Annukka Taivassalo

Before the kickoff, I coached the project team to help them get set up quickly and embed an Agile mindset and practices into the project planning, facilitated working sessions, and designed the kickoff meeting.

The program goal was to migrate 15 location service APIs from company data centers to AWS with no customer impact. The approach was to create cross-functional feature teams to handle the API migrations end-to-end. These teams had the autonomy to figure out the best way of working for them. As a program manager, I provided guidelines and checklists for the teams' migration work, helped them clear out any blockers, and performed risk management and stakeholder reporting.

I was brought in to help the product manager launch a new product for HERE. I coordinated the non-technical launch activities, such as product marketing, legal compliance reviews, security and privacy reviews, customer support readiness, and sales training.

I coached a group of 130 people on their Agile transformation to increase speed, adaptability, and collaboration across regions. I also established a core team of Agile enthusiasts who are now able to drive and sustain improvements within their teams.

I coached and facilitated a group of product management leaders to create their strategic objectives, define top priorities for the year, and ensure alignment with the company's strategic objectives. This involved multiple coaching sessions and workshops.

I designed and launched a culture council concept to improve the feedback cycles between employees and the culture team. We completed one complete iteration with the culture council focusing on speed, including a customized design sprint, kicking off experiments, and following up on the recommendations that came from them.

I coached and facilitated a group of team leads from across regions to design a proposal for a new organizational structure. The proposal included role definitions and future ways of working to support Agile practices.

Coached and facilitated a cross-functional team in product management and development to create an end-to-end flow for how Places data flows from data sourcing to the consumer-facing mobile application. I also helped the team identify pain points and improvement areas during working sessions.

I conducted a value stream mapping exercise on how the feedback from customers on address data becomes available to the LastMile customer solution. I was invited to present the results in a product leadership team meeting.

The project goal was to set up the technical requirements needed for the HERE Location Services APIs to fulfill the GDPR requirements for data subprocessors. The project required a high amount of cross-team coordination and planning.

The goal of the program was to expand the HERE product coverage into China. The program included setting up the legal company structures (joint venture and a local partner), building a new team in China, finding a local cloud and network provider, and deploying the core HERE services into China.

As a program manager, I managed the core program team, including multiple project managers who were leading different streams of the program, the overall program budget and business case, overall risk management, and reporting to the leadership team.

The goal of the project was to identify improvements to help HERE Location Services meet and exceed customer-facing SLAs for availability and server response times. This involved a deep dive into topics that contributed to the poor SLA performance, such as application monitoring and alerting and dynamic data architecture.

The goal of this work was to create a community of excellence (CoE) that co-created companywide standards for program and project management, shared knowledge and best practices, and uplifted the program management talent.