SCRUM Master at Pramerica Systems Ireland
Letterkenny, na na
Ireland

October 2009-Present

I moved in to a management role with a team responsible for strategic development, infrastructure, upgrades and configuration of an Enterprise project management product. The team was practising traditional Waterfall development methodology. Following attendance at a Mike Cohn SCM course in London, I began the transition to Agile. We started our first Sprint in January 2010. We struggled with the change in process for some 6 months before we got to a place where we started to see the process bed down and delivery real value to our end users. Our BA staff sourced User stories from end users and brought them to a full day sprint planning day. In truth sprint planning never managed to complete in those early days within that timeframe but we made adjustments in our process and have managed to confine the sprint planning session to not more than 4 hours today. Our two most significant adjustments were one, to allow the team to act as two groups within the sprint planning session and progress breaking down user stories. The groups were only separate from an administration perspective and collaborated across groups to clarify task detail: and two, we introduced smaller more regular estimation sessions, facilitated with Planning Poker, to get to a relatively strong estimate prior to sprint planning. These adjustments also familiarised the team with the content of User stories prior to Sprint planning and therefore expedited design & solution discussions. We utilised traditional postits on large white paper to break out our User stories to task level. These boards were then trasnported to our SCRUM room and referenced daily to assess progress. Our initial attempts to track burndown were manually intensive. We utilised a spreadsheet which each individual team member was required to update daily. The process was clumbersome and not very Agile. We evolved this process by configuring the tool we were responsible for to take staff timesheet information and illustrate their record of activity as burndown against the total committment of the team. Horray! Simple, easy and workable! We've hit other challenges such as the presence of multiple product owners and performance issues which we've managed to address through further process improvements. We recently removed our only Systems Analyst from the team for a career development opportunity. The ease in which the team continued to operate following this departure was truly mind blowing. A lead technical resource steps up immediately taking ownership of tasks we'd typically have associated with teh systems analysts. Our BA's realised an enhanced level of independence in discussing complex financial capabilities of the product. This was only possible because these resources had already been volunteering for tasks that sat just outside their comfort zone. True cross functionality.

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Development manager at Pramerica Systems Ireland
Letterkenny, na na
Ireland

August 2011-Present

I myself have moved from my previous role as SCRUM Master and now have responsibility for a collection of teams. I continue to have responsibility for my SCRUM team and have mentored a new SCRUM master into my role. I hope to bring this resource through SCM accrediation and beyond. I also continue my advocation of SCRUM and joined the Prudential (USA) Agile Workforce in 2011. I presented at the Prudential Project Management Council addressing the corporate myth that Agile lacks control and Agile's facilitation of building cross functional teams. I hope to leverage my experience to introduce Agile to more areas within my current organisation.

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