Client: Colibri Group• eLearning company experiencing great growth due partly to the pandemic and partly by acquisitions.• Simultaneously performed the role Flow Master for a POC team and Scrum Master for their eCommerce team. Facilitated both teams in a cloud-based Jira system, supplemented with Confluence.• Provided agile-informed thought-leadership to the Director of Engineering.• Authored several Confluence Pages on a variety of agile topics: cadence, Jira issue types, output and outcome metrics, User Stories, backlog management, and estimating.

Client: Maritz• Motivational, Loyalty and Travel company, trying to reinvent itself and remain relevant in the digital economy.• Agile advisor to a multi-team, SAF-oriented train, creating a SAAS architected product: 1. Created a Lean-inspired Development LifeCycle, visually rich, and easy for developers and product owners to follow. As an added bonus, it was deemed sufficient to withstand a Soc 2 Type 2 audit.2. Worked with Product Management to begin articulating their requirements as Objectives & Key Results (OKR), and when possible, as outcomes instead of outputs. 3. Began changing the train’s approach to planning feature development, from one that was team-based, to one that was feature-based. Dismantling this manifestation of Conway’s Law, lead to a corresponding change to the train’s progress reporting.4. Created a large pictorial of the emerging deployment pipelines, as the train began strangling their Monolith and moving that functionality to microservices. Inspired by DevOps, the intent was to highlight the shrinking Monolith and draw attention to those emerging deployment pipelines.5. Ended code freezes thru a combination of requiring release toggles and limiting who could deploy to upper environments.Ad hoc advisor to senior leadership:1. Built a convincing case that neither SAF nor Scrum was a good fit for their train. As a proof-of-concept, moved one team out of Scrum and into Kanban.2. Introduced a Lean-inspired throughput metric. Over time this ad hoc report became more consumed than the standard scrum-based metrics.3. As stakeholder disappointment grew, constructed a narrative that their train’s organizational structure had little likelihood of enabling them to meet stakeholder expectations. 4. Taking a cue from LeadingAgile, I convinced them to consider a prescriptive, transformation approach, focusing on three things: Forming Teams, Building Backlogs and Working Tested Software. Their leadership team liked it!

Client: ExpressScripts (ESI)• Pharmacy Benefits Manager (PBM), Fortune 100 company, in the midst of acquisition by Cigna Insurance.• Primarily applied Lean / Kanban methods to new web development products.• Team was focused on ESI’s Home Page, Login and Account Recovery and occasionally some Single Sign On and A/B Testing work.• Facilitated Story-writing workshops.• Instituted a Continuous Learning & Improvement cadence rotating through three topic areas: Metrics Review, Retrospective, and XP Practices.• Created 2 Basic Metrics, consisting of Lead Time and Throughput. Eventually these reports were applied across the organization of 200 teams via the Tableau data mart.• Created a game wherein the XP Practices were introduced to the developers. This laid the groundwork for individual developers to pick a Practice, study it, then lead a discussion among the other developers at one of the monthly learning sessions.

• Transportation organization with a generation worth of technical debt. • Multi-year initiative, involving several teams, focused on re-writing their core business system. • From a process perspective, lead the Teams in their adoption of the Scrum Framework, the Roles, Events, and Artifacts.• Established a sprint cadence wherein vertical slices of new functionality were coded, tested, presented at a Sprint Review, and added to a growing accumulation of potentially shippable code.• Brought focus to the Product Owner role, their current dysfunctions, and the opportunity to deliver more value with less code by continually espousing the 80/20 Rule. Provided suggestions on whether and how to supplement the PO Role with an Agile BA. • Pressed the organization on the importance of role clarity, a necessary pre-cursor to self-organization. Why? Self-organizing teams certainly minimize coordination costs and have the potential to maximize customer value.• Evangelized the value proposition of the agile thought process. On an impromptu basis, took multiple opportunities to expose functional managers to the perspective that agility starts with a thought process; that is, filter each decision thru the Agile Manifesto’s Values and Principles. • Addressed organization dysfunctions by providing a knowledge service on the subjects of: organizational agility; barely-sufficient reporting; Jira simplification; role clarity; agile methodology alternatives (Lean Kanban).

Client: Keefe Group• Lead 8-person development team building a web-services Banking application.• Established a 2-week iteration cycle, wherein vertical slices of functionality were planned, coded, tested and presented to stakeholders at a bi-weekly Sprint Review.• Established a cadence within which the Scrum Team had 8 contiguous business days to focus on completing the Sprint Plan. The remaining 2 days were reserved for: contingency buffer, Scrum ceremonies, Tech Debt, Backlog Grooming and Sprint Planning.• Lead meetings wherein the Scrum Development Team established an MVC Design Pattern and their coding standards were periodically updated.• Created and published a bi-weekly multi-level status report: Sprint Review, Release Plan, and Product Backlog.• Enabled the developers, at their discretion, to employ pairwise-programming.• Encouraged the developers to adopt and pursue a no-defects approach, in part to clarify forecasting of when the current Release would be “done done”.• Lobbied for dedicated resources. Moved them out of cubicles and into a dedicated room, enabling intra-team osmotic communication within a cone of silence.• Encouraged intra-team collaboration and enabled inter-team coordination.

Responsible for contract execution of the following types of projects: 1.) Exchange 2003 to 2010 – into a new Resource Forest:a.) Indianapolis-based healthcare provider.b.) Exchange 2010 scoping, design and testing, for 60k users. Design included Site Resiliency and migration (via Quest) to a new Resource Forest. 2.) Active Directory remediation to enable a Lotus Notes to Office 365 migration:a.) Dallas-based provider of large valves to the petroleum and nuclear energy industries.b.) Upgraded dozens of AD servers to most recent version of Win Server and cleanup client’s data in Active Directory, as a prelude to a 20k user, multi-continent, migration. 3.) Lotus Notes applications re-write for hosting on SharePoint:a.) St. Louis-based agri-chemical company.b.) Coordinated off-shore resource mix including: 15 onsite; 50+ Hyderabad India; 100+ Hanoi Vietnam.Advised MCS management of forecasted variances, giving them ample time to make difficult customer-management decisions.Provided day-to-day coordination of on-site resources, leading them in facilitated planning sessions and guiding their customer interactions.

Client: Galleria (United Kingdom)• Lead delivery of a $10M space planning & optimization solution, a multi-terabyte MS-SQL database solution at the world’s largest retailer.• Presented results of 5 week SQL scalability test, conducted at Microsoft’s SQL Lab in Seattle, to the retailer’s Information Systems Division (ISD) and their Business unit at the Home Office. Explained necessary fixes, and resultant delays in timeline, to the Information Systems and Business Unit customers.• Kept Galleria stakeholders (based in the UK) involved via weekly project status reports, and periodic trips to central England.

Client: Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, Capital Markets (CM) Group• Coordinated scheduling, issue management, and change control for a $10M project to enhance decision support information for the securitization of residential mortgages, resulting in a CM Operational Data Store and a Finance Data Mart. • Pursued project initiation work to obtain funding for an R&D project detailing data requirements for selling assets and hedging those held in inventory.