Kristin Collum
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
Columbia, SC, United States
Toptal member since February 18, 2020
An Americas-based certified agile project manager and scrum master with experience in all phases, types, and sizes of complex global IT projects and programs across enterprise as well as small/medium-sized organizations, Kristin is a top-notch communicator and problem-solver who delivers results. She is a hands-on, fast learner who can quickly adapt to your company and lead your teams and projects to get things done while raising the bar.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile
- Agile Project Management
- Certified Scrum Professional
- IT Program Management
- Project Management Professional (PMP)
- Scrum
- Software Project Management
- Stakeholder Management
Work Experience
Project Manager, Special Projects
Apple
- Drove a directorate's software architecture, organization, and culture transformation's planning and design with a team—delivering an initial architectural design, desired cultural norms, and resources from internal successful teams to a new team.
- Kicked off and facilitated the first company-wide weekly forum of stakeholders and experts on master data management (MDM) to flesh out and share as-is/pain points of current MDM solutions and draft to-be solutions that resulted in a global program.
- Assisted in the planning activities of a yet-to-be-approved transformation program by researching and building draft resource plans, schedules, application/functionality mapping, financial estimates, risk/issue/question tracking, and presentations.
- Introduced CliftonStrengths to a 24-person leadership team through training, materials, 1:1 coaching, and providing a team strengths grid. Developed and facilitated team exercises to develop individual and team strengths and a strength-based culture.
- Served as a coach and project coordinator for a director's 12-week leadership mentoring program for four early-career people to actively learn and develop people management skills and thinking.
Data Migration Project Manager
Syndigo
- Managed, as a business project manager, a complex, highly-customized migration project of clients (many from the Fortune 100) from Content Analytics to the Syndigo Content Experience Hub, working with business leads, product owners, customers, and IT.
- Created and maintained a shared tracker of customers, features, contractual obligations, and other critical details that allowed teams to prioritize work, develop custom migration plans and schedules, and successfully migrate clients.
- Used Jira, Smartsheet, Excel, Microsoft Teams, and Office.
R&D Manager | Project Manager | Scrum Master
Sensus — A Xylem Brand
- Delivered six releases of a SaaS product in four years to energy utility companies with a team of software, firmware, and hardware engineers using a blend of Agile and Waterfall practices.
- Ran daily stand-ups, reviews, retrospectives, sprint and release planning, demos, and backlog refinement meetings; trained/coached on agile, and removed impediments for four scrum teams/18 people.
- Managed and improved relationships and communications with key customers, vendors, and internal partners/stakeholders, with frequent presentations to senior leaders.
- Raised the agile maturity of a team and process through continuously improving core Scrum practices, test automation, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), and sprint velocity/commitments.
- Led troubleshooting, triage, and issue resolution efforts to ensure customer satisfaction and project success.
- Improved existing processes and documented/established standardized processes where they didn't exist.
- Used Jira, Confluence, VersionOne, MS Office, Smartsheet, and MS Sharepoint.
Senior IT Agile Project Manager | Program Manager | Scrum Master
Hewlett-Packard
- Led 10+ large, complex, global IT projects and programs: eCommerce, global customer service, HR, and managed print services. Demonstrated beginning to end project expertise, stakeholder management, and risk/issue management; waterfall and agile.
- Deployed HP.com's digital transformation initial infrastructure build and the first HP eCommerce Chinese site deployment in a record-breaking five months.
- Achieved a flawless complex data center migration/tech refresh for a major mission-critical SAP system in nine months with 80+ people, as the technical project manager.
- Led up to three concurrent teams/projects containing as many as 25 developers/testers.
- Set, as the PMO/IT program manager, the usage of standards, tools, and policies for a successful program's communication, stakeholders, change, schedules/milestones/roadmap, risks/issues, dependencies, resources, training, estimating, and tracking.
- Coached and trained 12+ PMs through the PMP certification process.
- Used project tools including HP ALM, HP PPM, MS Project, MS Office, and MS Sharepoint.
Senior Oracle Database Administrator
Micron Technology & HP
- Developed and taught a data modeling class; served as the SAP Basis administrator and human resources DBA at Micron for four years.
- Enhanced mission-critical database support services through upgrades, Service-Guard HA, and international data center migration.
- Acted as the senior Oracle DBA and HP consumer support Americas for four years.
Signal Officer
US Army
- Served in the US military with 12 years of service, as enlisted (E-1 through E-6) and as a "mustang" officer candidate school-commissioned officer (O-1 through O-2).
- Led 52 soldiers as the signal platoon leader in the 25th Infantry Division.
- Worked on a special assignment to joint staff, Pentagon, working for General Colin Powell, Chairman, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (General/Flag Officer Matters).
- Assigned a special assignment to NATO School (SHAPE), Oberammergau, Germany; lived in Europe for five years total.
Project History
Agile Project Manager | Scrum Master
Led the initial platform build and first-ever deployment of HP Shopping to China as part of a major digital transformation program.
Engineering Manager | Agile Project Manager | Scrum Master
Pivoted underperforming team at Sensus to a high-performing agile team with an agile product and support structure.
Key Deliverables:
• Justified to senior leadership the short-term cost/investment of an 8-month rewrite of application to be modular, simple, and agile.
• Made personnel changes and hires, and coached teams on agility and scrum. • Ensured that teams continuously improved on meeting their commitments, test automation coverage, and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD). This gave the long-term result of consistent, quick, high-quality delivery of customer value in subsequent releases.
Facilitation Toward First Ever Enterprise-wide Master Data Management Solution
Kicked off and facilitated Apple's first enterprise-wide forum of stakeholders and experts on master data management to share as-is and pain points of the current solutions and draft to-be solutions that resulted in a global program.
Education
Master of Science Degree in Information Systems
Hawaii Pacific University - Honolulu, HI
Bachelor of Science Degree in Information Systems Management
University of Maryland University College - Global Campus
Certifications
Certified SAFe 5 Advanced Scrum Master
Scaled Agile, Inc.
Certified Scrum Professional — Scrum Master
Scrum Alliance
PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)
Project Management Institute (PMI)
Certified Scrum Master
Scrum Alliance
Project Management Professional (PMP)
Project Management Institute (PMI)
Skills
Tools
VersionOne, Jira, HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), Wrike
Paradigms
Scrum, Agile, Agile Project Management, DevOps, Servant Leadership
Platforms
Windows, MacOS, Oracle Database
Other
Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Certified Scrum Professional, Certified Project Manager, Communication, Project Management, Software Project Management, Project Management Professional (PMP), IT Project Management, PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP), Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), Risk Management, Stakeholder Management, Software as a Service (SaaS), Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Agile Transformation, Project Management Office (PMO), IT Program Management, Scrum Coaching, People Management, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Cross-functional Team Leadership, Distributed Team Management, IT Infrastructure, Program Management, Chief of Staff, Critical Path Analysis, Oracle9i, Database Administration (DBA), Leadership, Facilitation
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