Sean Kenney

My name is Sean Kenney and I have extensive experience in a variety of project management and software development methodologies.  From an Agile perspective, I hold the PMI-ACP (Agile Certified Practitioner) certification from the Project Management Institute and I hold the Certified Scrum Master certification from Scrum Alliance.

I was initially exposed to iterative development when I work at ConAgra Foods.  Most projects would start off using a Waterfall mindset but inevitably reality would hit and projects would be broken down into smaller and smaller components until such time as work could be planned and delivered in shorter intervals.  I learned that stakeholders really appreciated being included in feedback loops at regular intervals.

At PayPal I had the opportunity to be exposed to Agile experts.  This is where my Agile knowledge and foundation of experience really took off.  While PayPal is a financial services company, it really is a technology company.  To stay competitive, PayPal was required to innovate and get new products to market as fast as possible.  I had the opportunity to utilize Agile principles on projects I facilitated.  I was able to introduce the idea of cross functional stand-ups.  I also was able to facilitate many planning sessions that allowed the team to focus on the very near term and to be nimble and flexible in responding to change.  Dealing in reality was a personal mantra of mine that I started to develop at this time.  Non Agile methodologies really focus on following a plan that is usually not based in reality.  An Agile mindset is focused on what is possible given what is known at present time.  Agile allows a team to quickly react to new and changing information.  This mindset really allowed me to unburden from unrealistic expectations driven by other methodologies.

PayPal was and still is a young company.  While the company did Agile, teams didn’t always act Agile and there were pockets of the organization that hadn’t yet embraced Agile.  Having come from ConAgra where Agile was done more in stealth mode, it was interesting to now be in a situation where Agile was preached but not always practiced.

After 5 years at PayPal I wanted to try my hand at consulting.  This lead me to a short-term engagement with CRi and I worked on a project for a company called Kiewit.  I got to work on a high visibility, high pressure project and it was a fantastic experience.  This project allowed me to utilize many Agile principles and Scrum practices in an environment where I was really the only Agile expert.  For this project I was able to introduce sprint planning.  I was able to teach and demonstrate how a set of requirements could be created and prioritized and then broken down into sprints.  I was also able to demonstrate and teach how the backlog can be continuously groomed.  I facilitated the creation of release plans and that enabled transparency and visibility into what the team was working on and when functionality would be released to a production environment.

My current role is with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Nebraska.  This company has a fantastic reputation in Omaha, Nebraska as being at the forefront on Agile.  I am a Scrum Master for a team and I lead them through all Scrum Ceremonies.  These ceremonies include daily stand-ups, backlog grooming, sprint planning, sprint demos, and sprint retros to name a few.  At Blue Cross and Blue Shield I am surrounded by a wealth of Agile knowledge and talent.  I am an active participant in our Agile Community of Practice at work and I also participate in an Agile User Group that is outside of work.