Aaron Parker Email & Phone Number

Chicago, Illinois, United States

-Challenging leaders to define measurable, actionable goals as priorities and to provide clear focus to their teams about what is most important to the organization and to their department-Teaching team members and organizational leaders about Scrum events, process best practices, and how we can discover a strong fit for each team and their context-Encouraging a culture of understanding and experimentation through conversations about hypothesis testing and discovery with a bias towards shorter time intervals

Austin

• Identified and prioritized organizational and team level problems through observations and interactions with individuals and one on one conversations, then worked to resolve those problems through retrospective meetings and follow up conversations with team members and leaders • Championed personal growth and development activities with a positive attitude to inspire individual change across the organization • Helped team members have difficult conversations with each other to resolve challenging problems• Conducted coaching sessions to teach empathy and active listening skills• Act as scrum master for two teams of 8-10 members• Facilitated Scrum meetings including standups, grooming, sprint reviews, and retrospectives• Designed retrospective activities to address specific issues teams were facing utilizing dot and fist of five voting, web form surveys, and other techniques• Conducted training sessions on facilitation with managers and team members• Assisted with quarterly planning kickoff sessions and Scrum of Scrum meetings aligned with a modified version of SAFe

Austin

My role was to help manage the release process for a practice management and electronic health records product.• Failed to bring an architecture group into a more visible and transparent way (Kanban board) of working to serve the feature development teams • Built relationships quickly across the development team members, product organization, and support department• Evangelized Agile methodologies and tools through the use of a Personal Kanban, paper handouts, and hallway conversations

Austin, Texas

I split time with two Scrum teams working across a ~30 person IT department. • Lost trust with business stakeholders and sponsors in the ways I was tackling organizational and team level issues which ultimately undermined my ability to support the software teams• Educated development team members, product owners, IT management, and business stakeholders about Agile principles, implementation frameworks, and best practice approaches• Facilitated Scrum ceremonies on two teams for two week sprints including daily standups, grooming sessions, planning sessions, retrospectives, and reviews

Dallas

Cognizant gave me the opportunity to engage in a variety of different experiences within a very short time frame.I started as a business analyst for a healthcare software implementation where I learned how to read and create strong documentation for requirements. I also adapted to the offshore model for distributed development teams that are common in today’s workplaces.I spent my second year there improving the customer experience of an e-commerce platform for a leading telecommunications company as a quality assurance lead in an agile development team. Learning agile and scrum methodology was a huge break from previous assignments, but I quickly managed to make regular contributions to the team and our agile processes. As part of the quality assurance effort, I detected hundreds defects and worked side-by-side with developers and business analysts to clarify requirements and deploy dozens of code fixes to ship 2 successful releases for our product. In my last role which I held for two years, I moved beyond practicing agile to teaching it to multiple distributed scrum teams where everyone was either halfway around the country or halfway around the world. I worked closely with stakeholders from across the entire organizational spectrum from the development leads, architects, and product owners to marketing managers and client facing operations managers.I worked together with my client and scrum teams to transform the way traditional telecommunications companies do business by changing the client culture and industry perceptions of how technology brings value to their business and customers.

Buenos Aires

I worked at a small marketing firm that specialized in web design and search engine optimization in between my classes. At RelevanSi, I designed proposals for new business, created trackings tools for the sales team, and edited blog articles.• Created a proposal to generate over $5000 in new business and several spreadsheets on global search engine optimization businesses to guide strategy and to monitor competition • Collaborated with a multilingual team to complete team projects and study the host country’s culture

Champaign, Il

I led a team of seven peers from diverse backgrounds and subject areas in client engagements for two consulting projects. For our work, we drew analyses from multiple data sources including market research reports, experts, and survey data which we compiled for our client in meetings and presentations. I was later selected to work with the same client again on a similar project as a project manager where I had more direction over our research efforts and additional coordination with our client lead. Achievements:• Developed a strategy for the classification and segmentation of online consumers to optimize the online marketing efforts of a Fortune 100 client through research and analysis of consumer markets • Managed a team of 8 to build and deliver a project management tool tracking resource allocation • Raised ~$10,000 in revenue from past client pursuing additional projects and awarded a $500 scholarship

Chicago, Il

My internship at Bank of America (BoA) gave me an inside look at the middle and back office operations of one the world’s largest investment banking operations. My group supported the foreign exchange platform for BoA’s internal trading desk, white label, and private clients.Achievements:• Configured an alerting system in a monitoring application for BoA’s proprietary foreign exchange auto-trading platform to improve quality assurance efforts and to prevent losses of up to $2M/month • Interacted with over two dozen clients to improve and update monitoring efforts for the trading platform

Northbrook

UL Environment was a one-of-a-kind startup experience. I adjusted to new assignments on a weekly, and sometimes daily, basis: one day I was using social networking media for public relations, the next I was creating a training presentations for our Italian sales team. My most significant project was a complex market analysis of 13 different industries for the CEO and Director of Commerical Development to determine the most lucrative new product lines for their burgeoning new business.Achievements• Performed market research and sizing analysis on over three dozen industries to identify strategic opportunities for future service lines• Prepared multiple research documents to support M&A activity • Improved ULE’s marketing strategy by compiling market research and analyzing ULE’s press coverage• Optimized ULE’s knowledge management system by administrating previous research efforts and restructuring the interface to maximize usability

Mundelein, Il

I collaborated with the lead partner to devise a marketing plan for a new eCommerce site selling promotional sportswear products.• Monitored and revised Google AdWords campaign to increase website traffic by 200% • Devised diverse and wide-reaching marketing plan for a newly launched website through networking, web analytics, and qualitative research • Devised a strategy and wrote copy for two e-mail marketing campaigns• Generated leads from dozens of phone calls, hundreds of e-mail communications, and in-person networking activities