At Improving, we aspire to create trust with our clients and each other through creating transparency, delivering results, continuously improving, clarifying expectations, and keeping our commitments. Please reach out to me for information about public and private classes or short term coaching engagements to help your people, teams, and organizations experience continuous improvement.

Helping People and Teams Solve Complex Problemshttps://www.scrum.org/blake-mcmillanClasses Offered:Professional Scrum MasterProfessional Scrum Master AdvancedProfessional Scrum Product OwnerProfessional Scrum Product Owner AdvancedApplying Professional ScrumProfessional Scrum with KanbanProfessional Agile Leadership - EssentialsProfessional Agile Leadership - Evidence Based ManagementProfessional Scrum Facilitation SkillsProfessional Scrum Product Backlog Management Skills

Our mission is to support all Kanban practitioners, new & old, by providing a safe and inclusive forum to learn Kanban.Classes Offered:Applying Professional Kanban

• Completed 6 month engagement - Booted up 5 Scrum Teams, introduction to Scrum events, developed team goals and working agreements, built product backlogs, and visualized work through customized Jira boards. • Implemented 26 improvements discovered through Sprint Retrospectives: increasing transparency, eliminating non-value add work, remediating training gaps, developing prioritization techniques, and improving cycle time through dependency analysis. • Advanced Toyota Scrum Master Agile Practice: Scrum Values workshop, Evaluating Scrum Team Performance workshop, Toyota Way discussion group, facilitated Scrum Master Quality Circle gatherings, and developed 3 Agile games.

• Increased transparency of backlog, work in progress, and done providing team better opportunities to adapt to prioritization changes and information radiators for leadership to have insights to performance without disrupting the team or reliance on push reporting.• Coached and supported team on how to perform inspection and adaptation through our Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective resulting in increased self-organization of the team and a continuous improvement culture reducing cycle time for key program deliverables by 50%.• 20+ Improvements through Retrospectives- Culture: Self-Organized, Customer Focused, NTNT- Organization: Split Imp Team from Support, - Process: Team wiki, Working Agreements/Conflict Resolution- Technology: Bug Fix App, Daily builds + EODF

• Built program & project dashboards in Rally providing IT PMO standardization guidelines (burndown, velocity, and cumulative flows), trained management in using metrics to assess which teams needed support. Provided training and support for Executive Stakeholders, Product Owners, Scrum Masters, and Development Team members to re-align with Scrum values and practices. • Supported business by assuming Product Owner role for two projects required for aligning disparate systems and processes across four departments. Worked directly with Dev Teams to maximize value in Product Backlog by prioritizing based on business benefit and development efficiency. Increased value to business by structuring iterative releases by feature to focus training, communications, and change management to affected groups. • Planned and delivered 18 highly date-driven projects using Agile/Scrum and Waterfall methodologies to support the integration of Technical Operations

• Planned and delivered (using Kanban) portfolio management project 5% below budget to prioritize strategic projects, increase transparency to VP and C-level execs, and provide measurable alignment with business goals. • Planned, designed, and implemented executive dashboards in JIRA for tracking IT, Marketing, and Sales Agile Scrum projects resulting in 20% productivity gain for VP and C-level execs

• Reduced incidents by 80% and project overages by 20% through process improvements reporting to Sr. VP of IT.• Repaired a broken $12MM/yr client relationship by taking ownership of platform instability and leading a $4MM remediation project with iterative releases based on business value.• Led 15 project managers, operations support managers, and technical architects. Provided prioritization guidance for 23 developers (.NET & ETL), quality assurance techs, sys admins, and database admins.

• Product Owner for Scrum team (5 onshore and 5 offshore) in successfully delivering a $2MM ETL data project.• Improved BSA project requirements gathering estimation processes by 30%.

• Led operations support teams (2 managers, 10 operators) responsible for multiple contact centers that handled 750k calls per month reporting to Director of Operations Support.• Improved outbound campaign setup process efficiency by 85%.

• Built and led 12 person onshore/offshore project support DevOps team to achieve consistent 100% customer satisfaction rating; selected as the IT team of the quarter in 2007 reporting to VP of IT.• Led 22 person managed service app support development team to reduce average ticket age by 25% and less than 1% defect rate. • Managed portfolio and IT governance for $4MM of platform improvement projects for IT Director.• Led IT employee morale initiative for auto finance department resulting in 60% improvement to 90th percentile in associate survey metrics.

• Progressive responsibility from desktop administrator to systems administrator to project engineer.• Planned & implemented SMS 2.0 project to support desktop growth of 300%.• Led project to replace manual server maintenance checks with automated maintenance scripts.• Managed IT operations support queue for 5 desktop admins 6 sys admins ensuring requests were completed according to established SLAs.

• Performed packaging and deployment of COTS and custom developed software.• Coordinated validation and user acceptance testing with business customers. • Provided level 3 support for software deployed through packaging and deployment processes.