Jennifer Downing Email & Phone Number

Palmetto, Fl, Us

Palmetto, Fl, Us

Florida, United States

Leverage Agile technical practices to promote high-quality, sustainable work across multiple teams. Implement strategies to enhance Agile acumen within the organization and to ensure stakeholders recognize the business value of Agile practices. Guide/coach Scrum Team on Agile practices and principles to deliver high quality products and services. Track and measure scrum team performance to determine areas for team improvement. Identify and remove impediments to progress, including conflict resolution. Develop proficiency with Hitachi’s Unified Framework and train team members on the framework. Contribute to the advancement/improvement of Unified Framework practices within the organization. Work with multiple enterprise level clients simultaneously, which have multiple scrum teams per project. Facilitate and support all scrum events: Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review & Sprint Retrospective. Collaborate with Product Owners and Hitachi Project Managers/Coordinators to understand the teams’ velocity, progression against the backlog, and key project issues and risks.- Facilitate Hitachi's Scrum Master Unified Framework Office Hours.- Led a team of 5 Scrum Masters to cover all people management activities.

Sarasota, Florida, United States

Release Train Engineer for a train of 9 Scrum teams which are fully remote and in desperate time zones, as part of the company’s initial SAFe implementation. Facilitate all aspects of the SAFe framework, including PI Planning, Scrum of Scrums, System Demos and Inspect & Adapt workshops. Manage Program Board, Jira dashboards and other information radiators to track train-level progress. Monitor, collect and evaluate train level metrics shared with management and teams to identify improvement opportunities. Coach the team members, Product Owners and Scrum Masters in maturing their Scrum, SAFe and agile practices. Establish and document Scrum team best practices across the organization. Collaborate with management to address issues with SAFe transition and implementation.• Key contributor in initiative to change and implement new practices in Jira to promote agile maturity• Established and facilitate an agile Community of Practice group

Sarasota, Fl

Acted as Scrum Master for Scrum team with ~ 10 members. Supported the Development team and Product Owners with management of the product backlog including assignment of resources, planning of deliverables, and setting of milestones. Facilitated all aspects of the Scrum framework, including sprint planning sessions, backlog grooming sessions, daily scrums, sprint reviews and sprint retrospectives. Maintained the Scrum team capacity plan, Scrum board, sprint backlog, velocity charts and burn down charts. Coached the team in self-organizing and maturing their agile practices. Identified and helped to remove impediments to enable success of the Scrum team. Proactively managed risks and issues providing appropriate escalation to the necessary levels. Fostered visibility and transparency to ensure that the team's progress, obstacles, and successes are highly visible. Facilitated regular meetings with DevOps and the Client Success Team to schedule and coordinate client deployments.

Clearwater, Fl

Scrum Master for multiple teams working on internal applications. Responsible for holding daily stand ups, sprint reviews, retrospectives, backlog grooming, and sprint planning, velocity monitoring, and liaison with the Product Owners to prioritize and groom the product backlog. Utilized Jira to track and communicate team and sprint/release progress. Assisted team to make appropriate commitments through story selection, sizing, task definition and capacity planning. Provided guidance and training for agile/Scrum practices to improve agile maturity. Facilitated Scrum of Scrum meetings with cross-team technology participants.

Palmetto, Fl

Scrum Master for 2 teams, focused on mobile applications and customer facing web-based applications. Responsible for holding daily stand ups, sprint reviews, retrospectives, backlog grooming, and sprint planning, velocity monitoring, and liaison with the project managers and BAs to prioritize and groom the product backlog. Track and communicate team velocity and sprint/release progress. Utilize Azure DevOps to create queries and dashboards for tracking team metrics. Assist team to make appropriate commitments through story selection, sizing and task definition to protect them from over-commitment. Set standards for format and content of the different Scrum ceremonies. Facilitate Retrospective of Retrospective meetings with cross-team technology leadership.• Held dual role as BA and scrum master for over 10 months• Trained and mentored fellow employee as a Scrum Master & successfully tutored to achieve SM certification• Created and documented multiple Agile/Scrum best practices for both business and tech audiences• Instrumental in implementing a technology reorganization plan for interaction between the PMO and dev teams• Facilitated Solution Sprints following TheSprintBook.com practices for solving problems and testing ideas

Sarasota, Florida Area

Initially Scrum Master for 2 teams, focused on tax return preparation/processing and customer facing marketing-related applications. Later Scrum Master for 3 teams, focused on Business Intelligence, Release Management and Network Engineering/Security/DBA. Responsible for holding daily stand ups, sprint reviews, retrospectives, backlog grooming, and sprint planning, velocity monitoring, and liaison with the product owners to prioritize and groom the product backlog. Tracked and communicated team velocity and sprint/release progress. Utilized both Rally and TFS to create queries for tracking team metrics. Assisted team to make appropriate commitments through story selection, sizing and task definition to protect them from over-commitment. Facilitated Scrum of Scrums with multiple team representatives and Retrospective of Retrospective meetings with technology leadership.• Held dual role as product owner and scrum master for over 6 months• Coordinated production deployments between scrum team and marketing team for public web site• Provided on-boarding assistance and knowledge transfer for new product owners and scrum master

Sarasota, Fl

Manage quality assurance team which is responsible for over 140 applications (written in .NET/Windows/C++/Redhat/Linux) and reports supporting functions of 6400 offices in tax service business, including financial reports, employee management/training, electronic filing, bank processing and marketing. Set direction for a team of 6 testers, plus additional 2 off-shore and 3 -5 seasonal resources (prioritize and assign workload, arrange staffing and develop contingencies for resource constraints). Responsible for all people management tasks (provide performance feedback, increase skills, coach/mentor staff, interview candidates and perform annual reviews). Develop and track team budget worth over $300,000 (not including salaries and project-specific costs). Negotiated with vendors providing test resources or services to establish Master Service Agreements and subsequent SOW contracts. Manage relationship with internal Support department for which QA team is escalation point. Collaborate with project managers and other teams to ensure the correct priority of projects and tasks and address resource conflicts.• Created a strategic and tactical planning roadmap for the department• Developed a spreadsheet to track regression testing• Hands-on testing on various applications• Increased cross-team knowledge of responsible applications by 40%• Reduced quantity of escalated support cases by 25% – eliminating need for weekly meeting between departments

Sarasota, Fl

Managed technical development team responsible for over 140 applications and reports supporting functions of 6400 offices in tax service business. Set direction for team of 8 developers with skills in C++, C#, SQL, FoxPro, SharePoint, and tax form development. Responsible for all people management tasks. Managed relationships with internal customers (project managers and other teams) to ensure proper task priority and resource allocation.. Coordinated with vendors and offshore resources on staff augmentation needs and assignments.• Held dual role as project manager on 2 projects: SharePoint replacement of Lotus application and IT asset inventory• Created organization's first ever SOP template and guidelines – authored company's SDLC and Software Maintenance SOPs• Successfully delivered all applications on time despite extremely tight time lines and resource constraints

Sarasota, Fl

Responsible for deployment of equipment, including using Norton Ghost to setup new computers. Supported the desktop needs of over 200 employees, locally and remotely – including troubleshooting issues and deploying software/equipment. Utilized Active Directory to add machines/users and administer rights/passwords. Responsible for annual effort of providing equipment and account setup needs for seasonal Support Center training. Implemented new procedures to achieve long and short term process improvements. • Developed organized method of tracking equipment which decreased new employee deployment times by 30%• Consistently within under 10% of the department response time SLA• Continued to fully support prior position after transitioning to new role – fully trained replacement within 4 weeks

Sarasota, Fl

Responsible for creating and deploying builds on both the UNIX and Windows platforms, multiple daily builds to the test/dev environments and production releases. Provided quality control test on daily builds and production releases. Administered Lotus Notes issue tracking database. Utilized MS Visual SourceSafe to create new code branches. Managed the automated testing tool to track results/changes. • Key member on project to reduce preparer time by 35% for returning customers, providing data for over 800 franchisees• Identified several key issues before deployment which would have caused costly production issues and re-deployments

Sarasota, Fl

Managed quality assurance for 12 high-profile internal projects. Designed and implemented the test strategy, plans, cases and scripts. Completed training and implemented Rational Robot for testing PeopleSoft payroll system. Facilitated meetings with key project personnel to monitor time lines and goals. Used PVCS to document/track software change requests and report project statistics. Acted as liaison between customer support and development teams, utilizing SQL queries to troubleshoot support cases and designing Standard Resolutions to expedite support case closure. Tested software for corporate taxes at individual state level.• Completed Learning Tree: Identifying and Confirming User Requirements course in May 2001• Recognized by tax manager for the speed and accuracy in which my test were completed – allowing time for additional runs

Bs, Business Administration And Management, General

Cum Laude

Aa, Paralegal Studies