Marco De Stefano
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
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
Expertise
- Agile
- Agile Coaching
- Agile Project Management
- Jira
- Kanban
- Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
- Scrum
- Scrum Master
Work Experience
Agile Coach
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
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
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
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
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.
Project History
Smartpoint Pro
Led a team transformation from Waterfall to Scrum and SAFe methodology for three teams located in four different time zones.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
Education
Postgraduate Course in Business Planning
LUISS Guido Carli - Rome, Italy
Master's Degree in Computer Software Engineering
Universita degli Studi Roma Tre - Rome, Italy
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Software Engineering
Universita degli Studi Roma Tre - Rome, Italy
Certifications
SAFe® 6 Practice Consultant
Scaled Agile, Inc.
SAFe 6 Practitioner
Scaled Agile Inc.
SAFe 6 Scrum Master
Scaled Agile Inc.
Professional Scrum Product Owner I
Scrum.org
Professional Scrum Master Level I (PSM I)
Scrum.org
Skills
Tools
Jira, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Trello, Confluence
Paradigms
Scrum, Kanban, Agile, Agile Project Management, Waterfall Development, User Acceptance Testing (UAT), DevOps, Lean, Agile Software Development
Industry Expertise
Travel & Leisure
Platforms
Windows, OS X
Other
Project Management, Scrum Master, PSM-1, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Agile Coaching, Backlog Management, Backlog Grooming, User Stories, Story Mapping, Requirements & Specifications, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Project Management Office (PMO), Lean IT, eCommerce, Product Owner, Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Aha!, Less, Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS), Release Management, Portfolio Management, Lean Portfolio Management, Java, Extreme Programming, Product Ownership, Software Engineering, Software Architecture, Business Planning, Agile Software Testing
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