Marco De Stefano, Project Manager in Turin, Metropolitan City of Turin, Italy
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Marco De Stefano

Verified Expert  in Project Management

Project Manager

Location
Turin, Metropolitan City of Turin, Italy
Toptal Member Since
March 19, 2019

Marco started out as a software developer but moved on to more suitable roles—scrum master and Agile project manager—which he’s been successfully occupying for over the past decade. His technical background and business-oriented mindset facilitate effective communication with development teams and with different business stakeholders. Recently in his latest projects, he also works as an Agile coach to foster scrum adoption.

Project Highlights

Smartpoint Pro
Led a team transformation from Waterfall to Scrum and SAFe methodology for three teams located in four different time zones.
Generic Ticketing Platform
Successfully defined and implemented a ticketing platform for the most significant Brazilian online travel agency.

Expertise

Work Experience

Agile Coach

2020 - PRESENT
CNH Industrial
  • Started first scrum team and first scaled agile framework (SAFe) program in the company, bringing teams from zero agile knowledge to full proficiency.
  • Defined value stream and portfolio for IT, applied Weighted shortest job first (WSJF) approach for prioritization.
  • Led the first Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE) in the organization, setting up the hub-and-spoke approach for other LACE.
  • Started internal agile training session already delivered to more than 200 employees in the company within three months. Training program under expansion to have a complete catalog with in-depth training for specific scrum roles.

Scrum Master

2017 - 2020
Travelport
  • Led three scrum development teams (15 people) in four different time zones.
  • Coached management, product team, and development teams on Agile practices and processes.
  • Cooperated with the product team on the build and management of a prioritized product backlog.
  • Set up and reorganized Jira projects to ease the transition towards SAFe and agile release train organization structure.
  • Implemented Scrum process and ceremonies on three teams with no previous knowledge on scrum.
  • Implemented SAFe scrum processes and cooperated with a release train engineer in program-level ceremonies.
  • Cooperated with the product team, delivery managers, and DevOps to deliver software to the world's top four corporate travel management companies.

Scrum Master | Business Analyst

2012 - 2017
Amadeus (via Alten)
  • Helped in the creation of successful agile cross-functional teams.
  • Introduced scrum and led scrum events for a team in three different timezones.
  • Coached the development team on the estimation of story points.
  • Introduced and set up Jira for the development team.
  • Helped the set up of Aha! for the product team to manage the product roadmap.
  • Acted as the main business expert in a successful project involving the most important Brazilian online travel agency.
  • Cooperated with the product team, development team, and SMEs in creating the product backlog and writing user stories in a standard format.

Business Analyst | Vendor Manager

2012 - 2012
Amazon
  • Defined stochastic methods for sales forecasts and warehouse replenishment plans.
  • Provided daily and on-demand reports to the business team for order and sales analysis.
  • Cooperated with a third-party vendor to integrate an external dataset to ease customer experience.
  • Analyzed promotional sales options and results to improve the forecasting model.
  • Helped the whole Amazon.it organization to clean the data catalog and reduce incoming wrong data from different input sources.

Software Engineer

2008 - 2012
Asset Data
  • Led a requirement gathering phase on client premises.
  • Designed and developed a human resource management SaaS platform used all over Europe.
  • Acted as the company expert on Kanban and Scrum practices.
  • Led the transition in a versioning system migration from SVN to Git.
  • Worked as a system engineer on internal application servers.

Smartpoint Pro

Led a team transformation from Waterfall to Scrum and SAFe methodology for three teams located in four different time zones.

The project's scope was to deliver a highly customizable travel reservation management platform for corporate travel management companies, built on top of the travel reservation management system that the company provides to online and standard travel agencies.

I led the transformation of three teams to adopt scrum practices and enable the on-demand release for clients, including the world's top four corporate travel management companies (with a cumulative earning of USD 94 billion in 2016). My work included the introduction of scrum ceremonies and practices, aligning the sprint duration to comply with company standards, and leading the transition to SAFe. Our teams were then ready to be part of an official agile release train months before the expected target date.

I led the backlog management and helped write user stories to ensure that the backlog always contained the right amount of details with a standard and agreed-upon user story format.

Generic Ticketing Platform

Successfully defined and implemented a ticketing platform for the most significant Brazilian online travel agency.

The scope of the project was to build a single platform with XML interfaces to handle all aspects related to trip reservations, from availabilities to fare details, booking, payment, ticketing, and reporting.

I acted as the scrum master and business analyst throughout the project. My responsibility mainly involved coordinating the ticketing stream from requirement details until the end-to-end testing phase and providing an analysis on the KPI expected for the project after the product activation.

I also facilitated the creation and management of the product backlog as a single input channel for the team, in cooperation with the product team, development team, and SMEs.

Design of a Generic Ticketing Platform

Brought an internal project from the exploratory phase to production use with customers using the product on three continents.

The goal of the project was to design and develop a new ticketing platform by extending the capabilities of the existing one—which only worked with Airline IATA standards—without introducing any regression/limitations to support the issuance of contracts for non-IATA industries (rail, car, hotel, low-cost airlines, and more).

My responsibility was to perform requirement analysis and design the new architecture; I deployed the project successfully. It was generic enough to be sold with a few domain-specific adaptations to three different customers.

School Textbooks

Led the team to find a technical solution and provide access to textbook lists for Italian schools to Amazon customers.

The project's goal was to create a specific section dedicated to textbooks on Amazon.it website.

My responsibility was to create a technical solution that fit the existing data model and coordinate the activity with the company providing the complete list of schools and textbooks. The main challenges were the need to integrate a new kind of service without altering the existing structure of Amazon.it website, and the need to access data available only through a third-party provider.

Aventinus SaaS

Designed and developed a highly customizable microkernel architecture to support HR processes in a different domain.

The project's goal was to build a module-based web application to manage HR processes (performance appraisal, competency mapping, defining the course of action, and internal training courses).

The web application uses the Jakarta EE stack and was offered as a hosted solution—with eventual customizations—or as a simplified version as SaaS for customers within different businesses and scales (non-exhaustive list: Mitsubishi, Alitalia, Poste Italiane, KPMG, Findus, Bruno Farmaceutici).
2010 - 2011

Postgraduate Course in Business Planning

LUISS Guido Carli - Rome, Italy

2008 - 2010

Master's Degree in Computer Software Engineering

Universita degli Studi Roma Tre - Rome, Italy

2005 - 2008

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Software Engineering

Universita degli Studi Roma Tre - Rome, Italy

OCTOBER 2018 - PRESENT

SAFe 4 Practitioner

Scaled Agile Inc.

OCTOBER 2018 - PRESENT

SAFe 5 Scrum Master

Scaled Agile Inc.

APRIL 2017 - PRESENT

Professional Scrum Product Owner I

Scrum.org

FEBRUARY 2017 - PRESENT

Software Product Management

University of Alberta (via Coursera)

MAY 2016 - PRESENT

Professional Scrum Master Level I (PSM I)

Scrum.org

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