Alan Sebring

- Established daily standups, sprint planning, review, planning and retrospective meetings.
- Connected product roadmap to epic/features to stories.
- Collaborated with peers in PMO to apply Scrum to our process improvements and improve meeting efficiency.

- Coached scrum masters, product owners, and teams.
- Established standard sprint review for each team to showcase progress consistently for business stakeholders.
- Established common usage of Rally for all teams.
- Integrated critical path DevOps with multiple delivery teams.

- Created and delivered workshops on excellent product management.
- Assessed and coached leaders, product managers, and product owner/analysts to support new director.
- Topics ranged from business cases and relationship management to agile delivery.

- Defined a "Chief Scrum Master" role and Scrum of scrum framework to tie together 15+ Scrum delivery teams, all eCommerce value streams/products.
- Led security assessment and recommendations project the board demanded after a critical incident.
- Supported teams' migration from Jira to VersionOne as the new organization and SDLC was introduced.

- As Technical PM/Scrum Master, reintroduced Agile for all Scrum ceremonies adapted to unique requirements within the department.
- Introduced Agile release planning to align product roadmaps with quarterly releases and biweekly sprints.
- Coached additional teams and Scrum Masters to spread success across the department.
- Facilitated project chartering meetings to get a cloud-based rewrite of the legacy system on track.

- Interviewed operators and leaders, conducted time and motion studies, and reviewed operational procedures.
- Recommended new approaches to procedures, opportunistic technology, and human investments to lower costs and improve the safety of Microsoft's worldwide staff and lower asset risks.
- Presented findings and recommendations to leaders, supported strategy on how they would proceed.

- Collaborated with lead instructor to design course blending text-based material and real-world experience to prepare students for industry work.
- Led Agile parts of the curriculum during lectures and in-class exercises.
- Coached students through homework feedback and in-person.

- Gathered requirements from company's leadership and staff to drive Agile project for technology refactor.
- Facilitated offshore team communication for Scrum and other meetings with client stakeholders.
- Worked with CEO on the roadmap for other product upgrades.

- Led establishment of hybrid Scrum / Kanban "flow" board to dramatically improve daily visibility on progress.
- Coached by example how to effectively participate in Scrum ceremonies.
- Introduced Agile release planning to overcome past, unrealistic schedules that had dogged project execution.

The team struggled to balance ongoing IT support tasks and strategic "product" investments. Through a combination of Scrum training and coaching them to better organize their different activities, I helped get them on the right course.

I also worked with business leaders to adapt to the new development processes, better communicating their priorities to the developers. Part of this included empowering the leaders to clarify the trade-offs between support and development required of the team.

The team had been trying Scrum for over a year but found the approach too brittle and not meeting business or team needs. I delivered workshops and coaching to the team and supporting roles (PO, engineering manager) to clarify principles and co-create a better-adapted process.

The key to our success was making sure they understood how Agile principles are effective when properly adapted to the team's context. Their previous training was too dogmatic but easily addressed with respectful guidance from an experienced coach.

After an intense onsite kickoff, we worked remotely and with follow-up visits of decreasing length and frequency.