Ellen Albright Email & Phone Number

Scrum Master | Agile | JIRA |Business Analyst | Confluence | Microsoft TeamsI found my passion when I began working with DST. I was hired, by DST, as a Business Analyst/Scrum Master after over 20 years with ADM Milling, in the Tech/Accounting BA role. I have a desire to help people be successful. I knew very little about the Agile-Scrum world when I was hired and was delighted with the opportunity to teach myself and my newly formed team about agile. My co-workers are and were awesome. They all had different strengths and weaknesses. Our biggest challenge was figuring out how to have synergy as a team. The Scrum Master has the unique position to guide the team toward practices to build synergy. My role as a Scrum Master was to help the team participate in the Agile-Scrum methodologies, lead the team in ways to become high functioning, and understand what synergy truly is and looks like. Lastly, share what I learned with the team and collaborate with the team about ideas to put into practice to help us build synergy. I began my quest for knowledge and understanding about high functioning teams and synergy. I learned synergy is the whole is greater than its parts, suggesting, as a whole team more will be accomplished. When a team has synergy, it inspires every member of the team to put its best foot forward. This is how the team will become high functioning and successful. Next, I talked to mentors at work and outside of work about their successes in helping a team build synergy and researched the intranet/internet for suggestions. I set up a meeting for collaboration about team building ideas and to creating a team goal. At first the team was resistant to any team building ideas. I suggested maybe we could start with the Goal. Everyone agreed we wanted to be a high functioning team with successful sprints. After we agreed on the goal, it was easier to obtain an agreement from the team to try team building activities. We did short team-building activities monthly. In addition, we talked about the ways to create open, trusting communication. These included appreciating each members different abilities, listening, empathy, dependability. My team was recognized for having made great progress toward synergy. Our projects were delivered, by the team, on time and with few bugs. Each year brings its own set of challenges, and I am a part of a new team again and we are on the path to working toward synergy and becoming a solid, high functioning team again.