Tony Amos

I devised implementation strategies for each team as part of a larger initiative to bring a digital technology division to greater effectiveness. Over nine months, I introduced Scrum practices such as backlog management, daily stand-ups, sprint planning, and retrospectives. Some teams used Jira and Confluence, and others Microsoft Azure.

Also, I mentored scrum masters, advised management on effective Agile practices, and established procedures for greater consistency for velocity measurement and overall sprint management. Increasing team effectiveness was achieved by proactively guiding product owners to strengthen relationships with business units and forming collaborative relationships among development teams to resolve blockers.

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 implementation planning, and run DevOps workshops as well as various Agile workshops as needed.

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.

Clients rely on this cloud-based SaaS solution to aggregate data and perform analyses that are not otherwise possible. The service empowers clients to gather information from external sources such as business partners, clients, vendors, and internal documents. This service reads documents, applies structure to the information, and then loads it to a database. It also cleanses and enhances data by integrating machine learning and 3rd-party data into the normalization process. Clients then use various analytic tools to make business use of the information.

This product is my original design, and I drew upon many years of software and data management experience within enterprise-level organizations. As a system architect, I designed the platform and data normalization processes, wrote specifications, engaged 3 – 5 contract staff to write and test code, and implemented a CI/CD solution to automate code review, testing, and release.

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

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.

I collaborated with customer care department heads, team managers, trainers, and technologists to document business practices and system integrations needed to bring a Salesforce-based customer care system to life.

I aided the client in negotiating contract terms with external vendors. Also, I served as the liaison with the client’s digital technology teams so that business and technical requirements were documented and compliance needs met. This ensured the project was ready for strategic integration with the larger Salesforce platform efforts.

I met the first critical component of project responsibilities by becoming the first technology resource in the client’s experience to attend customer care training with employees. This included product training, a retailer visit, and shadowing real cases. The experience and knowledge gained from that investment paid significant dividends during requirement gathering, analysis, and system integration planning.

Finally, I set up a Scrum working model for external vendors since they performed most of the implementation and worked with the internal digital team to create a DevOps solution to facilitate the integration of vendors’ work products into the internal testing platforms.

Working very closely with a first-time product owner and a 12-member development team, I was given several tasks:

• Meet an upcoming commitment to have the product ready for business acceptance testing in six weeks.
• Address several problems with the team’s dynamics.
• Bring the project in line with the Scrum framework.

Having already missed two prior commitments, the team needed to repair its reputation.

I immediately implemented consistent scrum ceremonies, eliminated excess meetings, and negotiated to reduce dysfunctional interactions by establishing boundaries around accountability. Also, I set sprint goals and disallowed any distractions from immediate goals.

In order to become an independent arbitrator for technical disagreements, I took on the responsibility of managing integration testing and empowered the product owner to be the final decision-maker.

I closely tracked activities using Microsoft Azure to maintain team focus and instituted internal and external dependency tracking to stay ahead of upcoming blockers. Finally, I proactively tracked and worked with the product owner to clear blockers rather than leaving them to developers and testers.

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 a member of the global deployment team and established the North American markets’ relationships with Medallia. It involved managing the retirement of existing customer survey systems and collaborating with local digital technology teams to integrate survey results with an internal data lake.

I coordinated efforts with vendors and data engineers to transition retiring data so that new data would not interfere with statistical analysis. Also, I participated in data design to facilitate more meaningful statistical analysis when new data came on board, helped with data integration and testing, and documented adjustments to Medallia’s rules to accommodate local market needs.

Finally, I helped the project to maintain momentum by guiding the global development team, documenting data model adjustments, creating sample analytic models for local testing, and working with the vendor to ensure data accuracy.

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.