Mike Iseman

Managed a team of 10 including iOS and Android specialists, a team of QA, and designers to build a robust app for guests to download and install on their phones to enhance their experience at a luxury resort. My involvement went beyond the day-to-day management of the project to include product ownership when creating the user stories and grooming the backlog and leading the discovery sessions to attain a shared comprehensive understanding of the needs. It also included team management and day-to-day servant leadership of the solution team.

Led the team to finish and post to production a 12,000 SKU online store. A major project over 18 months. When I was assigned to it, the project was stalled and the client was unhappy. I worked to re-establish trust with the client, focused the team on the top priority outstanding work for a Beta launch, and was able to finish the project and deploy to production.

The high-profile, high-demand client had functionality that needed to be in place by the end of January for their financial year-end. This requirement wasn't communicated to the team until Mid October. I worked with the team for a high-level estimate and it was likely six months' worth of work. I worked with the value team to accelerate the requirements definition and kicked off the project with the solution team which we expanded from four dedicated team members to 10 developers and three QA. The project plan was communicated to the business team with the communication there was little margin for error. The team started falling behind and I implemented measures to get them back on track and started tightly coordinating them to ensure we weren't falling behind again. While the rest of the company enjoyed time off over Christmas and New Year, my team and I dedicatedly pushed toward completing Phase 1, which had to be completed by December 30. After successful deployment, I kept the team on track to deliver Phase 2 and 3, both of which were completed and deployed ahead of schedule.

The team had a series of issues to address from operating in Waterfall (while the organization had an Agile commitment), velocity was untracked precluding forecasting, quality was consistently a major pain point, and there was a dearth of architectural capital as the vendor team was building the platform.
I developed a guide of standard operating procedures (SOP) based on the Scrum framework to codify the processes and gained sign off from the leadership team (product owner, technical lead, and vendor manager) and then presented it to the team in a PowerPoint to kick off discussions and get their feedback and perspectives. After agreement on the new SOPs, we set a date to start the new processes which was then day 1 of the first sprint. While it took a little getting used to, the team was pleased at the process documentation and communication which made their jobs easier. We also started tracking velocity, quality and wait times to discuss team performance and show improvement where applicable.
The team took 5-6 sprints to stabilize the new SOP and then we started the team towards a more mature self-management model where the leadership team stepped back and let the team begin developing the competency of Agile self-management

The team, a mature agile team operating in Scrum, had a reputation for consistent reliable delivery. Their platform accounted for 80% of the firm's revenue and they were regarded as knowledgeable and helpful high performers to the rest of the company. The issues/pain points they were experiencing were centered around demands outside the platform, which made forecasting impossible. The product owner also challenged me that we needed to figure out ways to help the team get the next performance level in terms of velocity.
I took over from another agile coach and investigated the metrics being used to track performance. After discussing it with the product owner, QA manager, and solution architect, we agreed on other metrics to use to track the team to ensure their performance was honed. In the retrospectives, we extended them to review metrics at the outset and I transitioned them from “+/-” format to action based “start/stop/continue” based and took copious notes to compare them in subsequent reviews to ensure the team was staying on track with what they needed to start, to stop and to continue for performance and morale hygiene.