Agile
Recommendations
Discover all the details of the wonderful recommendations I’ve received from colleagues (thanks everyone) in Recommendations. Here are some brief quotes from them.
Ken has the deepest passion for “all things agile” and was a great partner to the engineering leadership ... I would highly recommend Ken to any development organization looking for leadership to get to the next level of agility.
... the teams had made significant progress toward agile adoption, and were seeing many of the benefits ... I recommend Ken to any team looking to transition to agile processes, or struggling with lack of predictability in delivery.
He’s a phenomenal program leader who is well-respected by his peers and is well liked by his customers. ... I can’t say enough good things about Ken...
... Ken’s organizational and communication skills were outstanding throughout the project. He took charge of a variety of workstreams and kept them all on schedule ... Ken is outstanding at what he does and I would welcome the opportunity to work with him again.
... he is caring and passionate, and such personality showed through in his team work ... I valued his partnership ...
...his desire to bring the benefits of Agile to those he works with sets him apart.
His professionalism and drive were two things that led me to bring him on board. I would recommend Ken to any team that is looking for someone who really understands Agile ...
... worked extensively with Ken in transforming our cloud testing capabilities, and implementing a Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery [CI/CD - DevOps] ... Ken’s role in that major transformation was vital to our success.
Ken is a very strong Agile process engineer with great insights on how to scale agile across a large software development environment. ... Enjoyed working with him!
...Ken was the first one who truly transformed the program and made it run smoothly. ... coached multiple teams in how to ... implement proper SAFe methodology. The result was what many Agile practitioners aspire to, but rarely achieve: Truly accelerated velocity of delivery and capability.
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Summary
Here is a summary list of some of my talents and experience:
- Agile / Scrum: 16+ years in total; 3 Scrum certifications (CSP, CSM, CSPO); Published author.
- 3 certifications in the Agile Scrum framework.
Earned Certified Scrum Professional (CSP) in 2014, and the Certified Scrum Master (CSM) and Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) credentials in 2011. View the certifications on my Scrum Alliance profile. - 12+ years in a Scrum Master role.
- Agile Coaching & Transformation: 12+ years at Apple (very large scale transformation in a >850 person engineering group – >100 teams – 3 continents); Ivanti (>180 of engineers, PdMs, UX – 24 teams – 4 continents); Cox Auto (1,000’s of engineers, PdMs, UX – 100’s of teams – 14 brand divisions); Others: Macys.com, Kohls.com, Genentech, PG&E & more.
- Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe): 7+ years; Fully trained in Leading SAFe and Implementing SAFe; Extensive experience implementing SAFe at large scale.
- Agile & PPM tools: 12+ years – Jira, Azure DevOps/VSTS, Rally, Mingle, Confluence, Jive Software, WordPress & many others.
- Certified as a AgilityHealth Facilitator (AHF). Agility Health tools are used for measuring Agile maturity, the effectiveness of Agile practices, and developing Continuous Improvement plans and actions.
- DevOps, CI/CD: 10+ years; Led transformations; Automation; TDD; Repo strategies & more.
- Waterfall / Ad-hoc: 16+ years – IBM PM certified (based on PMI PMP), trained & experienced in many methodologies.
- Program / Project / Change Management: 19+ years.
- 5 Certifications in Agile, Project Management & IT Management: CSP, CSM, CSPO, IBM PM & CCP.
- Software Engineering Background: 12+ years, started career as software engineer, earned
17 engineering certifications.
DevOps, CI/CD
DevOps and Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) are directly relevant to Agile software engineering. Without these engineering practices, tools and techniques, agility is much more difficult to achieve. And organizations and teams cannot fully benefit from the speed and flexibility that Agile management frameworks like Scrum and SAFe can offer.
- 10+ years in organizations from no skills in DevOps or Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) to extreme maturity utilizing full automation and TDD or ATDD.
- Led transformations of large scale Agile programs up to 24 Scrum teams.
- Built and led CI/CD Scrum team to transform product dev Scrum teams – also known as a System Team in SAFe.
- Techniques & practices: Test Driven Development (TDD); Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD); QA / Test automation; Build automation; Deployment / Release automation; Pair programming; Code repo management, branch strategies & more.
Role Profiles by Company
12+ years experience transforming organizations from waterfall methods and ad-hoc methods.
Apple
More about my work at Apple
- Using Jira with Scrum at Apple Training blog article summarizes the Jira configuration I created at Apple.
- How To make JIRA Agile sing a great Scrum tune blog article details a Jira configuration optimized for Scrum.
- Recommendations from colleagues at Apple.
My Role
- My role was Engineering Program Manager (EPM) responsible for managing multiple software and infrastructure engineering programs and teams.
- EPMs manage multiple programs simultaneously, fulfill the Scrum Master for teams, manage cross team communications, and interact with many groups outside of the Apple Online Store (AOS) group including leadership, MarCom (Marketing & Communications) which designs Customer eXperiences (CX) as well as marketing and external communications, business teams that manage the business aspects of online and retail, and many other engineering teams outside of AOS.
- Years: 2014 to 2015
Company and Group
- Apple Online Store (AOS) engineering group that develops the software, builds the infrastructure and operates the global scale e-commerce platform at www.apple.com/store, and the backend systems and front-end software that powers the Apple retail stores.
- Very large scale Agile transformation in a >850 person engineering group consisting of over 100 teams located on 3 continents.
- Tools: Jira, Jira Portfolio, Confluence, suite of Apple developed tools like Radar.
Accomplishments and Experiences
- Managed the Agile transformation for the many teams that I managed.
- Transformed from mostly ad-hoc methods and processes, with some waterfall like methods, to Scrum at scale.
- Built a new Jira configuration that was optimized for Scrum teams. Trained other managers, Scrum Masters and team members on the Jira configuration.
- Managed teams work on projects such as:
- Developing the software and content systems of the store for the launch of the Apple Watch.
- New country deployments like China.
- New payment types and bank integrations. Such as the launch of what is now the financing with Apple Card for all products, and the iPhone Upgrade Program.
- Backend software engineering and infrastructure builds like core engineering systems managing the store systems, message queueing technology deployments, and more.
- Massive scale integration of the store into the rest of Apple.com marketing content systems.
VMware / Boeing / AT&T
More about my work at VMware
- I wrote a blog article Scaled Agile – SAFe Backlog & Roles Simplified to help leadership learn SAFe fundamentals and strategy.
- Jira Dashboards & Reports – 2023 Samples blog article documents some of the Jira dashboards and reports that I built.
- Recommendations from colleagues at VMware.
My Role
- My roles were as Program Manager, Agile Coach and Scrum Master.
- Years: 2020 to 2023
Company and Group
- VMware is the Silicon Valley pioneer of virtualization and cloud technology.
- I worked in the Professional Services Organization (PSO) responsible for helping customers design, integrate and deploy at scale VMware products.
- Boeing and AT&T were 2 of the VMware customers that I worked with.
- Tools: Azure DevOps (ADO), Jira, Confluence (collaboration platform).
Accomplishments and Experiences
- Transformed multiple teams from waterfall methods and some ad-hoc, to Scrum.
- Assisted and coached leadership teams in learned and implementing SAFe, at Boeing where scale was required.
- Trained team members in both Jira and Azure DevOps (ADO).
- Migrated data from Jira to Azure DevOps (ADO) for some teams that elected to switch to ADO.
- Developed many real time dashboards and reports in Jira and ADO for individuals, teams, groups and leaders that allowed them to manage their day to day, hour to hour work, and pro-actively measure progress and track actions to improve and correct plans and activities. Advanced metrics driven dashboards and reports allowed everyone to predict future progress and the effectiveness of plans.
- Wrote lots of documentation and training assets to support teams and leaders.
Ivanti / Heat Software
More about my work at Ivanti / Heat Software
- Here are blog articles on some of the work I did with Azure DevOps (ADO) / formally known at that time as Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS).
- Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services Training blog article on some of the training I did with ADO / VSTS.
- Jive Software Wiki Training blog article on some of the training I did.
- Recommendations from colleagues at Ivanti / Heat.
My Role
- My role was Global Program Manager for the Agile Transformation and Agile Coach.
- I was hired by Chief Product Officer (leader of software engineering, SaaS cloud operations and product management) to transform all of his teams from multiple methods including some waterfall like, some ad-hoc, and some managed with spreadsheets and todo lists, to Scrum at scale.
- Years: 2016 to 2018
Company
- Ivanti / Heat Software was a software product company whose portfolio including service management (similar to ServiceNow and other support ticket management products), end point management, security management, and more.
- Over 180 engineers, Product Managers, User eXperience (UX) designers – 24 teams on 4 continents.
- Tools: Azure DevOps (ADO) / formally known as Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), Jive Software (collaboration platform similar to Confluence)
Accomplishments and Experiences
- Introduced SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) tools and techniques to provide what was needed to manage at scale.
- Managed Scrum and SAFe training and tools implementation, data migration and training.
- Led transformation of large scale Agile program with 24 Scrum teams.
- Built and led DevOps / CI/CD Scrum team to transform product dev Scrum teams – also known as a System Team in SAFe.
- CI/CD (Wikipedia page), Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery / Deployment, is a set of software engineering practices and technologies to implement advanced automation, and is essential to truly take full advantage of Agile frameworks like Scrum, Kanban and SAFe, and is part of DevOps (Wikipedia page) methodologies.
- This team led the adoption and deployment of advanced, modern engineering practices and technologies utilizing Microsoft Azure.
- Before I created this team, almost no automation existed, QA was done manually and so was extremely time consuming and error prone, development infrastructure and environments were very limited and not very unreliable.
- With this team we transformed software engineering practices using Azure tools and cloud infrastructure, to fully embrace automation and cloud based environments for development and testing environments.
Cox Automotive
More about my work at Cox Automotive
- Continuous Planning Training blog article on the training and workshop I conducted.
- Community of Learning (CoL) Training blog articles on the workshops I conducted.
My Role
- My role was a Senior Enterprise Agile Coach, as part of the large scale Agile professionals group of over 100 people that included coaches, trainers, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) roles like Solution Train Engineer (STE), Release Train Engineer (RTE) and more.
- Year: 2018
Company and Group
- Cox Automotive owns over 20 automotive industry related brands including well known name brands such as Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book. And many inside the auto industry brands.
- Cox Automotive is a division of Cox Enterprises which had at the time, more than 55,000 employees and $20 billion in revenue, which also includes Cox Communications and Cox Media Group.
- More than 40,000 clients in 100+ countries around the world.
- 1,000’s of engineers, PdMs, UX – 100’s of teams – 14 brand divisions.
- Tools: Rally, Confluence (collaboration platform), Jive Software (collaboration platform similar to Confluence).
Accomplishments and Experiences
- Organization utilized Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and teams utilized Scrum and Kanban.
- Coached dozens of Scrum and Kanban teams in Agile practices and techniques.
- Facilitated the training and deployment of Rally Agile Lifecycle tools.
- Conducted Agile training and workshops for engineering and product teams, and Community of Learning (CoL) Training for RTEs and STEs.
- Managed the implementation of Agility Health tools for measuring Agile maturity, the effectiveness of Agile practices, and developing Continuous Improvement plans and actions. I am certified as a AgilityHealth Facilitator (AHF).
Others
- IBM – Waterfall to Scrum. Tools: IBM custom developed internal tools.
- Macys.com – Nation scale e-commerce & mobile apps. Mostly ad-hoc to Scrum. Tools: Mingle (similar to Jira).
- Kohls.com – Nation scale e-commerce. Waterfall and ad-hoc to Scrum. Tools: Mingle (similar to Jira).
- Genentech – Biotech enterprise mobile apps. Waterfall to Scrum. Tools: Jira, Confluence (collaboration platform).
- PG&E – Utility customer facing web site. Waterfall to Scrum. Tools: Jira.
- And more…