Iryna Charkovska

I managed 40+ developers, analysts, testers, and domain experts to deliver a tech solution that assessed large amounts of data and produced insights to enable proactive data-driven decision-making across multiple functional areas in the organization. Stakeholders included internal employees, government agencies, and multiple companies from the energy sector.
Key responsibilities and deliverables:
• Worked closely with the executives on product vision and overall roadmap for delivery.
• Led discovery workshops and business requirements elicitation.
• Ensured alignment of key stakeholders on the priorities.
• Led product design and launch of MVP and subsequent releases.
• Regularly spoke with customers and monitored user experience to identify opportunities for improvement.
• Provided coaching to peer product owners.
• Led tool integration into business processes.
Project result:
• Business intelligence from the tool is used by 600+ users on a daily basis to make data-driven decisions.
• We successfully implemented a scaled agile framework (LeSS) and built a high-performing remote team. This was the first formal agile project for the team and included a large amount of process creation, team adaptation, and executive counseling.

I rolled out agile product development best practices to help shift the program towards being more user- and product-centric. I also advised the executive team on how to design, structure, plan, and implement agile transformation.
The program teams were poorly organized and did not communicate across despite the need to collaborates on key features. Resources were consistently asked to develop multiple features at the same time, creating a large amount of work in progress (WIP) and not being able to move features across the finish line. I highlighted previously unseen risks and issues and helped the program team avoid and/or mitigate the consequences.
Project results:
• Moved the entire program to scrum methodology and developed product backlogs and sprint plans from scratch using Jira.
• Implemented sprint planning, daily standups, demos, and retrospectives—resulting in the teams' velocity increasing by 60% and team morale was vastly improved.

My participation in continuous improvement (CI) organization-wide transformation started with managing the first pilot CI project. A successful pilot delivery led to a CI rollout across the 1,200-people organization and its 12 regional offices.
Key responsibilities and deliverables (over three years):
• Became the first certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt in my organization.
• Participated in the development and implementation of the organizational-wide CI framework.
• Planned and managed multiple cross-functional improvement projects and lead high-performance geographically distributed project teams.
• Developed a strategy to enhance CI technical capabilities and integrate CI mindset into day-to-day business operations.
• Developed a training strategy and delivered targeted training sessions across multiple regional offices and different levels of employees (including preparing CI change agents in every department).
• Provided strategic advice to senior leadership teams for identifying and prioritizing high-impact project opportunities.
• Coached and mentored CI project leads on the application of Lean Six Sigma methodology, project management, and team management.
• Prepared CI project leads for Lean Six Sigma certification.