Puja Jain

Puja Jain is the Scrum Master at Intersections Inc. located in Chantilly, VA US.

I was born and raised in India where I received my Bachelor’s in Commerce from Delhi University, Diploma in Business Finance from Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India (ICFAI), and Master’s in Finance and Accounting from JMI University in India. I also have Master's degree in Information Systems from George Mason University, Virginia, US.

I joined Intersections Inc. in 2007 as a Software Engineer and over the span of 14 years, I have changed many roles with in the company ranging from Software Engineer, QA Manager, Tech Manager and Scrum Master.

My company was always using waterfall methodology for the projects in which once the requirements are written, it has been handed over to the IT department with a deadline and a small team with few developers and QA Analysts were assigned to work on the project. The meetings were set up as and when required and if more resources were needed, they got added into the team to meet the deadline.

Since I became the QA Manager, I have had the opportunity to learn about the Scrum Framework and got interested in the Scrum approach. I started reading more about it and came to know about Scrum Team, Scrum Ceremonies and the Scrum Process. I wanted to apply the Scrum process to a project to see if it is feasible. After discussing it with the management, a scrum team was formed with a Product Owner, a team of developers and QA, and me as a Scrum Master. Sprint length was decided as 2-week period.

It took the entire team a little while to get adjusted to scrum ceremonies. It was a change from the norm that we knew won't happen overnight. We started using Agile tool "JIRA". A sprint 0 was set up to come up with stories for the backlog and talk about sprint ceremonies. The process started and took us about 4-5 sprints to figure out the velocity of the team, and with the pool of stories we had, we were able to forecast a date of release. The team really liked the idea of Product Owner being involved because that cleared out lot of assumptions and confusion on daily basis. I personally became fan of 2 week Sprints where everyone has a clear/visible picture of what’s going in and out of the Sprint.

I learned a lot while being an “Un-official Scrum Master” and then in March 2016, I became a  Certified Scrum Master. Getting the certification boosted my confidence and I wanted to get the feel of different perspective from the Product Owner’s side. To extend my knowledge further I also became Certified Scrum Product Owner in Nov. 2016.

After learning more about the Agile and Scrum Methodology apart from implementing it at work place, I decided to implement the Scrum at home with my kids.

I created couple of Small Tasks (example: Practice Piano / Work on Homework/ Get ready for Soccer etc.) as Backlog Items and created a Kanban board. Every day before leaving to work, I put couple of these tasks (Sticky Notes) in "To Do" Swim lanes and when I come back from work, I saw couple of these sticky notes in " In Progress" or "Done" Swim Lanes. The idea was to teach them time management. One day I was told that I cannot work on "Piano Practice" as I have big test to prepare. I was happy to hear that as it made them realize that priority may change over period and then they have to re-prioritize the tasks in order to get the things done.