Christopher Whittier Email & Phone Number

Ellicott City, Md, Us

Remote

Leveraging an enterprise-wide view, Strategy and Transformation (S&T) uniquely identifies opportunities across Verizon to unlock value. The S&T team includes members with backgrounds from Fortune 500 and top external consulting companies from around the globe and across various industries. The team provides an outside in perspective and challenge the status quo while helping to transform the various business units within Verizon.

Remote

Rhode Island, United States

Took on the task of turning a founder run "start-up" into a mature organization that can execute on the mission and grow effectively.

Rhode Island, United States

Advised executive directors and the board on a number of different topics, including change management, navigating resistance, design thinking, facilitation, and strategy.

Remote

- Educated two teams in scrum frameworks as well as complementary practices resulting in improved predictability and delivery.- Worked with a team of mostly independent and specialized contractors working on a number of projects to plan, track and identify ways to improve agility in a non conventional setting in order to hit quarterly goals.

- Evaluated, designed and implemented a Product/Engineering re-org focused on enabling agility. Highlights include moving from component-focused teams to cross-functional teams and realizing a single product backlog resulting in a significant increase in focus and delivery of high value items.- Introduced leadership change management practices to get buy-in and engagement on change initiatives, resulting in improved response and sustainability compared to past failed efforts.- Facilitated “Program Level” reviews with stakeholders resulting in an increase in feedback and therefore quality, as well as a greater awareness and alignment on work being done and its priority.- Scaled quarterly planning efforts by defining and guiding through processes and expectations on work refinement, commitments, dependency and risk management, etc. improving the ability to deliver on promises through greater focus, and less priority shifts and distractions.

Remote

- Standardized a number of engineering and agile metrics providing visibility on performance and delivery making it easy to identify and resolve bottlenecks and impediments.- Provided workshops and training to address organizational knowledge gaps and enhance the agile toolkit of 16 scrum teams and leadership. - Created and supported a collaborative culture and break down of silos by providing opportunities for feedback, learning, and discussion across teams, and coaching management on empowerment vs micromanagement.- Led company-wide CoE initiatives such as agile education for new hires, incident retrospectives, quarterly assessments and an agile book club.

Remote

- Increased visibility, predictability and delivery of value for three teams by education in SAFe and Scrum frameworks as well as complementary practices.- Assisted leadership in identifying and removing impediments and gaps in knowledge and practices to improve outcomes.

Providence, Rhode Island Area

- Served two scrum teams and focused on continuous improvement through coaching, goal setting, and retrospection resulting in a more self-organized, pro-active and value based approach to development. - Guided teams and stakeholders through a new product kickoff using product vision boards, personas, story mapping and refinements to align, estimate, prioritize and plan work resulting in fast realization of value and reduction of risks.- Led company-wide CoE initiatives such as agile education for new hires, lean coffee corners, and an agile book club.

Providence, Rhode Island Area

- Introduced Scrum to the organization and made incremental changes to engineering processes, resulting in better cooperation, planning and earlier identification of risk.- Removed organizational dependencies, including eliminating handoffs between Engineering and QA “departments” by including QA in sprints and the definition of done, resulting in increased quality and faster cycle times.- Introduced devops practices and tools for CICD (Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery) reducing manual effort, time and cost needed to release.- Contributed as software developer with experience in C, C#, C++, and java. Led multiple successful software projects both in-house and offshore. (Could go into more detail, but I am not focusing on my developer background here)

Executive Education: Artificial Intelligence: Implications For Business Strategy

Bachelor Of Science (B.S.), Computer Science