Tyler Yoder Email & Phone Number

Kansas City, Mo, Us

In May of 2021, H&R Block adopted a Block OS working model centered around small, autonomous teams. I was promoted to IT Manager in this re-org and asked to lead one US team and two India teams, consisting of 16 direct reports and ~35 dotted line reports. These teams were responsible for building the tax systems portion of BlockWorks Online. In October of 2022, I inherited another manager's teams (one in US, two in India) and now own the entirety of the BWO project. This includes 101 FTE engineers, testers, and analysts.

Kansas City, Mo, Us

Shortly before the pandemic I transitioned from a business analyst to a project manager to broaden my PMO expertise. As the project manager over three of the four major workstreams of Block's next generation of retail tax software, BlockWorks Online, I was responsible for ensuring timely delivery of features in an agile methodology. I am also leading the charge in creating standardized reporting across our organization and own or have leadership positions on multiple communities of practice centered around devops and agile principles across the company. In 2020 I introduced Big Room Planning (a derivative of SAFe's Program Increment exercises) to Block. I created the framework and led the 2 day sessions for a group of over 300 attendees across 14 application teams that were tightly dependent on one another to plan their next quarter's worth of work. Since the initial Winter 2020 session, the teams have continued to hold quarterly sessions and the practice has caught on at Block - the majority of teams now participate in some form of quarterly planning.

Kansas City, Mo, Us

After being promoted to Senior Business Analyst in April of 2017, I continued working on BlockWorks and Companion (the client monitor). In March of 2018, the IT organization re-orged into Strategic Initiatives and Tax Delivery. I moved onto a strategic team that rewrote the front end of BlockWorks as the sole business analyst, which piloted successfully in April of 2019. Throughout that time we hired two additional business analysts in Kansas City and two additional resources offshore which had dotted line reporting to me. After the successful pilot, the team merged with the new retail tax platform team to build a cloud native tax platform.

Kansas City, Mo, Us

I worked in the BlockWorks scrum team to develop H&R Block's proprietary tax professional software, deployed to over 10,000 offices in multiple countries all around the world. I worked with developers, product owners, and the architects to develop user stories, write acceptance criteria, understand technical requirements, and to do anything else that helped move the product forward. New Client Experience: From 2016-17 I was the business analyst for the new Client Monitor, a revolutionary change for H&R Block. A new Companion application runs alongside BlockWorks to highlight the expertise of the tax professional and runs analytics using H&R Block's data along with a partnership with IBM-Watson to ensure the client is getting the best outcome possible. This initiative went live in 2017 following a Superbowl commercial.

Lawrence, Ks, Us

As a Food Board Manager, I maintained the kitchen and did all of the meal planning for fifty residents, in addition to typical resident assistant duties like disciplinary action, crisis response, and strong hall leadership. I maintained a $90,000 budget for the year's food and kitchen supplies. I also developed multiple programs to lead the hall and to create bonds with other halls.

Kansas City, Mo, Us

Learned about Business Analysis. Mapped ~190 fields in BlockWorks to our Downstream Systems, wrote the acceptance criteria and user stories for a five story epic to build out a Client List (a tab in the application that allows tax professionals to see all of their clients' returns in a single page) that has received extremely positive feedback from the field.

Kansas City, Kansas, Us