Ali is available for hire
Hire AliAli Jafri
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
Location
Aurora, ON, Canada
Toptal Member Since
October 18, 2021
Ali is a seasoned agile coach and experienced facilitator with over a decade of experience. He has helped teams reach their true potential by meeting his clients where they are while honoring the wisdom they hold. As a nurturer of resilient systems, Ali works to build capability through sincere partnership. With a solid technical background, he naturally distills complexity to create a shared understanding among teams.
Project Highlights
Enterprise Data Lake Migration to Cloud
Agile transformation of a security operational readiness program for deploying the enterprise's digital crown jewels to the cloud.
Creation of High Value Wire Payment Application
Received Best of the Best Award for creating a wire payment application built on a modern technology stack using microservices deployed to the Cloud. Major milestone with billion dollars moved through the application with zero bugs in production.
Wire Payment Tracker SWIFT GPI for High Value Commercial Banking Clients
Launched an application to enable clients to instantly track their wire payments. The first bank in Canada to integrate SWIFT GPI (Global Payments Innovation) via API saw a significant drop in call center volume and increased customer satisfaction.
Expertise
Work Experience
Agile Coach
2022 - PRESENT
Royal Bank of Canada
- Served as the Agile Coach for the Next Generation Servicing Mega Journey. Guided portfolio leadership and Agile squads across the journey to nurture their autonomy with focused alignment on portfolio OKRs.
- Coached journey leaders, product owners, design leaders, and a team on the Agile journey.
- Facilitated SAFe PI quarterly planning, preparing squads in advance on dependencies, risks, and milestones.
- Performed team assessment based on needs, opportunities, culture, and delivery of outcomes.
- Implemented feedback loops to increase engagement across the journey and reduce friction.
- Designed and delivered workshops on the workflow using Lean-Agile practices and principles.
- Coached journey owners and product owners on system capability to increase delivery predictability.
- Trained technology leadership on the cost of delay to translate technology effort into business value.
- Launched new Agile squads with a focus on team chartering activities.
- Facilitated all-day workshops to align initiatives with cross-functional teams, SMEs, and partners.
Scrum Master
2024 - 2024
The Weather Group - Main
- Facilitated standup, sprint review, sprint planning, refinement, and retrospectives for back-end and DevOps teams.
- Generated trending velocity to establish the team's baseline, understand capacity, and report to leadership.
- Empowered the team to accomplish predicable delivery by effectively removing impediments, getting ahead of dependencies, managing risk, and garnering early feedback from stakeholders.
Scrum Master
2022 - 2023
Daylight Transport, LLC
- Integrated third-party solutions as well as internal microservices leading to a successful launch of an MVP with features approved by the product owner and CTO.
- Established the agile ways of working, beginning with team norms followed by agile ceremonies and reporting.
- Visualized the workflow showing how work moved through the delivery system using Jira and Confluence.
Agile Coach
2021 - 2022
Scotiabank
- Served as a principal agile coach for the global identity access management technology team. Accountable for the identity access management of over 90,000 global users.
- Established team norms, the definition of done and ready, metrics, and refined the Jira board to reflect the actual flow of work for operations, development, and solutions architecture teams.
- Designed and conducted agile training to create a shared understanding of Agile values, principles, roles, artifacts, ceremonies, estimation, and tools like Jira, Confluence, and Miro.
- Visualized upstream discovery flow and created Confluence intake for stakeholders, PMs, and external teams. Worked with global head of security to prioritize discovery items.
- Created reports and presented them bi-weekly to the global head of security, technology, and PMO leadership.
- Evangelized Agile through pieces of training for the wider global identity access management team.
Agile Coach
2019 - 2021
TD Bank Group
- Initiated Agile transformation for a Tier 1 program by coaching senior delivery leaders, co-creating cross-functional teams, setting up new processes, and onboarding new Scrum Masters, product owners, project managers, and program managers.
- Transformed an operational team by visualizing work through value stream mapping and in-depth metric reporting, doubling the teams' throughput for operational incidents.
- Reconstructed an identity and access management (IAM) onboarding and governance team by co-creating new processes. The mentoring and training of the team resulted in a significant increase in onboarding new applications to the security framework.
- Created assessments and presented Agile executive updates to the executive sponsor and leadership quarterly.
- Guided leadership and Agile pods through SAFe PI planning, where 13 Agile pods planned their quarter, ensuring alignment on shared dependencies, risks, and milestones.
- Conducted customized Agile workshops and training for onboarding and uplifting teams.
Senior Scrum Master
2018 - 2019
Scotiabank
- Received the Best of the Best award from the executive vice president (EVP) for team accomplishment in creating a new wire payment application for high-value payments. It was built on a modern technology stack using microservices deployed to the cloud.
- Managed the new wire payment app that hit the milestone of moving billions of dollars through the application with zero bugs in production, including increased straight-through processing rates, which resulted in less manual intervention required.
- Coached a team to develop and deploy GPI integration through API—the first in any bank across Canada—for high-value payments aimed at commercial business customers.
- Evangelized agile principles to executives and business and technology leadership. Mentored scrum masters, product owners, and lab leaders on facilitation and agile best practices.
- Used a Kanban board and CFD to visualize workflow, highlight impediments, and focus resolutions. Facilitated agile ceremonies: standup, sprint planning/review, retro, and refinement. Created training sessions for tracking, reporting, and collaboration.
- Facilitated discovery sessions using story mapping as a tool to help visualize work end to end.
- Mentored team on software best practices and integrated tests in CI/CD, less batching, BDD, and TDD. Tracked metrics such as lead/cycle time, trending throughput, sprint conformance, and time blocked.
- Integrated the app with a payment microservice for the orchestration of payments, including reconciliation to external entities.
Scrum Master
2017 - 2017
Scotiabank
- Coached and guided the team's agile journey with 1-2 million daily active users across mobile apps, mobile web, and desktop web.
- Mentored the team to deploy a new two-factor authentication microservice to the cloud. Advanced from design to development within six months.
- Led the team while increasing digital sales by enabling customers to renew existing mortgages and GICs through digital channels, including a mobile and web app.
- Tracked metrics, such as SP committed, spillover, activity time, backlog depth, and trending velocity. Ensured best practices, namely unit tests, security scans, automated integration tests, and CI/CD.
- Managed stakeholders' expectations and concerns, such as security, fraud, legal, and privacy. Coordinated integration of solutions with external teams and third-party vendors.
- Collaborated closely with the marketing group to coordinate releases with GIC and mortgage renewal marketing campaigns.
- Integrated with a third-party solution to deploy two-factor authentication codes to mobile devices.
Product Manager
2016 - 2016
Kiwi Wearables
- Performed competitive analysis and environmental scan of B2B motion capture wearables space to highlight opportunities.
- Refined end-to-end onboarding process beginning from initial customer interactions to final code release and reported the findings to CEO.
- Created UI wireframes for prototyping and mapping interactions before finalizing the design.
QA Lead
2007 - 2016
Qualcomm
- Created test plans, triaged issues, validated bug fixes, and escalated critical issues.
- Managed graphics automation framework triggering automated tests for all code check-ins.
- Automated UI and API testing using in-house and commercial tools.
- Cooperated closely with cross-functional teams to drive issues to completion.
RF Consultant
2006 - 2007
Ericsson
- Performed network optimization and tuning on AT&T 3G UMTS network upgrade with HSDPA.
- Analyzed dropped calls, data speeds, connection timeouts, and inter/intrasite handovers.
- Validated newly installed sites with a complete transfer to neighboring sites without dropping calls, data packets, or reduced download/upload speed.
Project History
Enterprise Data Lake Migration to Cloud
Agile transformation of a security operational readiness program for deploying the enterprise's digital crown jewels to the cloud.
The organization is in a strategic shift to deploy workloads, services, and applications to the cloud.
The current platform can ensure security compliance for low-risk applications; however, the platform cannot provide security compliance of digital crown jewels (DCJ) by scale.
The existing process for DCJ are manual and focused on heritage technologies. The program intends to create a cloud run-state operating environment to securely and rapidly deliver and operate DCJ class-cloud workloads with scale and velocity while ensuring the platform and services are compliant with the internal security compliance standards as well as PCI and SOX.
This includes deploying security, operational, and governance solutions and practices for enabling cloud transformation, focusing on securely maintaining concurrency and velocity as the enterprise scales workloads in the public cloud.
This program will accomplish its goals by:
• Leveraging automated pipeline-driven capabilities with agile development methodologies.
• Developing a practice ownership model with the security organizations and seeding it with the appropriate expertise.
• Evolving into DevSecOps practices in the enterprise.
The current platform can ensure security compliance for low-risk applications; however, the platform cannot provide security compliance of digital crown jewels (DCJ) by scale.
The existing process for DCJ are manual and focused on heritage technologies. The program intends to create a cloud run-state operating environment to securely and rapidly deliver and operate DCJ class-cloud workloads with scale and velocity while ensuring the platform and services are compliant with the internal security compliance standards as well as PCI and SOX.
This includes deploying security, operational, and governance solutions and practices for enabling cloud transformation, focusing on securely maintaining concurrency and velocity as the enterprise scales workloads in the public cloud.
This program will accomplish its goals by:
• Leveraging automated pipeline-driven capabilities with agile development methodologies.
• Developing a practice ownership model with the security organizations and seeding it with the appropriate expertise.
• Evolving into DevSecOps practices in the enterprise.
Creation of High Value Wire Payment Application
Received Best of the Best Award for creating a wire payment application built on a modern technology stack using microservices deployed to the Cloud. Major milestone with billion dollars moved through the application with zero bugs in production.
I coached a cross-functional team including architects, developers, user experience designers, business analysts, project managers, lab leaders, and QA analysts through design, development, and deployment.
Wire Payment Tracker SWIFT GPI for High Value Commercial Banking Clients
Launched an application to enable clients to instantly track their wire payments. The first bank in Canada to integrate SWIFT GPI (Global Payments Innovation) via API saw a significant drop in call center volume and increased customer satisfaction.
I coached a team of developers, designers, business analysts, and project managers to design, develop, and launch new functionality. The integration involved working with third-party application SWIFT with several back-end teams throughout the enterprise.
Education
2001 - 2006
Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering
Carleton University - Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Certifications
FEBRUARY 2023 - PRESENT
Change Leadership Master Class
Kanban University
APRIL 2022 - PRESENT
Kanban Coaching Professional
Kanban University
JANUARY 2021 - PRESENT
Leading with Agility (ICP-LEA)
ICAgile
MARCH 2019 - PRESENT
Agile Team Facilitation (ICP-ATF)
ICAgile
MARCH 2019 - PRESENT
Agile Certified Coach (ICP-ACC)
ICAgile
OCTOBER 2017 - PRESENT
Kanban Management Professional (KMP)
Lean Kanban Inc
JANUARY 2016 - PRESENT
Hubspot Inbound Marketing
Hubspot
APRIL 2014 - PRESENT
Certified ScrumMaster (CSM)
Scrum Alliance
MARCH 2014 - PRESENT
Pragmatic Marketing Certification
Pragmatic Institute
Skills
Tools
Jira, Confluence, Atlassian Suite, Atlassian, Trello, Miro
Paradigms
Scrum, Agile, Agile Project Management, Kanban, Agile Leadership, Microservices, Change Management, Progressive Enhancement
Industry Expertise
Digital Marketing, Vehicle Tracking Systems
Platforms
iOS
Other
Agile Transformation, Agile Coaching, Team Mentoring, Facilitation, Training, Scrum Coaching, Scrum Master, Sprint Ceremonies, Coaching, Workflow, Kanban System Design, Sprint Planning, Sprint Retrospectives, Agile Sprints, Project Management, Leadership, Reporting, Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Stakeholder Management, Analysis, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Project Planning, PI Planning, Executive Coaching, Value Stream Mapping, Business Agility, Fintech, SaaS, Web App Development, Mobile Apps, Data Analytics, Organizational Design, Process Flows, JQL, Project Tracking, Web Applications, Technical Project Management, Jira Align, Integration, Training Workshops, Product Management, QA Automation, Python, Perl, Systems, Engineering, Wireless Network Design, Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Psychology
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