Technical Project Manager in Summit, NJ, United States

I served as a liaison for over 80 development teams as they coordinated, tested, and prepared various enterprise and public-facing systems for monthly release cycles. Each scheduled release required a 6-week testing cycle, so I created a resource management strategy to maintain three test environments with overlapping schedules, established sprint cycles to manage testing, and participated in program implement (PI) planning to ensure proper communication and responsibility assignment.

This strategy resulted in an expanded testing capacity.

I was tasked with reducing the cost of resolving post-release software defects, so I introduced an OKR strategy to set objectives aimed at identifying, isolating, and prioritizing defects based on cost analysis.

The feature's cost factor became an input to WSJF calculations when prioritizing sprint backlog items. This forced defects with the highest cost-of-delay to be resolved first while allowing lower value defects to remain in the backlog.

Ultimately, the focus on higher-value defects reduced costs by 22% while maximizing value delivery, thus debunking the myth that all defects must be addressed immediately.

As part of a lending platform, I performed data analysis and business process analysis to deconstruct a 20-year-old 40GB SQL database in order to design a more flexible distributed model using SQL Server, SSRS, and MongoDB as new data stores.

I decided to use a distributed model to allow flexibility as the system grew while optimizing data storage and retrieval efficiency. SSRS provided a consistent data access method, facilitating the use of an API layer to isolate data from business process functionality.

As feature implementation progressed, the old Oracle database served as one of the data stores while we enabled functionality in the new platform. This eased the transition to the new platform, as it enabled us to gradually retire the old database as data moved to the new platform.

I served as liaison to 65 developers, product owners, and scrum masters across 12 teams as they were transforming their development practices from traditional waterfall to Scrum.

This was prior to the concept of an Agile coach or Scrum coach. After I implemented sprints, sprint goals, daily scrums, sprint reviews, and sprint retrospectives to manage our backlog and define our increments, I helped the product owner to treat other development teams as our stakeholders and size, prioritize, and refine the backlog.

My team was the first in the bank to fully implement Scrum, so we became the model for other teams. I coached other scrum masters, participated in their sprint reviews and retrospectives, and helped to keep their daily scrums from becoming a status meeting.

Using Python 3 and working closely with the product owner, I designed two microservice APIs which isolated business functionality and data management while facilitating eventual migration to the Cloud. Major services were implemented as thread-safe stateless processes to minimize operating system overhead, facilitate code distribution, and optimize performance.

Through design work, I prepared user stories and created organization standards for the definition of done. I helped the development team with epic and value-stream management, sizing efforts, and by addressing impediments.

I published an active and growing series of well-received articles on various aspects of Agile, Scrum, and life in the software profession on the Medium publishing platform. The articles have been distributed and promoted by the "Serious Scrum," "Agile Insider," and "The Innovation" publications, garnering hundreds of readers and scores of fans.

I created and produced a video series that focuses on different aspects of Agile and Scrum management. Each video covers a topic, challenge, or fundamental requirement necessary to bring Agile to life within an organization. I then extracted the audio track from the video to create a podcast channel.

As a member of the Verizon Wireless release management team, I was a direct asset to 23 DevOps Scrum teams for various internal and external software products across a variety of technology platforms. I created and monitored OKR strategies, prepared executive presentations, and tracked team-specific objectives.

Since Verizon follows the SAFe standard, I guided scrum masters and release train engineers to follow an Agile mindset, establish and follow continuous improvement practices, and advance increasingly predictable quality. I would routinely identify and correct behaviors that impeded positive progress, actively participate in program implement planning, and run DevOps workshops as well as various Agile workshops as needed.

For a commercial investment portfolio performance product, I transformed the development team to Scrum by implementing an Agile Transformation strategy. I coached the CEO and executive team as part of the Agile/Scrum transformation and then trained and coached a scrum master and product owner through Scrum adoption by participating in three Scrum iterations.