Jodi Higbee, Pmp, Csm, Cspo Email & Phone Number

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Area

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Area

With the project management role in its infancy when I began at Saxum, I borrowed on my past experience to help shape the role and define processes. In the absence of a true project management system, I identified manual processes that could be automated or streamlined, and introduced PM concepts across the company.As Saxum's only technical project manager, I established the processes and workflow for all website builds in addition to introducing agile concepts to ensure better team interaction and client feedback. Through those implementations, I averaged a 24% profitability on managed projects during my tenure.A member of Saxum's technology and processes committee, I spearheaded our transition from internal server storage to Google Drive and also managed our implementation of Hubspot. When it was evident the lack of a true resourcing tool was hurting us from an efficiency standpoint, I introduced Smartsheet to the PM team as a stop-gap solution while playing a role in identifying and implementing a true project management system - Workfront.

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Area

Joining the team at AFR was the biggest challenge of my project management career to date. I was presented with the opportunity to introduce agile methodologies to the TSD department, with the eventual long-term plan of using agile across the entire company.In a year and a half with AFR, we had great success in the TSD area with agile. I was the scrum master of three teams - the mainframe team, the business intelligence team, and the Britecore team.On the Britecore team we started with scrum from its inception, and even in my absence they continue to use it today. We successfully launched the first line of business on the new platform in March 2016. Shortly after that launch, we had 100% turnover of the developers on the team, which provided an exciting opportunity to reset and teach the agile methodology to a new team of developers.For the other two teams I worked with, given the age of the system we were dealing with, significant knowledge silos, and never-ending maintenance and bug tickets, it was been a cycle of "let's try this and adjust". We first implemented kanban, then moved to scrum, and finally embarked on a scrumban hybrid. It was a fun and unique challenge figuring out the best way to implement new school philosophies into an old school environment.In addition to my work with the teams, I implemented collaboration tools to the company in the form of Slack instant messaging and corporate Google accounts. Slack lessened everybody's dependency on e-mail and allowed real-time conversations to occur without calling everybody into a meeting. Additionally, Google Drive allowed them to access files from anywhere with internet access and truly collaborate within those files.In an industry as traditionally antiquated as insurance, I embraced the challenge to bring innovation to the forefront of everybody's minds.

Adding accounting responsibilities for 352 was an opportunity to learn more about the company and take the lessons I learned managing people and projects and apply them to a different area.Right out of the gate I identified and shored up significant holes in the third-party billing, which led to a significant increase in profit for the company.I streamlined our HR processes by researching and implementing new systems for time off and time tracking. This put the ownership of these responsibilities on the employees, allowing them to self-manage their schedules.I configured and entered 352's bi-weekly payroll, including he calculation of commissions for 352's sales project management teams. When 352 later moved to a bonus program, I tracked all efforts towards those milestones.Predicting profitability was a key component of my position, and as such I maintained an intricate spreadsheet showing billing projections for all eight development and both marketing teams. I also tracked the budget of each active project to provide better visibility into the opportunity, or sometimes necessity, to up sell.Because of my prior experience as a seasoned project manager and member of senior staff, when 352 changed its development strategy from waterfall to agile, I played a large role in coordinating the teams and transitioning clients. For those clients that didn't fit this new strategy well, I worked closely with a partner company to make their move over as seamless as possible. With this transition, I additionally took on the role of traffic manager, scheduling all new sales with the appropriate development or marketing team, and identifying when team schedule were opening up, minimizing down time and lost profit.This work gave me a broader understanding of 352 and how decisions made during the project life cycle affect the company's overall profit and loss. That experience became invaluable in my subsequent scrum master positions.

Embracing 352's transition to the agile workflow methodology, I became a certified scrum master and began working with an Agile team.Managing many types of projects in an agile environment proved to be a unique challenge, but one that was tremendously successful for both the product owner and my own personal growth. Due to the nature of our work, I interacted daily with multiple project owners to groom and prioritize backlogs for the team. I also led the team in developing processes for time-sensitive requests to balance the clients' needs to have the work done quickly against the team's need to focus on what was committed to in the sprint.

In May 2007 I joined the senior leadership team at 352 as the Director of Development - Project Management. While maintaining my project and work stream management workloads, I began overseeing the entire Project Management departmentWorking closely with the heads of the engineering and design departments, we created a new workflow for all incoming projects, including the creation of necessary documentation, the purpose of all project meetings and the implementation of a post-mortem upon completion.I handled the hiring for all project management positions and created a comprehensive training program through which new project managers could quickly learn about and gain exposure to our project life cycle, the meetings that were a part of that process and the systems we used to manage our work.Additionally I took over the management of the support team and helped to streamline all support requests.

A year after joining 352, I welcomed the challenge of becoming a team lead. In this position I directly managed a diverse team of project managers, engineers, and designers.In addition to my workload as a project manager, I took on the added responsibility of work stream management for the company. I managed the work schedules for the teams and assigned all new work to the available teams.To ensure the continued growth of my team members, I conducted weekly one-on-one meetings to discuss their professional goals, troubleshoot client or team issues and celebrate their victories.

At the beginning of my time with 352, I served as a project manager responsible for the successful launch of over 30 interactive projects.My days were filled with coordinating work, communicating progress to clients and developers, managing budgets for each project while keeping the client focused on the initial scope, identifying opportunities for up selling, and enforcing timelines.I worked closely with the clients to create comprehensive functional plans. This process helped to identify features of the website and record, in detail, how they would work. This document was then used by the team during development.

Ba, Journalism

Master Of Education (Med), Sports Administration

General