Jiri Forman
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
Prague, Czech Republic
Toptal member since January 17, 2022
Jiri is a project manager and an agile coach with 11 years of experience working in the IT, finance, and logistics sectors as a PMO director, agile coach, program manager, technical product owner, and leader of multiple BA, Agile CoE, and PMO teams. Jiri's led the portfolio of critical company initiatives, allocating 1,300 full-time equivalent resources to the IT department, and handled a multinational company's digital and agile transformation, impacting over 100,000 employees.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile Transformation
- Business Analysis
- Distributed Team Management
- Lean Project Management
- Technical Project Management
- Vendor Management
- eCommerce
Work Experience
Transformation Program Manager | Change Manager
CETIN a.s.
- Joined the team in as a transformation Scrum master and co-product owner. Also acted as a line manager for the members of the transformation team.
- Helped the company to postpone and kill 30% of the running activities, identified key critical roles needed to boost the company's throughput, and opened hiring of those positions within the first three months of this transformation.
- Built several Agile teams, from identification of the goals, structure of the teams, and identification of the roadmap, all the way to the stable, Agile delivery in a 2 week sprint.
- Introduced an internal Agile academy, replacing external training with internal resources.
PMO Director | Agile CoE Lead
Home Credit China
- Led project managers and Agile coaches in handling the company's portfolio of critical projects with an average of 15+ parallel running projects and programs, capacity management, and planning.
- Coordinated the Agile transformation of the HomeCredit China, involving up to 200+ squads in multiple locations and timezones and impacting over 100,000 employees.
- Guided the Agile CoE team in developing an Agile competency team in HCC, involving 15 internal coaches and 30+ scrum masters.
- Strengthened my Agile-related competencies by joining the Wemanity Agile coach academy led by Arie Von Bennekum, co-author of the Agile Manifesto, Agile leadership courses (CAL) by Michael Sahota, and scrum.org PSM and PSPO courses.
Technical Program Manager | Senior Agile Delivery Lead
Home Credit China
- Led the migration of five mobile applications, some with 50+ million users, from European external vendors to the newly built internal team in Asia, resolving in €20 million saving annually.
- Built an internal mobile application development team, handling hiring, team structuring, business product owners selection, and training, among other processes.
- Led scrum masters, product owners, and the technical development teams taking part in the assignment.
- Designed and delivered Agile-related training to the mobile application department.
Business Analysis Manager | Business Analyst | Product Owner
Home Credit China
- Joined the team as a senior business analyst and grew it into a leading team of 10+ business analysts.
- Established the initial change management process and its implementation in Jira, including all documentation templates, standards, and training.
- Acted as a product owner of a consumer finance loan application which generated over a €300 million annual loan volume.
Project Manager
Embedit
- Acted as a project manager for software updates of the core banking system.
- Coordinated with distributed teams in multiple locations in the Czech Republic and Asia.
- Handled a budget of approximately $12,000 million annually.
Project History
Consumer Finance Mobile Application
Launched the new version of a customer mobile application for a Chinese customer used by over 50 million users.
• Building a mobile application development team
• Leading an implementation team of over 100 full-time equivalent professionals from eight full-stack teams and platform teams
• Selecting and training business product owners and hands-on leading some of the technical teams and scrum masters within the mobile app team
• Co-designing the agile delivery and release approach
Agile Transformation of Multinational Company
Led the Agile transformation of a multinational consumer finance company, impacting over 100,000 employees over three years, improving the time to market by over 50%, and significantly narrowing roles and responsibilities within the organization.
• Leading the Agile transformation and Agile competency team composed of 15 Agile coaches and 30 scrum masters
• Designing and implementing the Agile adoption approach
• Co-developing all related training and delivering workshops for over 1,000 employees
Sales Back-office Process Application Development
Managed a BPM-based web application that allowed to move several complex sales back-office processes—opening a new point of sales, validation of employees, sales network self-service, anti-fraud validations—from spreadsheets into the web portal.
My responsibilities in this project involved:
• Co-designing the system as a business and processes analyst
• Leading its implementation as a product manager
Atlassian Jira and Confluence Implementation and Rollout
Rolled out Atlassian tools for over 1,500 staff from IT and other business lines.
My responsibilities in this project involved:
• Mapping the change management process in the company and designing its adoption to Jira, as a business analysis manager
• Configuring end-to-end tools, setting up the templates and workflow, and conducting users training
eCommerce Platform Development Migration to Internal Team
Migrated a fintech company's eCommerce platform to the local team, long-term saving the cost of 20-FTE support team from the vendor and allowing the team to migrate the platform to the new technology stack.
The project was initially developed by an external vendor, using the ShopEx framework for the Chinese market. Due to delivery quality issues, the project started to get delayed and ran over budget. I step into the project then as a project manager, mapping out the current status of the codebase with internal architects and analyzing the existing backlog, targeting features and issues. We decided to assign and partially hire an internal team to take over the product, removing most of the new development from the vendor backlog, apart from significant bug fixes, and using the vendor capacity primarily for handover support. Initially, the internal team kept the original technologies, using mainly the PHP-based framework; after three months of shadowing and handover from the vendor, the internal team could fully take over the new development.
Education
Master's Degree in Computer Science
Masaryk University - Brno, Czechia, Czech Republic
Bachelor's Degree in Informatics and Applied Mathematics
Masaryk University - Brno, Czechia, Czech Republic
Certifications
Professional Scrum Master Level I (PSM I)
Scrum.org
Certified Agile Leadership (CAL 1)
Scrum Alliance
Professional Scrum Product Owner I (PSPO I)
scrum.org
Internal Agile Coach Academy
Wemanity
PRINCE2 Agile Practitioner Certification
Peoplecert
PRINCE2 Foundation
APMG
Skills
Tools
Jira, Confluence, Trello, Office 365, Atlassian, Atlassian Suite, Project Management & Work Tracking Tools, Miro
Paradigms
Lean Project Management, Scrum, Requirements Analysis, Agile Project Management, Kanban, Organizational Change Management (OCM), Agile Product Management, Agile Software Development, Behavior-driven Development (BDD), Design Thinking, Agile, Agile Leadership, Change Management
Industry Expertise
Banking & Finance
Platforms
SharePoint
Other
Portfolio Management, Agile Transformation, Project Management, Distributed Team Management, Business Analysis, Microsoft Teams, Technical Program Management, Vendor Management, Technical Project Management, Scrum Master, Agile Coaching, Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), IT Business Analysis, IT Project Management, Fintech, Project Planning, Project Timelines, Agile Program Management, Core Banking Systems, Jira Administrator, Remote Team Leadership, Business Process Improvement (BPI), Process Optimization, Process Analysis, Workflow, Large-scale Projects, Process Improvement, End-to-end Implementation (E2E), Process Improvement Project Management, Waterfall Methodology, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Sprint Planning, Sprint Retrospectives, Bizagi, Product Ownership, Mobile Apps, Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Finance, Consulting, IT Consulting, Discovery Workshops, Client Management, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Project Management Operations, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Product Management, Airtable, Notion, Teams, Programming, Information Security, Teamwork, Team Management, Training, Coaching, Stakeholder Management, Product Design, Business Process Analysis, Release Management, Facilitation, PRINCE2 Project Management, Algorithms, Statistics, Mobile App Development, Bonita BPM, BPM, System Migration, Website Migration, eCommerce, Software Development, Lean Portfolio Management, Financials
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
Share your needs
Choose your talent
Start your risk-free talent trial
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring