Biography
Stephen Nelson
Stephen began his career at ALLTEL Communications. He grew his skillset from report writing and general website maintenance to application administration, database development, and database administration. Stephen continued to grow his skillset as a database administrator at Acxiom and then as a consultant. He later joined Northrop Grumman Information Systems in Little Rock, Arkansas. He initially served as a database administration for the program but soon was leading the Arkansas program in becoming Agile. Stephen was promoted to a Software Development Manager and is now helping to spread the good news about Agile through coaching and training.
Work experience
Northrop Grumman, Software Development Manager
August 2013 - Present, Little Rock, AR, US
Initially led a six person team responsible for over 50 applications. Within six months, was leading a 13 person team responsible for over 80 applications. Drove changes for reductions in silos, improvements in teamwork, knowledge sharing, backlog management, daily operations, and project management. Trained four developers to become high quality team leads with exceptional people skills.
• Managed over millions of dollars of annual projects and operations for NG Arkansas site.
• Embeded Agile methodologies into our culture.
Northrop Grumman, Database Administrator
November 2007 - August 2013, Little Rock, AR, US
Led the initial implementation for Scrum at our Northrop Grumman Information Systems (NGIS) Arkansas program. Implementation included a pilot program for a process improvement project to better utilize existing infrastructure. Served as ScrumMaster and coach to the feature team as well as to the Product Owners.
Served as ScrumMaster for a team to reduce costs of SQL licensing due to Microsoft licensing model change. The team consisted of members from Database Administration, Network Engineering, Application Development, and Security. Our client experienced excellent results including a reduction in licensing costs from approximately $1.5 million to under $500k.
Upon completion of SQL Cost Reduction project, I served as Scrum Master for an Agile Burst project. The project goals were to further embed Agile/Scrum into our culture, launch two more Scrum teams, and to continue to educate our staff and our customers,. The team consisted of senior managers on our program.