Pavel Kamyshov

When starting the project, we found several key issues:
• Unpredictable delivery, as less than half of planned stories were successfully delivered.​
• Communication overhead, yet the delivery wasn’t transparent.​
• Team’s velocity was lower than expected​.
• Inefficient meetings​.
• No noticeable progress over time​.

Methodologies:
• Instead of a big team of 30+ people, we created three cross-functional teams. ​
• Established regular team-level and project-level retrospectives. ​
• Redesigned the delivery process to allocate time for investigation and user story refinement, increasing backlog quality and improving estimation accuracy.​
• Agreed with the customer to establish an additional scrum master position on a project, which ensured further process improvements.​​
• Mentored and helped the SM to familiarize with the context and align on the first steps.​

Results:
• Teams increased their productivity. The customer was extra happy with the results. ​
• Teams became more predictable and started keeping up with their sprint commitments.​
• Regular retrospectives took place, allowing teams and the client to resolve their issues faster.​
• Delivery quality increased due to a refined approach to story analysis and preparation.​

Achievements after four months of engagement in the project:
• Helped the client identify key issues with the processes he had.
• Created the improvement strategy and organized a team of change agents to work on it.
• Delivered a series of webinars and face-to-face Agile and Scrum workshops for 11 Scrum teams in four locations.
• Refined estimation approach, normalizing estimations among distributed teams and making them much more predictable.
• Settled test automation process, so that it became more transparent and predictable.
• Introduced common understanding for teams about the definition of done and definition of ready, which improved cooperation among dev teams and BAs.
• Helped teams improve their local retrospectives.
• Involved development teams in closer cooperation with the business stakeholders.

Established the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) for a program of 100+ full-time engineers. Helped a European bank implement the Scaled Agile Scrum Framework (SAFe) from scratch for 10+ teams.

My achievements included the following:
• Went through all necessary preparation events, including program increment planning for a series of product owners, teams, and architects’ workshops to get ready for a new delivery approach.
• Organized and led the community of scrum masters to implement changes altogether and work on a system level.
• Supported the whole program for successful delivery.

As a result, the client shortened time-to-market from 1+ years to ±3 months, received an outstanding performance raise, and expanded this approach to other locations.

The startup worked in a relaxed mode for almost a year. However, one month till the delivery date committed to investors appeared that nothing is ready — scope was not in place, teams were focused on second-priority stuff, environments for verification were absent, and no CI/CD processes were set, which required numerous last-minute changes.

As a crisis manager whose goal was to “deliver no matter what,” I arrived with best-in-class specialists to save the project. We covered the majority of areas in the shortest possible timeframe. I covered the backlog visualization in Azure DevOps, estimation, prioritization, creating an understanding of how far beyond the schedule we are. Aligned on business and colleagues what we can do here — add additional overtimes incentives, work only on P1 tasks, build environments for testing. I assessed the number of critical defects, created a PROD delivery schedule and an additional temporary SWAT team to resolve existing burning issues.

After a successful release, I continued creating DoR and DoD for user stories and aligning releases and sprint cadences for four teams. Created Agile transformation strategy for systemic long-term improvements and organized teamwork around that.