Karen Hodges

Karen Hodges is an Agile Coach/Scrum Master (CSM, CSPO, ICP-ACC) with expertise in delivering Business Solutions for Data Warehouse, Dot.com/Content Management, IT Software and Infrastructure projects. 

Her goal as an Agile Coach/Scrum Master is to provide coaching at all levels to ensure alignment with agile principles and transform teams into performing at their highest velocity, to continually improve delivery. She has expertise providing Scrum Master, Product Owner and Scrum team level coaching.

Additionally, in facilitating release planning and utilizing retrospectives for continuous process improvement.     

Proven track record for:

• Establishing and facilitating co-located and offshore (India) teams.    
• Continually demonstrating the ability to prioritize and manage multiple projects concurrently.  
• Effectively managing project budgets, resources and timelines.
• Coaching Product Owners in respect to creating features, backlog refinement and readiness.
• Communicating project status and metrics to Stakeholders and Business.
• Successfully transitioning teams from Waterfall to Agile Methodology.

Industry Expertise include Airlines, Credit Card Services, Mortgage Insurance, Retail Banking and Supply Chain Management.

Karen is very passionate about Agile and frequently engages with the Agile Community for continued education and networking. Additionally, she volunteered as a Mentor for Girls in Tech. 

Karen took her agile career to another level in Jan 2014, when she joined Capital One in Mclean Va. Previously she had worked on projects that were not fully implementing agile and often reverting to waterfall practices. The onboarding process required her to complete an introductory course for both Agile and SAFe methodologies. Afterwards, she was totally hooked and wanted to learn even more about agile principles and decided to pursue her certifications. Initially at Capital One, she was a Product Owner and part time Scrum Master, after some consideration, she decided to pursue the Scrum Master certification. Shortly after obtaining her CSM certification, an opportunity became available for her to permanently transition into the role of Scrum Master, facilitating two Retail Banking teams. The teams consisted of both seasoned and new agilist. The teams were co-located with developers and QA team members in the US and India. Video conferencing was utilized for ceremonies to ensure that the co-located teams could participate in the agile ceremonies. The time difference was often a challenge when facilitating offshore resources, so the scheduling of ceremonies had to be well planned. There were training opportunities in the areas of user story writing, backlog management and story estimating utilizing the Fibonacci scale. Capital One was transitioning to ATDD, so Karen facilitated training that focused on TDD story formatting and clearly defining the definition of done. Release planning was held every six weeks and the objective was to ensure that there was a backlog of 2-3 sprints and that the team had clearly defined requirements. During release planning, she ensured that outside dependencies and blockers were identified and managed the team’s velocity.  Karen put a lot of emphasis on her retrospectives and always strived to provide the teams with a safe environment to reflect and focus on process improvements. Karen utilizes several resources both print and online for retrospective ideas. Her most popular retrospective thus far has been the “Lego” exercise. She determined early the need to refine the PO role and decided to become certified in this area. The CSPO certification helped to expand her knowledge of the PO role and enabled her to better facilitate coaching/training. After building up these teams to be high producing and self-organizing, Karen was transferred to Capital One’s Credit Card division, where she was the servant leader for two development teams across two different release trains. These teams were newly established on this project, so she facilitated agile ceremonies and worked closely with the Product Owners to build backlogs for the teams. The team had to overcome the challenge of ever changing business requirements, so release planning was crucial in ensuring that the teams stayed in alignment with the business.      

After joining Southwest Airlines in Dallas Texas, Karen transitioned more into an Agile coach role. The requirement was to start up an Agile team to support a $3 million Big Data project. The organization was in the midst of an organizational transformation to agile, so this required training at both the team and management level.  She provided the teams with an introduction to agile and the PO training on writing user stories and backlog management. Training at the management level required providing an overview of agile methodology in addition to understanding the different metrics i.e. burndown/burnup charts, team velocity. There were ongoing opportunities for coaching and ensuring that management was in alignment with agile principles. There were also a lot of instances where she had to work very closely with business to understand project budget, requirements and timelines. As this project progressed the requirements changed and Karen was eventually managing up to three project teams at a time. She managed resources across these projects in addition to timelines. There was not a Release Manager for this project, so she assisted with releases and change management. Most of the agile training was conducted via video conference to accommodate the offshore team members.  She also provided training around facilitating agile ceremonies and servant leadership to other Scrum Masters on the Release Train. The release train was on two-week sprints, so she closely managed the Work In Progress (WIP) between the offshore and onshore teams.  

Recently Karen transitioned to the dot.com/content management area at Southwest Airlines, where she is restructuring an agile team that is practicing Kanban. Previously agile was not being properly implemented and project deadlines were being missed. In the two months, since taking over this team, Karen has worked with the PO’s to restructure the backlog and reduce carryover. Additionally, the standup is time boxed to 15 minutes and she is facilitating Sprint Reviews. The developers were working in a silo, estimating stories individually and not collaborating. To correct this issue, she implemented bi-weekly grooming sessions, requiring that developers and QA estimate the stories collectively, in addition to bi-weekly demos and introducing the team to managing (WIP). The next major project milestone for Karen will be to determine what metrics will be most beneficial to management and the team. Additionally, she will be starting up a new analytics project team.