Robert Hammock
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
Port St. Joe, FL, United States
Toptal member since September 4, 2020
Robert is an experienced agile practitioner with over 20 years of experience helping teams deliver maximum business value to their customers. He has led organizations with 80+ team members through agile transformations, improving predictability and quality while reducing employee attrition. Robert is a certified SAFe Practice Consultant (SPC), PMI Project Management Professional (PMP), and Six Sigma Green Belt.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile Coaching
- Agile Leadership
- Agile Product Delivery
- Agile Product Management
- Agile Transformation
- Financial Services
- Project Management
- Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
Work Experience
Owner | Agile Transformation Coach and Consultant
Pelican Gulf Consulting, LLC
- Provided freelance/contract consulting to leverage and transform teams to an agile mindset based on collaboration, transparency, and accountability.
- Performed agility assessments to develop transformation roadmaps.
- Implemented metrics to measure quality, predictability, and flow while eliminating the use of vanity metrics.
- Provided ongoing coaching and mentoring for individuals and teams. Established communities of practice to facilitate knowledge sharing.
Product Owner via Toptal
Yara International - Farm & Field Connectivity
- Assessed business value, developed business cases, and prioritized stories, epics, and themes to ensure work focused on delivering maximum value and alignment with the product strategy.
- Led the team in identifying and resolving product challenges, focusing on collaboration with cross-functional teams and stakeholders.
- Advocated for internal customer needs in the development of technical solutions.
Agile Coach via Toptal
Rubrik
- Performed initial assessment to identify key focus areas for transformation.
- Developed material and facilitated training for 22 global teams. Training highlights included the reasons for an agile transformation, agile foundations, and building a high-performing agile team.
- Led workshops to assist teams in capacity planning, estimation, and metrics to track and improve performance. Implemented improved planning and estimation practices, leading to a 26% improvement in predictability.
- Established the community of practice to foster sharing and improve user story writing skills.
Delivery Lead via Toptal
Toptal Client
- Planned and facilitated Agile Release Train (ART) ceremonies with a focus on relentless improvement. Coordinated pre-planning checkpoints to verify teams were ready for PI Planning.
- Led the risk and issue management process to identify and mitigate risks during all stages of project planning and execution.
- Collaborated with product strategy, design, and engineering to develop features to support new product recommendations. Led the implementation of a 3rd-party application to detect the farmer's fields automatically.
- Drove system improvements for farm and field management systems from conception through implementation while providing detailed tracking and reporting performance metrics.
- Liaised between customer service and development teams to ensure customer-reported issues were prioritized and promptly resolved. Worked with engineering teams to perform root cause analysis and communicated solutions back to the customer.
Agile Coach | Scrum Master via Toptal
Partner Reinsurance
- Managed an intranet migration project to SharePoint to minimize cost and improve user experience.
- Introduced agile practices to the company, resulting in more frequent feedback and higher quality. Demonstrated the ability to "pivot without mercy" when new requirements were introduced.
- Led planning, daily stand-ups, retrospectives, and sprint reviews for a global team distributed across four countries.
- Defined the product roadmap and built the backlog. Provided ongoing training to the product owner to decompose epics into features and stories. Managed the backlog to ensure the team worked on what was most important for the business.
Agile Coach
DXC Technology
- Designed and co-facilitated training sessions to teach Agile teams, release train engineers, and product owners how to successfully plan, execute and deploy solutions that delivered a continuous flow of value to the customer.
- Implemented performance-based metrics to assess program progress. Eliminated vanity metrics that provided no value and artificially showed productivity improvements.
- Championed continuous improvement by introducing new retrospective techniques to identify solutions to the root of problems. Eliminated security testing bottlenecks, improving cycle time by 66%. Introduced test-driven development.
Development Manager
DXC Technology
- Owned the development life cycle of a digital insurance administration system, ensuring five global teams delivered program objectives on time and within budget.
- Developed and deployed processes to improve workflow, reduce delivery time, and improve quality.
- Improved cross team coordination by creating standard procedures for risk management, metrics, and sprint reviews.
- Sponsored Inspect and Adapt workshops to foster innovation and experimentation. Transformed the team to a culture of delivering smaller work increments with fast feedback to continuously deliver real business value throughout the release cycle.
Program Manager
DXC Technology
- Led the transformation of the Product Accelerator's development team from Waterfall to Agile methodology. Created five high-performing teams that focused on "completing" instead of "working on" to deliver real business value.
- Facilitated release planning, backlog grooming, and Scrum ceremonies. Developed dashboards to monitor relevant team metrics and identify opportunities for improvement.
- Led the transition to Essential SAFe and implemented the first Agile Release Train (ART) with four cross-functional business teams and one system team.
- Coordinated new development requests between customers and the German-based development team as a North American lead for VP and MS development, responsible for triage of customer issues and final acceptance testing.
- Delivered the second phase of MassMutual’s $1.1 million sales illustration replacement project, which utilized Product Accelerator to reduce IT costs and improve time to market by providing a central repository for product information.
- Managed a cross-functional team that externalized product information for property and casualty lines of business.
Program Leader
Genworth Financial
- Evaluated and implemented data analytics tools to create the company's Business Intelligence Center of Excellence. Developed an implementation strategy to support multiple office locations.
- Collaborated with senior executives to develop digital dashboards to demonstrate the health of the business. Participated in weekly meetings with senior leaders and made data-driven decisions to resolve issues.
- Led a team of business and technical experts in developing a data warehouse to measure cycle time from receiving an application through policy issues. The associated systems and processes were filed with the US Patent Office for protection.
Project Manager
Genworth
- Managed the conversion team responsible for converting 1.6 million policies to a new policy administration system, ensuring 100% accuracy of regulatory and contractual data.
- Facilitated briefing sessions to inform the stakeholders and executives of progress.
- Implemented Agile engineering principles to support administration system upgrade and data conversion.
- Implemented SWAT teams of employees, vendor consultants, and contractors to solve problems quickly. Arranged to have developers, business analysts, and actuaries collocated to facilitate collaboration.
Project History
Life and Annuity Administration System at DXC Technology
Managed the development of DXC Technology's digital life and annuity insurance administration system.
I led a global team to develop and deploy a highly configurable, component-based life and annuity administration system.
• Managed onshore and offshore teams, including Java developers, UI/UX developers, business analysts, and architects.
• Spearheaded evolution of Scaled Agile and Lean practices.
• Developed team metrics to drive continuous improvement.
• Transformed the team from the mindset of “working on a task” to completing smaller work increments that delivered real business value throughout the release cycle, improving backlog management and eliminating overtime.
• Performed risk assessment and ongoing corrective actions.
• Implemented quality standards to ensure 95% of the business functionality went through automated tests.
Agile Training at DXC Technology
Developed and facilitated remote training for global teams.
I led the development and facilitation of a four-day class for hands-on training to prepare Agile teams to launch an Agile Release Train (ART). The syllabus included Agile values and principles, ART roles, and exercises that illustrated how to launch and execute a Program Increment (PI) successfully. I also co-facilitated Scaled Agile Framework’s leading SAFe for 24 employees in nine countries.
Insurance Product Configurator at DXC Technology
Led transformation of the Product Accelerator development team from Waterfall to Agile methodology.
On this project, I facilitated release planning, backlog grooming, and Scrum ceremonies. I also developed dashboards to monitor team metrics and identify opportunities for improvement.
As a release train engineer, I led the transition to Essential SAFe and implemented the first Agile Release Train with four cross-functional teams focused on business value and one system team to support the development environment and pipeline:
• Provided SME coaching to four new scrum masters to continuously deliver business value.
• Tracked work status and managed risks and issues.
• Facilitated retrospectives and inspect-and-adapt workshops to drive continuous improvement and process validation.
External Calculation Engine Projects for DXC Technology
Managed projects for major insurance carriers to improve time for marketing the new insurance products by implementing DXC's product configuration tool.
I managed global teams from four to 25 developers and product specialists to support the entire insurance product development lifecycle.
• Collaborated with clients to improve speed to market for new insurance products.
• Coordinated all project documentation preparation, from initial statements of work, project planning, status, and final delivery.
• Developed detailed project plans to highlight significant milestones and dependencies.
• Identified and managed project risks and impediments that could decrease the team’s velocity.
CEO Cockpit for Genworth Financial
Served as project manager to develop an executive level dashboard to display key business metrics.
The CEO Cockpit provided a summary of key business processes, including new business cycle time, call center statistics, and claims.
Key responsibilities:
• Collaborated with C-suite and key business leaders to identify objective metrics.
• Managed the design and development of red/yellow/green indicators with drill-down reporting using BusinessObjects.
• Participated in weekly review meetings with the senior leadership team, which frequently requested enhancements to the dashboards.
System Conversion for Genworth Financial
Successfully managed CyberLife upgrade and conversion.
Key responsibilities:
• Managed onsite and remote teams responsible for converting traditional and advanced products.
• Implemented the best Agile practices such as decomposing deliverables into smaller tasks and delivering products with the greatest business value first.
• Facilitated weekly stakeholder briefings.
Business Intelligence Center of Excellence for Genworth Financial
I led the creation of the Business Intelligence Center of Excellence and initial implementation across multiple US locations.
The Business Intelligence team led the development of a data warehouse, consolidating data from disparate systems, and automating reports created using Crystal Reports and Excel.
Key responsibilities:
• Performed structured product evaluation to select BusinessObjects as the preferred tool.
• Managed the development team responsible for building and maintaining Oracle database environment.
• Led data transformation and load effort using Informatica PowerCenter to populate the data warehouse with contract data from CyberLife, Vantage One, and LifeComm systems.
Intranet Migration to SharePoint Online
Improved intranet usability for employees and content providers by migrating to SharePoint Online, which provides a standard set of tools for creating and displaying content.
Led planning, daily stand-ups, retrospectives, and sprint reviews for a global team distributed across four countries. Project objectives included a complete refresh of the home page, creating new content templates, and integration with Yammer and MS Teams to facilitate collaboration and employee feedback. The SharePoint Online environment enhanced the user experience by providing native access for mobile devices and improving access to cloud-based content.
Product Manager for Digital Farm Monitoring and Fertilization Application
https://www.at.farm/Led the farm and field management team, which provides software to enable farmers to utilize satellite imagery to monitor and apply fertilizers.
Led the implementation of a third-party product (Spacenus) to automatically detect and draw field boundaries using a single click.
Consistently performed backlog refinement to provide the opportunity to make adjustments. Introduced time-boxed design spikes to enable the additional elaboration of new product features.
Actively managed risks and dependencies.
Certifications
Certified SAFe Release Train Engineer (RTE)
Scaled Agile, Inc.
Certified SAFe Scrum Master (SSM)
Scaled Agile, Inc.
Certified SAFe Practitioner (SP)
Scaled Agile, Inc.
Certified SAFe 6 Practice Consultant
Scaled Agile, Inc.
Leading SAFe (SA)
Scaled Agile, Inc.
Certified Scrum Master (CSM)
Scrum Alliance
Project Management Professional (PMP)
Project Management Institute
Six Sigma Green Belt
General Electric
Skills
Tools
Jira, Big Room Planning, Microsoft Project, Microsoft PowerPoint, Office 365, Confluence, Atlassian Suite, Google Docs, Slack, Microsoft Outlook, Google Workspace, GitHub
Paradigms
Agile, Waterfall Development, Continuous Integration (CI), Agile Leadership, Agile Delivery, Agile Workflow, Agile Software Development, Agile Product Management, Agile Project Management, Scrum, Planning Poker, Servant Leadership, Waterfall Delivery, Implementation Project Management, Kanban, Release Trains, Change Management, Team Development, Test-driven Development (TDD), Behavior-driven Development (BDD), Cross-platform, B2C, DevOps, Requirements Analysis, Agile UX, B2B2C, Business to Business to Consumer (B2B2C), Six Sigma, Azure DevOps, Testing
Platforms
SharePoint, Azure
Industry Expertise
Financial Services, Life Insurance, Insurance, Lean Six Sigma, Call Centers, Digital Agencies, Healthcare, Agriculture
Other
IT Project Management, Program Management, Scrum Master, Release Train Engineer (RTE), Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Enterprise Coaching, Project Management, Consulting, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Agile Sprints, Agile Practices, Agile Coaching, Agile Product Delivery, Agile Program Management, Project Tracking, IT Projects, Project Reporting, Budget Management, Project Budget Management, Remote Team Leadership, Remote Work, Technical Project Management, Project Controls, Project Planning, Sprint Planning, Capacity Planning, Risk Management, Cross-cultural Management, Collaboration, Project Estimation, Cost Estimation, Project Timelines, Team Leadership, Project Leadership, Issue Management, IT Management, Waterfall Methodology, Project Lifecycle, Resource Allocation, Enterprise Systems, Implementation, Process Improvement, Facilitation, Estimations, Backlog Grooming, User Stories, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Enterprise, Cross-cultural Communication, Cross-departmental Collaboration, Sprints, Sprint Ceremonies, Project Management Professional (PMP), Time Management, Software Implementation, Budgeting, Lean Budgets, IT Services, Client Services, Certified Project Manager, Process Management, Quality Management, Strategic Planning, Reports, Team Productivity, Coaching, Estimation & Planning, Customer Service Management (CSM), Sprint Retrospectives, Enterprise Software, Agile Release Training, Release Management, Software Release Management, Technical Program Management, Stakeholder Engagement, API Integration, IT Consulting, Mentorship & Coaching, COBOL, Training, P&C Insurance, Product Owner, PMI, Scrum Coaching, Data Conversion, Digital Delivery Management, CICS, Virtual Storage Access Method (VSAM), ISPF, Metrics, MVS, Resource Management, Financials, Defect Management, Program Increment Planning, Agile Transformation, Agile Scaling Frameworks, Agile DevOps, Project Rescue, Change Leadership, Client Management, Communication, Leadership, Team Mentoring, Team Building, Stakeholder Management, Documentation, Team Management, Creative Problem Solving, Remote Work Consulting, Leadership Development, Project Scoping, Software Development, Roadmaps, Product Roadmaps, Training Content, Training Workshops, Business Transformation, Retrospective Techniques, GAP Analysis, Cross-functional Team Leadership, Management Reporting, Cross-functional Collaboration, Transformational Leadership, Leadership Training, Financial Reporting, Business Requirements, System Requirements, Vendor Management, Vendor Selection, Requirements & Specifications, Functional Requirements, Enterprise Metrics, Planning, Stakeholder Interviews, Technical Hiring, Technical Recruiting, Product Ownership, Technical Leadership, Risk Assessment, Risk & Compliance, IT Operations Management (ITOM), Process Design, Business Processes, Backlog Management, Feature Backlog Prioritization, User Requirements, QA Testing, Digital Project Management, Product Management, Requirements, Design Sprints, Operations, Project Management Office (PMO), Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Integration, Automation, Product Launch, Technical Product Management, Business Process Automation, APIs, Technical Requirements, Software as a Service (SaaS), SharePoint Online, Discovery, Web Applications, System Conversion, File Conversion, Full-stack, Wireframing, Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Certified Trainer, Web Project Management, Product Development Manager, Product Delivery, System Design, Solution Design, BI Reporting, Project Discovery, WebApp, Feature Analysis, Feature Planning, Feature Roadmaps, Product Design, Product Vision, Community of Practice, Community Management, Digital Solutions, Websites, Data Analytics, Business Analysis, Training & Training Content Development, Scrum Product Owner, Business Plan Consulting, Business Process Improvement (BPI), Business Process Re-engineering, System Integration, Objectives & Key Results (OKRs), Conflict Resolution, Client Relationship Management, Negotiation, Microsoft Teams, Database Management, Application Monitoring, Business Intelligence (BI), Discovery Workshops, Microsoft Azure, Customer Service, REST APIs, Technical Direction, eCommerce, Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A), Post-merger Integration, Data Science, Fintech, Web Platforms, Mobile, Charity, Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs), Startups, RESTful Development, Web Product Management, Analysis, Project Evaluation, Request for Proposal (RFP), Security, Cybersecurity, Security Audits, Design Systems, Digital Transformation Program Management
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