Professional Summary

An approachable person with a deep, detail-oriented understanding of lean-agile principles and excellent communication, coaching, facilitation, and pragmatic approaches to delivering value through team building, process design and improvement, and organizational change management by combining Agile, Lean, and DevOps values and principles.

A Lean-Agile Enterprise Transformation Lead | Coach | Mentor | Consultant | Advisor. A thought leader with broad business and hands-on IT/DevOps/engineering experience, working remotely or travelling to be on-site. Comfortable with Fortune 50 companies and possessing the soft skills needed to work with thousands of people in the scope of influence, as well as engaging with medium and small organizations. Personal experiences with various roles in Solution Development support a balanced approach to being a change agent for lean-agile transformation and operating model sustainability in challenging enterprise ecosystems.

  • Working with clients to inspire enterprise-wide adoption, sustainability, and improvements in their lean-agile mindset, culture, and operational changes using SAFe methodologies and bespoke adaptations. Coach and consult/advise portfolio [executive] and program [mid-tier] leaders to establish desired lean-agile behaviors with their value streams and Agile Release Trains (ARTs)/team of teams.

Working with Executive and Senior Leadership to define and communicate strategy, tactics, and roadmaps for all things related to business and operational agility. Building and collaborating with a leadership coalition to untangle complexity, establish tactical goals, resolve delivery challenges, learn and adapt using feedback, and support business needs to achieve desired outcomes.

Skills

Leading large-scale initiatives, Coaching, Consulting, Agile Methodologies, Process Design and Improvement, Project & Program Management, Change Management, Conflict Resolution, AI for productivity

Methodology and Process

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) Practice Consultant (SPC6), Disciplined Agile Coach (DA-CDAC), Enterprise Business Agility Strategist (EBAS), Lean-Agile Practices, Scrum, Kanban, eXtreme Programming (XP), Test-First Mindset (TDD, BDD), IC Agile-Business Agility Foundations (ICP-BAF), AgilityHealth Facilitator (AHF)

Tools & Languages

ALM & APM: Jira w/Admin, Align, Structure, Advanced Roadmaps, eazyBI | Power BI, Confluence, Broadcom Rally w/Admin, SharePoint, TFS/Azure DevOps, VersionOne, Jazz.net – Rational Team Concert (RTC); JavaScript, Python, SQL, Cucumber, Selenium, Nexus/Maven, Jenkins, Miro / Mural / Lucid / Visio, Trello, Camtasia, MS Teams, Microsoft Office applications and VBA, Able to learn and adapt to using internal tooling.

Professional Experience

NextGen – 11/2022 to 11/2024

Enterprise Transformation Coach, Remote, Contract – cprime

  • Operating model transformation. Laid the foundation for an enterprise-wide refresh of their operating model and organization of their delivery structures/value streams to position them for data-based decision-making, sustainability, and continuous improvement of their operating model. Stand up 7 ARTs.
    • After several earlier transformation attempts, this enterprise required leadership buy-in. They benefited from being met where they were and approaching the introduction of a new way of working through change management with a series of minimum viable changes.
  • A leader in utilizing and refining Lean-Agile practices across NextGen Healthcare.
    • Led with empathy and presented with confidence that the journey would be shared and that we would learn and adapt together if something didn’t go as expected.
    • Hands-on leadership leveraging a technology background to relate and express the WIIFM
  • Coached leadership (CIO, SVP, VP), product management, ART Release Train Engineers (RTE), Product Owners, Scrum Masters, and development teams in Agile principles and practices. Facilitated initial PI Planning events.
    • Assisted individuals in understanding their roles, identifying areas for personal improvement, and contributing to a collective vision of enterprise agility, while helping each person find value for themselves and their organization.
  • Performed extensive work to lean out and drive consistency across 500+ users into using Jira/eazyBI through issue type, screen layout, workflow, transition, automation, and validator (JavaScript) design. Saving $2,500/day.
    • Instead of having teams configure Jira in a siloed or ad-hoc manner, I worked to consolidate and organize teams as product lines that consistently utilize a standardized Jira configuration. This approach enables data aggregation to provide insights on delivery characteristics that can be meaningfully applied as input for roadmaps, quarterly planning, and managing a portfolio of product lines.
    • Hands-on administrator for issue types, fields, workflows with validators, and automation.
  • Coached OKRs and KPIs, and developed performance and operational metrics along with reporting mechanisms to track progress (Cycle time/Delivery speed, Quality/Defect rate, ROI) and the benefits of cultural and organizational adoption of their refreshed operating model.

Visa – 7/2021 to 10/2022

Enterprise Agility Coach, Contract – cprime

  • Contributed to the Agile Center of Excellence to coach, train, and support leadership and teams in aligning with unique organizational structures and methods as part of adopting the Visa Agile Development Framework.
  • Teamed with Product Managers and Owners with Features and using available tools, environments, and other materials for Program/Planning Increment (PI)/Quarterly planning and execution cadence.
  • Coach Leadership and Teams in the development of incremental and/or iterative deliverables.
  • Ensure Leadership and Team members understand and can work with new roles, tools, and processes.

Chevron – 10/2021 to 7/2022

Enterprise Agility Coach, Contract – cprime

  • Provided transformation coaching for the adoption of a lean-agile mindset and process changes.
  • Coach and advise portfolio and program leaders to establish desired lean-agile behaviors with their value streams and team-of-teams.
  • Assisted with establishing a new operating model design and the launching of 13 digital platforms structured with lean portfolio management and product-based delivery systems.

Morgan Stanley – 09/2020 to 10/2021

Enterprise Agile Coach, Contract – UST Global

  • Agile Center of Excellence member providing divisions/platforms coaching for their adoption of Agile ways of working.
  • Work to identify opportunity areas and help leadership establish agile constructs.
  • Improving engagement and interaction model for firm-wide shared operations and infrastructure services.

Sunset Vista Vineyards, COVID-19 Summer ‘Break’ – 05/2020 to 08/2020

Operations Manager, Onsite

  • Rebuilt a portion of an old barn to create a wine processing/tank room.
  • Obtained licenses, permits, and approvals to successfully open a wine tasting room.

Financial Services / Fintech – 01/2020 to 04/2020

Enterprise Transformation Coach, Contract – Icon Technology Consulting

  • Review and update processes, standards, and controls for compliance and governance to support business agility, as well as align with COBIT5 and FFIEC.

Southwest Airlines – 03/2019 to 11/2019

Enterprise Transformation Coach, Contract – Agile Velocity

Coach, train, and support Southwest Airlines leadership, internal coaches, and guiding coalitions to form SAFe Portfolios and Agile Release Trains (ARTs). Coaching in areas such as:

  • Achieving a sustainable flow of value for executives and leaders; for portfolios, programs, and teams
  • SAFe Portfolio Level implementation, operations, strategic alignment, and governance
  • SAFe Program Level (ART) implementation and operations
  • Collaborating with coaches for SAFe Agile Teams.

Anthem – 02/2017 to 03/2019

Enterprise Transformation Coach, Contract – Agile Velocity

Collaborated with Senior and Executive leadership to define and communicate transformation strategy, tactics, and roadmap. Collaborated with a guiding coalition toward tactical goals, desired outcomes, resolving challenges, and, supporting transformation or engagement needs.

  • Built rapport and relationships with internal and external coaches throughout the enterprise to enable consistency and facilitate synergy across organizational and virtual teams/groups.
  • Responded to the needs of the client to support presentations and information sharing.
  • Assisted with the refinement of evolving roles, responsibilities, and organizational structures related to enterprise transformation.

Northwestern Mutual – 04/2016 to 02/2017

SAFe Consultant and Coach, Contract – Icon Technology Consulting

Coached ARTs in the development of their deliverables, facilitated workshops with ART teams to develop user stories and ensured team members understand roles, tools, and processes. Identify measurements around key engineering practices (e.g. continuous integration, availability, and delivery), assess where good engineering practices are occurring, and recommend achievable next action steps to apply more broadly.

  • Coached Team Members in XP and Quality practices to improve capacity and delivery speed.
  • Coached on technical practices to fulfill a prerequisite need to support the adoption of DevOps to create a sustained high-performance capability.
  • Coached for quality solution craftsmanship to support continuous value flow.

General Dynamics Mission Systems (GDMS) – 04/2016

Agile Consultant, Contract – Icon Technology Consulting

In the context of Disciplined Agile (DA),

  • Assessed agile initiative strategies and activities to provide feedback and recommendations based on interview and survey findings related to the execution of programs within an organization that desires continued growth and adoption of agile values, principles, and practices.

Kohl’s – 02/2016 to 04/2016

Agile Coach, Contract – Icon Technology Consulting

  • Provided multi-team coaching to support Kohl’s teams providing critical solutions under intense pressure to satisfy predetermined dates to support initiatives.
  • Provided coaching to prepare teams with a likelihood of becoming part of other SAFe Agile Release Trains.
  • Leveraged Disciplined Agile (DA) process factor options to determine which options would provide likely advantages at their maturity point of agile adoption.

Target – 07/2015 to 01/2016

Scaled Agile Program Coach, Contract – Icon Technology Consulting

  • Provided enterprise, program, and multi-team coaching to support Target’s adoption of agile and scaled Agile (SAFe) principles and practices.
  • Key contributor at the enterprise level to support the implementation of Agile across multiple products based on mature knowledge and appreciation of Agile values and principles.
  • Embedded with program and team members to coach, train, and facilitate the transformation from waterfall to agile mindset for effective SAFe Program Increment and Sprint Planning sessions, as well as to support PI and Sprint ceremonies.
  • Helped implement Jira to work for the program and to support team needs.

Citigroup – 07/2012 to 07/2015

Senior Solution Architect, Contract – Icon Technology Consulting

Global rollout of ALM Rational Team Concert (RTC) solutions for a large financial services client to a population of thousands of developers, and hundreds of teams. Providing critical services for governance, strategy, and technical stack implementation. The rollout includes assessments and the introduction of best practices in application/software development and tool usage as applicable.

  • Developed and delivered enablement training for Rational Team Concert (RTC).
  • Led definition and implementation of RTC template customizations (including JavaScript and plugin extensions for operational behavior).
  • Supported migration of JIRA and ClearQuest change requests and ClearCase code into RTC repository/project areas.

Education

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Hartford Connecticut

  • Master of Science, Technology Management

University of Vermont in Burlington Vermont

  • Bachelor of Science, Electrical Engineering

Certifications

  • Scaled Agile Practice Consultant (SPC6, previously SPC5, SPC4, SPC3)
  • Certified Disciplined Agile Coach (CDAC, allowed to expire, focusing on SAFe)
  • Enterprise Business Agility Strategist (EBAS), IC Agile – Business Agility Foundations (ICP-BAF)
  • AgilityHealth Facilitator Certification (AHF)
  • Certified ScrumMaster (CSM, allowed to expire, replaced by SPC)
  • IBM Certified Solution Developer Rational Unified Process