Joseph Sosa

Joe Sosa

I have been very fortunate to be involved with software development for many years and taken on many various roles such as software tester, software developer, project lead, project manager, process champion, configuration release manager, program release manager, and worked with customers to address issues they were experiencing.

Having this full-spectrum view taking development from inception through deployment and working with end customers has solidified my understanding on best practices to developing software meeting customer needs. Through all this experience, failure, learning, is where I have come to enjoy leading and coaching teams to becoming high-performing individuals ... high-performing teams.

Through most of my career in software development, the approach utilized was mostly waterfall, but incremental and, rarely, iterative, were used. Learning about Agile, particularly, Scrum, was an approach that resonated with me at first. This came after a project where many team members shared with me a common wish about "get to coding fast" - something that waterfall does not employ. I knew then that Scrum would have been the right approach.

After many years with one company, I recently changed jobs to meet career objectives wanting to help direct an organization looking to leap forward in using Scrum. Additionally, I wanted to be able to apply this at a portfolio-level downwards to IT as part of a Program Management Office (PMO) feeling that this approach is a correct way to drive execution. I was fortunate to find such a company looking to do such a thing. As they were growing a PMO, leading a transformation of the technical organization to adopt Agile - specifically Scrum!

Now, a few years later, we have successfully converted the workflow to one needed for us to execute Scrum using Atlassian JIRA Agile. I currently am a Program Manager tending to high-level projects and initiatives, at the portfolio-level, and, as a Technical Project Manager, seeing those flow to development for implementation. To the technology organization, I act as Scrum Master and Coach to a few Scrum teams which include developers, product owner, QA. One team, recently, I converted to Kanban as this was a more appropriate approach for this particular team to use.

Now, I relish in seeing teams and team members grow utilizing good software and agile/Scrum practices and helping them on that path.