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, Smartsheet, Tableau, Aha, 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

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.

Independent Consultant / VMware / Boeing / AT&T / Adobe

My Role

• My roles were as Program Manager, Agile Coach and Scrum Master.
• Years: 2018 to Present

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.
• Accelerated product management with integration of Azure DevOps (ADO) & Jira with Smartsheet and Aha.
• Improved product planning by coaching the IT Research & Technology leadership team on how to use product roadmaps.
• Boosted engineering planning, management & reporting with integration of Azure DevOps (ADO) & Jira with Smartsheet, Power BI, Tableau, Excel and many third party add-on/plugin apps.
• 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 Azure DevOps (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

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.
  • Scaled the cloud software development program from 10 Scrum teams, to 18, then to 24 teams over 8 months.
  • Teams included software engineering, QA and cloud operations.
• Dramatically advanced engineering practices by migrating 10 Scrum teams, then to 18, then to 24 teams to Azure DevOps (ADO).
  • Teams were previously many different tools including Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) for work management and code repos, Perforce code repos, Bugzilla, Excel spreadsheets, and more.
  • Managing the migration of all teams to a single cloud based Azure DevOps (ADO) instance.
  • Implemented cloud based development and QA environments hosted in Azure, from very old and unreliable on premise servers.
• 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.
• Led leading edge technology development by partnering closely with Microsoft‘s product management and engineering teams working on Azure and Azure DevOps (ADO).
  • Participated in Microsoft customer advisor council to review very early designs of new ADO capabilities and provide feedback and suggestions based on our real world customer expertise developing software with Microsoft’s tools.
  • At the time there were less than 5 companies using the latest versions of ADO – 1 of which was Microsoft itself.
  • Tested new beta ADO features as Microsoft engineering was building them.
• Advanced collaboration by implementing a company wide collaboration platform.
  • Everyone used the collaboration platform including product management, UX Design, engineering, leadership, and administration teams.
  • I designed and managed the implementation, and developed and delivered company wide training.
  • The platform we used was Jive Software – similar to the capacities of Atlassian’s Confluence. Jive was chosen because of a pre-existing partnership with Jive.
  • Like the Azure tools, we chose to implement a cloud instance of Jive. Cloud first was an essential part of our new strategy for our products and our tools.

Cox Automotive

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).

IBM

My Role

• My role was a Engineering Manager, Managing Consultant, and Project Manager.
• Years: 2006 to 2009

Company and Group

• IBM is of course well known. I worked in IBM’s Professional Services Organization known at that time as Global Business Services (GBS).
• GBS was formed from the acquisition of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) business consulting division, which was combined with IBM’s existing technology consulting division.
• Most of our most advanced consulting tools came from the PwC acquisition, including an extremely advanced waterfall based methodology that was rebranded as the Global Services Method (GSM). At its core GSM is similar to the Project Management Institute’s (PMI) Project Management Professional (PMP) methodology. But was significantly more sophisticated to accommodate larger scale business and technology efforts.
• Tools: IBM custom developed internal tools.

Accomplishments and Experiences

• Most of the projects and customers I worked with were based on IBM’s waterfall based Global Services Method (GSM). But in 2008 I was assigned as project manager for a 14 person engineering team. Working with the University of California’s state wide system, I took the opportunity to take advantage of Agile techniques, working within the constraints of GSM.
• Accelerated customer delivery by utilizing iterations on engineering work. Based on Scrum’s Sprint time boxing construct.
• Dramatically improved both internal to IBM and customer transparency by introducing regular reviews. Based on Scrum’s Sprint Review construct.
• Significantly improved customer satisfaction by utilizing rapid engineering iterations and customer reviews to gather direct and immediate feedback, and make design and engineering changes quickly.
• One IBM colleague on our team as a Business Analyst (effectively acting as a Scrum Product Owner) adopted this leadership phrase based on our work together, to guide his decision making, which I was particularly proud of: “What would Ken do ?”

Others

• Kohls.com – Nation scale e-commerce.
  • Waterfall and ad-hoc to Scrum.
  • Tools: Mingle (similar to Jira).
  • Recommendations from colleagues at Kohl’s.com.
• Genentech – Biotech enterprise mobile apps.
  • Waterfall to Scrum.
  • Tools: Jira, Confluence (collaboration platform).
  • Recommendations from colleagues at Genentech.
• Macys.com – Nation scale e-commerce & mobile apps.
  • Mostly ad-hoc to Scrum.
  • Tools: Mingle (similar to Jira).
• PG&E – Utility customer facing web site.
  • Waterfall to Scrum.
  • Tools: Jira.
• And more…