Michael Shourds, Csm, Sasm Email & Phone Number

Richmond, Virginia, United States

Richmond, Virginia, United States

Glen Allen, Va

Richmond, Virginia

Richmond, Virginia Area

• Scrummed two Agile Scrum teams (Integration/Data Migration, Web Development) within an Agile Release Train using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). The teams worked within the CAF (CarMax Auto Finance) System Modernization Program, working in a six sprint PI with two week sprints. • Drove stand-up productivity, better story writing and sizing, created more open communication between teams, initiated sprint demos and developed improvements, and made team story acceptance process more efficient.• Led team through PI Planning sessions; created and sized stories for feature completion, managed sprint work and capacity, tracked dependencies, communicated with product owners and other release train teams, negotiated commitment dates.• Through facilitation of Sprint Planning meetings, managed teams’ work through capacity and velocity management, story development, story and task estimation, and work prioritization. Continued story development by conducting story refinement and backlog refinement meetings.• Improved team efficiency by managing impediments, support and admin work, defect fixes, tracking dependencies, assisting with SDLC deadlines. • Defined and developed Definition of Ready and Definition of Done, and Team Norms, and created improvement action tasks and tracking through sprint retrospectives and team improvement meetings.• Owned program level responsibilities to track risk and release health; ran Scrum of Scrums (S2) meetings, tracked progress and impediments, created weekly status updates, created portfolio reports, managed resource allocation forecasting.

Richmond, Virginia Area

• Led effort to integrate DT tools with Artemis tool for pre-approved, automated releases and change orders; developed and executed plan for integration; set-up tracking of teams’ Jira issues in Artemis, engaged teams and stake holders to understand and complete work towards CICD pipeline standards; managed timelines toward completion of CICD assessments; managed work in Jira tool.• Led effort to decommission Clarity application; determined multi-phased strategy through needs and impact assessment, researched sub-process needs and support team contact, managed work in Jira tool through multiple epic and story planning activities. Coordinated work and communication with multiple teams including user groups, support teams, and technology teams.o Work included: identifying projects and groups to be off-boarded, shut down of front end, disabling user access requesting, monitoring removal, off-boarding of 1st and 2nd level support, decommissioning of application tier, databases, and integrations, shut down of access groups, application management set-up and artifacts, infrastructure records in CMDB.• Lead application, performance, and production support management for a suite of 10-15 applications as Tech Lead. Managed production support and incident resolution, working with Enterprise Support Teams, lead troubleshooting efforts. Implemented and analyzed performance monitoring, performed release and change management. • Learned and then took over Amazon Web Services (AWS), Private Cloud, and Performance Center administration. Worked in AWS to support AWS EC2 instances in all VPCs. Created and managed servers with Capital One’s Cloud tool. Monitored host health, remediated servers, fixed issues, and configured users in Performance Center.• Change and Configuration Management Lead; owned technology change planning and documentation, lead environment resource organization and management within HPSM tool.

Richmond, Virginia Area

• Scrummed for a new Agile Kanban Team of five technical resources supporting a suite of applications. Scheduled and facilitated ceremonies. Coached Product Owner to create, groom and owned status of stories. Coached PO and Team story writing skills. Continuously looked for ways to drive improvements within the team using retrospectives. Helped the team managed the backlog, the storyboard, and stories in VersionOne tool.• Diagnosed ways team could improve efficiency, implemented new ceremonies, habits, and behaviors, and the team saw improvements in the follow areas:o Held monthly product backlog grooming sessions to improve prioritization. Team was moving stories to In Progress from backlog on their own. My team meeting allowed everyone to understand the big picture and prioritize work that would be more impactful to users and stakeholders from group discussion and Product Owner input. Product Owner signed off on prioritization.o Backlog grooming sessions also created better awareness into the detail, level of effort, and amount of work needed on efforts. Stories that the team had been creating did not go into enough detail and did not give proper insight into work. Timelines and dependencies were better understood, improved planning and preparedness.o Improved stand-ups by keeping team focused on the appropriate content to speak to. Team had been just talking about everything they were working on. Focused on what other team members needed to know, what impediments they had, what help they needed, trying to be efficient and ready to speak. Decreased the amount of stand-ups from 5 to 2 a week based on team feedback.o Helped team get work into stories for better visibility for the Product Owner into work being done and team member bandwidth.

Richmond, Virginia Area

• Established Release Engineering and Agile processes for a new Agile Scrum team developing CapitalOne’s Private Cloud (cCloud), running on customized VMware vCloud tools. Drove continuous improvement of release content development and team efficiency, proven by benchmarking and tracking improvements to release time and the number of post-release incidents and emergency fixes.• Through Agile Scrum and SAFe ceremonies, managed release and sprint content and capacity, assessed and tracked dependencies and impacts with other systems and teams, coordinated integrated work with endpoint teams, owned impediment removal and communications. Built improvement plans for release planning, implementation, and coordination through retrospectives and release issue tracking.• Ensured effective and ever-improving release execution by establishing a schedule of release event planning meetings. Standardized and documented release plan and minute-by-minute steps, coordination of work and duties across multiple teams, owned release communication and status calls with execution teams, stakeholders, and users. Matured release quality by improving collaboration with other teams, held Go/No-Go meetings. Support improved, more detailed and coordinated planning, concise understanding of impacts, dependencies, and responsibilities. • Improved coordination of integrated work, dependency and impediment tracking, and communication to stakeholders by serving as Release Engineer of System Team for Cloud Agile Release Train (ART), representing team in PI Planning and Scrum of Scrums (S2) meetings. Aligned over 15 platforms on integrated release cadence, built an ART roster and release calendar, developed a release manifest. • Owned the Change and Configuration Management for team, improving team processes, led maturity of SDLC by establishing code lock down dates and testing sign-off deadlines.

Richmond, Virginia Area

• Developed, managed and improved a Self-Service Model to federate the Release Manager role to qualifying Platform Teams for better efficiency to expand and enhance Release Engineering services. Expanded coverage by researching for qualified teams, used communication and influence skills to present benefits and expectations to perspective teams. Created engagement process, planned and executed transition plans, trained and supported Release Managers.• Created website for the model to assist Managers to perform duties and to follow processes. Created and centralized job aids, templates and forms, documented responsibilities and processes, posted training material and release manifests and metrics.• Matured the support model by establishing compliance reporting and a monthly cadence, which provided exposure of release data and improvements to Platform Team and Release Engineering leadership. Conduct monthly compliance reviews with managers to provide guidance and work towards improvements.• Improved enterprise level Release Engineering compliance by creating and updating strategies for platform teams and driving better compliance. Created and opened communication with integrated teams and decreased issues. Made strategy renewal process easier through better communication and documentation.• Successful management of risk through substantial improvement of compliance metrics. Examples of application’s Release Metrics improvements for 2013: Blackberry bundling 33 to 100%, WTS apps bundling 39 to 86%, compliance 53 to 72%, EDE bundling 75 to 93%, EAS bundling 63 to 77%, compliance 27 to 90%, Share point bundling 12 to 100%. All “green”.• Mentored college new-hire, Project Management Development Program (PMDP) associate, trained and managed the individual to maintain compliance for the Self-Service Model. Conducted catch-ups, invested time to assist with his development and personal support outside the office, provided guidance and feedback, celebrated good work.

Richmond, Virginia Area

Bachelor Of Arts, Computer Science, Political Science

Activities and Societies: Sigma Alpha Epsilon, Football

Education record