Ethann Castell
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Toptal member since April 21, 2020
Ethann is an Agile specialist with a successful track record spanning project management, delivery, and coaching. His passion is for building and leading high-performing teams who deliver exceptional user experiences across cloud, B2C, SaaS, mobile, and web apps. Ethann loves a challenge and excels with projects needing quick starts and fast results.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile
- Agile Coaching
- Business Analysis
- Certified ScrumMaster (CSM)
- Delivery
- Design Thinking
- Jira
- Remote Team Leadership
Work Experience
Agile Coach
460degrees
- Led the agile transformation of a non-IT business area to new ways of working.
- Trained 40 non-IT executives and managers in a two-day SAFe training course—resulting in an over 80% pass rate across the group in the SAFe certification exam.
- Guided seven non-IT scrum teams from novice-level to high-proficiency within four months through a tailored program of agile coaching, training, and mentoring.
- Led and managed the quarterly big room PI Planning sessions.
- Launched an agile community of practice to improve agile skills and knowledge across the wider organization.
- Coordinated and facilitated the scrum of scrums ceremonies for the scrum teams within the department.
- Coached and mentored the leadership team while developing their OKRs.
Agile Delivery Lead | Agile PMO Lead
St Vincent de Paul Society
- Delivered 17 agile projects on-time and within budget across digital, cloud, and web domains to improve business capabilities and customer responsiveness.
- Managed an agile portfolio of 15+ concurrent projects to deliver ongoing business value to the societies 20,000 strong user-base. .
- Embedded design thinking into all application-development projects by facilitating two IDEO U training sessions and ongoing coaching.
- Introduced fortnightly agile governance and reporting providing visibility and transparency of the portfolio at the executive level.
- Constructed a cohesive agile PMO team from scratch by recruiting top talent, forming a robust social contract and practicing true servant-leadership.
- Designed portfolio roadmap with senior-level stakeholders.
- Successfully managed a WordPress migration/redevelopment project.
Agile Delivery Lead
NSW Department of Justice
- Accelerated overall team velocity by 55% through continual improvements in agile ways of working and embedding the agile mindset within the team.
- Implemented three major product releases and several incremental releases of a bespoke web/mobile timetabling app.
- Guided the transition from one scrum team into two feature teams and one DevOps team to increase team morale, velocity, and value delivery.
- Generated reports at the team and program level on performance against agile measurements.
- Initiated and facilitated guilds for business analysts, developers, and DevOps to enable the sharing of lessons learned across teams.
- Acted as a scrum master for two development teams and one DevOps team.
- Led a cross-functional teams of Node.js and React developers, business analysts, UX designers and testers.
- Removed impediments to ensure that the teams could perform at their best.
Scrum Master
Vodafone Hutchison Australia
- Transformed the worst-performing offshore team into the best performing team within two months by employing agile leadership principles.
- Delivered over 30 mobile app production releases (average of one release every eight days) providing the capability for the business to respond rapidly to changing market conditions.
- Streamlined all agile projects from four offshore vendor teams to two internal onshore teams while maintaining 100% business continuity throughout.
- Modernized portfolio risk management by replacing a bureaucratic legacy reporting system with a streamlined agile portfolio wall.
- Led up to five agile teams to deliver continuous updates to a mobile app used by 4 million telco customers.
- Facilitated all scrum meetings (standups, planning, review, and retrospective) with local and offshore teams.
- Managed all of the scrum boards and user stories in Jira.
Scrum Master
National Broadband Network (NBN)
- Rescued a quarterly release from being 30% over the schedule to being completed on time through effective leading, coaching and team building.
- Created a fun team culture through designing and implementing innovative team-building exercises and facilitating agile games.
- Crafted velocity charts and sprint reports providing visibility and transparency of the project to upper-level management.
- Improved team cohesion and increased psychological safety by defusing difficult situations and counseling individuals to resolve internal team cultural conflict.
- Led scrum teams to deliver updates to the web portal and API.
Senior Agile Business Analyst
NSW Parliament
- Wrote over 100 user stories with full acceptance criteria.
- Maintained the product backlog and sprint backlogs in Jira.
- Upskilled the team in agile practices including scrum, kanban boards, and user stories so that they could operate in harmony with the agile practices of the vendor.
- Showcased progress to key stakeholders regularly to elicit timely feedback and influence future product increments.
- Modeled complex "as-is" business processes using Visio.
- Reengineered and automated “to-be” business processes resulting in significant efficiency gains across the department.
- Worked with clients, subject matter experts, and technical leads to analyze business needs.
Lead Agile Business Analyst
Westpac
- Ensured that business benefits are delivered by the program working closely with key business stakeholders to clearly articulate requirements and acceptance criteria.
- Revised sub-standard business requirements document to obtain full business sign-off, allowing the project to continue on schedule.
- Uncovered and resolved hidden security hole in $600-million worth of critical business processes which avoided compromising the whole migration project.
- Upskilled team members by providing migration subject matter expertise to technical, business, and change management streams.
Agile Project Manager
Insurance Advisernet Australia
- Reduced annual IT OPEX cost by 15% by formulating a group-wide IT strategy based on leveraging cloud computing, outsourcing, and vendor consolidation.
- Led cloud migration from on-premise email and documents to Office 365.
- Partnered with appropriate external vendors to ensure timely and economical project delivery.
- Managed teams responsible for IT Infrastructure projects, including hardware implementation, network connectivity, and server management.
- Led cloud migration of legacy systems to Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Azure.
Agile Project Lead
UNSW Faculty of Medicine
- Reduced exposure to an unsupported legacy system by implementing a student application/CRM system to manage 5,000+ student applications annually.
- Streamlined the way ten clinical schools publish and manage timetables for 3,000 students in over 50 locations by implementing a new timetable management system.
- Avoided financial penalties by delivering a compliance reporting project before an immovable government-enforced deadline.
Co-founder
Caliton Innovations
- Developed a real-time CRM data synchronization product for over 100 European organizations. (A project which IBM had declined as “too difficult”).
- Designed a Google apps migration tool that enabled the Financial Times (London) to migrate off a legacy messaging system.
- Evolved several concepts for software development tools into real products via the innovation lifecycle.
- Delivered a commercial data synchronisation product, from concept to launch, with a globally distributed technical team of .NET developers.
Project History
Domino Synchronizer for a SuperOffice CRM
Led a remote team to deliver a real-time synchronizer (commercial product) which was sold to 100 European organizations. IBM had declined the project labeling it as"too difficult," but our success proved them wrong.
Although containing IBM technology, IBM and several of their leading global business partners, all declined the project because it was "unachievable."
Never one to give up so quickly, I identified five potential stumbling blocks for the project, key tech risks which none of the global experts we contacted could confirm were technically possible to achieve.
Leading a remote team based in Europe, we developed a proof of concept that verified all five of the technical risks could be overcome. After demonstrating this to the executive team, we secured funding to develop the full product.
Synchronizing calendar info sounds deceptively easy, but connecting repeating appointments between systems with almost incompatible data models presented a nearly endless supply of challenges.
Collaboration and rapid experimentation were the keys to our success as I led the remote team to iteratively overcome these challenges and develop product features in two-week sprint cycles over the next ten months.
The results were outstanding: a fully functional off-the-shelf product that was eventually deployed to over 100 organizations and supported thousands of users.
Education
Master of Business Administration (MBA) Degree in Business
Macquarie Graduate School of Management - Sydney, Australia
Certifications
Certificate IV in Training and Assessment (ATE40116)
HBA Learning Centres
Foundations in Design Thinking
IDEO U
Certified Cloud Practitioner
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Certified Scrum Professional (CSP)
Scrum Alliance
Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)
Project Management Institute
Certified Scrum Master (CSM)
Scrum Alliance
Six Sigma Green Belt
6Sigmastudy
Project Management Professional (PMP)
Project Management Institute
Professional Scrum Master I
Scrum.org
Skills
Tools
Jira, Trello, Office 365, Visio, Canva, Zoom, Slack, Canvas, Skype, Google Hangouts, Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino, Google Docs, Microsoft Project, SQL, TeamViewer, IBM Rational ClearQuest, Microsoft Dynamics GP, Confluence, Microsoft Excel, Assembla, Basecamp, Balsamiq, Balsamiq Mockups, Google Workspace, Google Analytics, Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Yammer, Microsoft Visio, Microsoft Access, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft OneNote, Visual Basic, Visual Studio .NET, Big Room Planning, Miro, MURAL
Paradigms
Agile, Scrum, Agile Delivery, Agile Project Management, Servant Leadership, Agile Leadership, Design Thinking, Kanban, XP, Agile Software Development, Iterative Development, Planning Poker, DevOps, Team Development, Waterfall Delivery, Six Sigma, Testing, Azure DevOps, Object-oriented Design (OOD), PMBOK, Requirements Analysis, Software Testing, Iterative Delivery, Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), User Acceptance Testing (UAT), Agile Workflow, Agile UX, Waterfall Development, Microservices, Microservices Architecture, Acceptance Testing, Lean, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Test-driven Development (TDD), Continuous Integration (CI)
Industry Expertise
Telecommunications, Higher Education, Nonprofits, Insurance, Banking & Finance, Government, State Government
Platforms
WordPress, Drupal, WebSphere, SharePoint 365, SharePoint, Android, iOS, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Other
Scrum Master, Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Agile Sprints, PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP), Agile Certified Practitioner, Certified Scrum Professional, PSM-1, Remote Team Leadership, Remote Work, Delivery, Project Delivery, Projects, IT Projects, IT Project Management, Thought Leadership, User Stories, Sprint Ceremonies, Sprint Planning, Sprints, Brainstorming, Creative Thinking, Backlog Grooming, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Backlog Management, Retrospective Techniques, Agile Coaching, Scrum Coaching, Project Management Professional (PMP), Business Analysis, IT Business Analysis, Business Process Analysis, Teams, Microsoft Teams, Cross-functional Team Leadership, Cross-functional Collaboration, Coaching, Agile Transformation, Software Development, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Startups, Consulting, Story Mapping, IT Program Management, Leadership, Team Leadership, Business Agility, ICT Training, Employee Training, Project Leadership, Project Planning, Project Reporting, Project Design, Agile Program Management, Project Management, Software Project Management, Mobile/Web Project Management, Digital, Digital Project Management, Technical Project Management, Team Management, Team Mentoring, Offshore Team Management, Distributed Team Management, Multi-functional Teams, Global Team Management, Stakeholder Management, Stakeholder Engagement, Recruiting, IT Recruitment, Cloud, Critical Thinking, Cross-cultural Communication, Cross-cultural Management, Teamwork, Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), User Requirements, Business Requirements, Requirements, Requirements & Specifications, Functional Requirements, System Requirements, Workshops, Workshop Facilitation, Training Workshops, Data Conversion, Offshoring, Team Building, Migration, Migration Planning, Data Migration, Mentorship & Coaching, Project Rescue, Web Platforms, Training & Training Content Development, RESTful Development, Training, C++, Java, Extreme Programming, APIs, Mobile Apps, Websites, Finance, Lean Startups, Education, Discovery, Discovery Workshops, Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs), Charity, .NET, Project Discovery, Programming, Solution Architecture, Six Sigma Yellow Belt, Business Processes, Business Process Flow Diagrams, Business Plan Consulting, Request for Information (RFI), RFQ, Business Planning, JavaScript, Project Tracking, Frameworks, Documentation, Technical Documentation, Writing & Editing, Blogging, Blog Posting, Hybrid Project Management, Software as a Service (SaaS), Real-time Data, Business Process Re-engineering, Quality Assurance (QA), Automated Testing, SaaS, CRM Systems, Teaching, Project Scheduling, Scheduling, User Interviews, Customer Interviews, Stakeholder Interviews, Demos, Prototyping, Wireframing, Process Mapping, Relational Data Mapping, Mapping, Jakarta EE, REST APIs, XML, HRIS, Use Cases, Intranets, Infrastructure, IT Infrastructure, Workflow, Agile Deployment, Cloud Migration, Website Migration, System Migration, Database Migration, SharePoint Online, Regulatory Compliance, Training Materials, Objectives & Key Results (OKRs), Upgrades, Kaizen, Digital Solutions, Reviews, Node.js, Ruby on Rails (RoR), Sitecore, Portals, Stakeholder Analysis, Web Services, Content Management Systems (CMS), Risk Management, Risk, HTML, CSS, Gmail, Google, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Certified Project Manager, Native Mobile Apps, Project Estimation, Rapid Application Development (RAD), Apps, Microsoft 365, Project Design & Management, App Development, Social Media, Public Speaking, Presentations, PowerPoint Design, Conflict Resolution, Software Development Management, Microsoft SQL Server, Creative Problem Solving, Innovation, Software Innovation, ServiceNow, Client Relationship Management, Client Relations, Motivation, Vendor Management, Vendor Selection, Collaboration, Facilitation, Feature Roadmaps, Burn-down Charts, Cumulative Flow Diagrams, Release Management, Waterfall Methodology
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