SUMMARY:

An accomplished professional with a broad range of progressive experience in Application Development Management, Portfolio, Program, and Project Management, Budget Management, Resource Management, and Release Management. Proven ability to effectively enhance the solution engineering and delivery capability of IT teams by utilizing leadership skills that enrich the organizational effectiveness while addressing stakeholder requirements.

COMPENTENCIES:

Agile Methodology

Project Management

Release Management

Application Development

Scrum

DevOps

Portfolio Management

ITIL

SAFe

VSTS, JIRA, Rally, PPM

Vendor Management

WORK EXPERIENCE:

Confidential

Release Train Engineer

Responsibilities:

• Responsible for facilitating the flow of value produced by the Salesforce Release Train (consisting of 12 scrum teams), by ensuring effective product backlog management, optimal team health, effective train leadership, and transparent collaborating with key stakeholders. Facilitated key ceremonies including Pre - and Post-PI Planning, Stakeholder Sync, Release Train Core Sync, and other train level information sharing ceremonies to ensure transparency and alignment.
• Facilitated key Day-Away Release Train Team sessions to elicit improvement opportunities, ensure clarity of roles, and ensure leadership cohesion. Session results in improved leadership collaboration and synchronization.
• Introduced the concept of conducting Pre-PI Planning activities to improve the effectiveness of PI Planning outcomes. Pre-PI Planning ensured that product management and engineering had sufficient product backlog and engineering runway in order to provide a clear path for the teams to succeed. As a result, teams had better clarity on goals and objectives and were able to create sprint plans to produce the results.
• Introduced Continuous Planning to further improved planning outcomes and develop a healthier product backlog.
• Improved key stakeholder engagement by diversifying the relationship of the release train core, building relationship bridges, and establishing recurring engagement sessions that resulted in mutual respect, trust, and transparency.

Confidential

Senior Scrum Master

Responsibilities:

• Responsible managing the project efforts of 4 executing teams including implementing a Scrum transformation.
• Developed a transformation roadmap, conducted Agile training modules to enable the adoption of agility.
• Utilizing JIRA, implemented an online Scrum board, led the creation of a backlog, and implemented 2-week sprints.
• Resulted in improved throughput and the actual production of value to the end users.

Confidential

IT Portfolio Governance Manager

Responsibilities:

• Responsible for establishing portfolio governance policies and procedures and ensuring adherence in support of the organization’s Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) transformation.
• Responsible for implementing AgileCraft, to improve Confidential Portfolio Management capabilities.
• This involved understanding stakeholder requirements, defining process and procedures for managing the portfolio, implementing data integrations with JIRA and VSTS.
• Responsible for collaborating with the vendor to identify, define, and implement critical enhancements and fixes to the product which have been productionized by the vendor.
• Responsible for managing the system availability of all core system. Analyzed, tracked, and trended system incidents, conducted root cause analysis, ensuring continuous improvement of recommended changes, and producing C-level reporting. Realized a 10% increase in availability of the Auction Management System (AMS), and 25% increase availability of the OPENLANE system within 1 year.

Confidential

IT Release Manager

Responsibilities:

• Responsible for implementing Release Management processes for 9 engineering teams.
• Increased the teams’ throughput which resulted in faster and more efficient value delivery:
• Brokered and improved engagement between the Online Auction development team and their primary IT support teams by tracking and analyzing release issues, conducting RCAs, implementing CICD, and implementing other delivery process improvements.
• Reduced unplanned release builds by 150% which improved QAT and UAT environment stability
• Improved turnaround time for Shared Services Mean Time to Fulfill (MTTF) by 35% thereby increasing velocity of the delivery teams by 15%.
• Reduced turnaround time to complete code merges post releases and patching by 80%.
• Initiated, managed, and delivered the “EnAble” initiative to improve the environmental landscape and release capability for multiple lines-of-business.
• Implemented additional non-prod SAP environments to enable the release team to execute UAT testing.
• Built and delivered additional Citrix and SQL Server non-prod environments for the AMS system to enable parallel development, increase team throughput, and improve performance testing capabilities. Team velocity stabilized within 4 months.
• Managed the engineering of an automated DB refresh process to provide prod-like data in the non-prod testing environments. Realized a 10% reduction in production defect leakage overall.
• Led a cross-functional team to develop the Enterprise Standard Environments roadmap for all of KAR to improve delivery capabilities.

Confidential

IT Release Manager

Responsibilities:

• Responsible for managing the development and production release of multiple simultaneous projects. Ensured projects adhered to Release Management principles, SDLC best practices, and SOX policies.
• Created and managed non-prod dev and test environments
• Implemented auto-build and auto-deploy as part of building the DevOps capabilities for core systems
• Coordinated all testing phases
• Managed operational readiness activities to ensure the successful launch of the new systems/capabilities.

Confidential

IT Application Development and Production Support Manager

Responsibilities:

• Managed 15 full-time developers, BAs, PMs, and 5-10 contractors. Led and directed major projects, maintenance releases, and production support.
• Led the successful implementation of the “EXCELerate” project, a $16M multi-year initiative which resulted in process improvements for all Confidential branches and realized significant cost reductions. Tripled the team size, grew the application code base 5x, doubled the environmental footprint, and implemented an Agile delivery methodology to attain a 300% increase in the team’s application delivery throughput.
• Steered the RFP process to select a technology and implementation partner for the implementation of a document management system and a new web-based online payment system. This included developing the RFP materials, conducting market research on tools and partners, scheduling evaluations, reviewing responses, final selection of tools and partners, and subsequent vendor management.
• Managed the internal production support team. Instituted metrics and KPIs which reduced support turn-around time by nearly 200% and reducing Known Errors by 12%.