, and sprint retrospectives.  Motivating teams by sharing progress toward sprint and release goals.  Results to date:  Releasing new energy in teams by encouraging self-organization and a focus on purpose.

Coached an enterprise-wide rollout of Scrum in an insurance company. Quickly put teams into action defining product backlogs and trained them on user story writing. Trained ScrumMasters and brought teams into sprints. Mentoried the project leader and members of management. Consultant to the corporate Agile Transition Team. Motivated management to hire resources for concurrent testing. Drove installation of automated tools for testing and continuous integration. Facilitated formation of collaboration cradles for product owners and ScrumMasters. Initiated and directed risk assessments. Set up metrics on productivity, resource focus, and estimation accuracy. Trained and coached Product Owners on release planning, feature prioritization, clarity in feature set definition, effective contribution to sprint planning and responsive participation in sprint reviews and retrospectives. Outlined new roles for displaced project managers. Results: The Scrum framework is firmly embedded. Collaboration has been established between business and IT and among business system owners. A product coordination team is providing top-level direction. Continuous integration with TDD is in place for Java development. Resource focus metrics are guiding resource management for non-dedicated teams.

Introduced Scrum into the development of a web-based financial content management system. Trained a distributed team of developers and testers in Scrum practices on a path to improved productivity. Mentored the product owner to adapt his role so as to enhance team collaboration and self-organization. Aligned sprint planning, sprint retrospectives, and daily stand-ups with Scrum recommended practices. Results: Achieved adoption of Scrum practices essential for high productivity. Velocity doubled with no technical debt.

Launched and led Scrum to accelerate software development for a direct marketing services company. Trained and coached project teams and client top management. Results: teams delivered more functionality in the first month than had been possible in the preceding six months prior to Scrum. The project is on track for a market-critical go-live date, and client satisfaction is high.

As Agile evangelist and Scrum Master in an information security group, successfully introduced the Scrum framework and Agile practices. Facilitated adoption of Scrum through formal orientations reinforced by intensive coaching of project teams. Results: faster project startups, sustainable work momentum, less waste from task switching, and a lean format for meetings. Conventional projects have also adopted key Agile principles: schedules are deliverables-oriented, teams are self-organizing at the task level, and micro-scheduling is eliminated.

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