David Kaiser

During a restructuring of the software development department at a privately-owned natural gas company, six new product owners were hired to prioritize the work for their respective Scrum teams. My role as a senior product owner was to train these six new product owners on how to be successful in their new role. I held weekly meetings with them where we discussed how to create properly formed user stories, what should and should not be in a product backlog, the concept of backlog bankruptcy, and using radar charts to quickly identify which software projects provided the most value to the company using five different key performance indicators. Even now almost seven years later, some of these product owners have continued to succeed in their same role.

This project provided the opportunity for students in a K-12 classroom environment to take the Google Cloud G Suite Certification exam via online proctoring. My involvement with this project was to coach the development team in ensuring we met Google's deadline without sacrificing quality. I facilitated insightful sprint retrospective meetings where we examined and identified actionable items to improve the application's quality. We further identified ways to work more efficiently by managing and reducing dependencies between teams. These meetings also led us to implement a three-phase testing approach in order to deliver software with the highest confidence. Furthermore, my work on this project was to provide the team with any information needed to be as productive as possible. This included providing insights into their estimation practices and velocity as well as quickly finding answers to their questions mid-sprint so they could continue working. It was very rewarding to see the team mature in their practices, partner with one of the largest companies in the world, and meet the project's deadline without sacrificing the application's quality.

A privately-owned natural gas company hired me as a scrum master to lead a pilot project for adopting Scrum. This company, prior to my arrival, had already failed once at implementing Agile development methodologies. My job was to coordinate and facilitate all Scrum ceremonies, interface with the team's product owner, and remove any impediments to the team's productivity. This pilot program proved so successful that the entire software development department (consisting of five additional development teams) insisted on adopting Scrum. This led to me training the development teams, executive team, and new software developers on Agile and Scrum. The success of the pilot project, my experience in Scrum, and the quality of relationships built throughout the organization during this time ultimately provided the opportunity for me to serve as an agile coach for the development teams.