Biography
My name is Robert Taylor and I am an IT professional with over 17 years of experience. My first "career" was in the airline industry. I began in operations - fielding airline company requests for coding their rule and fare data into a standardized format for distribution to travel agency software systems. As the IT industry transformed and became more distributed - my career followed suit. I moved from operations to training - teaching our customers to code the information themselves once the technology lent itself to enabling that capability. From training, I moved into requirements analysis and UI design. From there, I moved into data modeling and diagramming - at this point I switched business areas and moved into Federal government contracting. I've since moved into project and program management, have transitioned to a Federal employee, and am constantly striving to make the Federal engineering and project processes more agile.
I am currently serving as an IT Manager in the Department of State and recently chaired a working group that successfully established a formalized Scrum-based framework for executing IT projects within the Bureau of Information Resource Management. Professional interests include the intersection of sound Enterprise Architecture with Agile practices and philosophies.
I am a certified CSM (applying for CSP), PMP, PMI-ACP, DoDAF Black Belt, and ITIL Foundations.
Work experience
US Department of State, Program Management
July 2012 - Present, Washington, DC, US
Instrumental in leading the Department of State's central IT service provider (the Bureau of Information Resource Management, IRM) in the adoption of Scrum. Led the formal working group to establish Managing State Projects-IT Agile framework, detailing how IRM projects should be executed based primarily in Scrum. Issued a policy for all projects in the IRM Systems Integration Office to execute their development approach under the MSP-IT Agile framework. A large portion of my daily activities are dedicated to coaching and working with project managers (to adopt more of a scrum master role) and feature teams to better hone their product delivery techniques and their Agile activities in alignment with Scrum 2.0 and the Agile Manifesto.
ActioNet, Inc, Program/Project Manager
December 2008 - June 2012, Washington, DC, US
Deputy Program Manager and Project Manager leading multiple projects for ActioNet's Diplomatic Security and Information Resource Management bureau customers. Instrumental in both organizations for introducing Agile practices, most specifically Scrum. In both organizations, used Scrum to break intraction on projects that had been stalled for multiple years and quickly allowed both organizations to see progress and get value out of products that to that point had existed only on paper.