KaiRise

In my role as a Partner at KaiRise, I spearheaded the development of the industry's first on-demand ICAgile accredited course, transforming the way agile training is delivered. By prioritizing flexibility and speed, I successfully increased course enrollment and client satisfaction, making agile training more accessible than ever before.

Partner

Accenture

Working across all Federal accounts and capabilities at AFS’ San Antonio location, promote awareness and adoption of Lean-Agile values, principles, processes and technical practices. Consult with clients and account teams on effective patterns for transformation and high-quality delivery. Provide thought leadership to enable accounts to grow their Lean-Agile practice. Provide sales and BD support at the account, sector and portfolio level. 

Primary focus falls into four key areas:

Delivery Support - Jumpstart new Agile projects by helping client teams understand Agile, onboard key roles, execute Sprint Zero. Work closely with project leadership to assess organizational impediments, measure flow and develop strategies for continuously improving. 

Thought Leadership - Collaborate with the AFS Agile Institute, Accenture LLP,  and the industry as a whole to promote local adoption of our corporate capabilities, and industry best practices. 

Education - Provide classroom training to project teams and clients in our ICAgile accredited courses and the Scaled Agile (SAFe) curriculum. 

Sales Enablement - Play an active role in supporting business development and proposal efforts for Agile opportunities across all accounts.

Agile Consultant

Compassion International

As a servant-leader, coach the global solutions engineering teams (currently 11 agile teams) to manage the life cycle of critical corporate-wide and customer-specific technology based products primarily using Lean and Agile SDLC practices – Scrum, KanBan, XP, ScrumBan, SAFe.  

Continuously develop a work environment promoting continual improvement and learning, free from fear of failure, while supporting mistakes that encourage continual learning.  Employ a Lean leadership style focusing on developing team members’ skills. 
Serve as an Agile Coach and transformation agent as the ministry transforms to a new way of thinking, applying Lean Agile principles to all levels of work.  Create teams that are jointly responsible for success, solving problems together in ways that develop people’s capabilities and increases their engagement and commitment, focusing on respect for people.

Develop and implement global strategy for application software design and development. Ensure staffing and development in function to provide technical and strategic expertise in the creation of global inter-related system design for existing architecture or new deployments.  Direct the development of specifications and requirements to integrate global applications.  Serve as catalyst and expert leader, driving the development and implementation of new standards in software development.

Provide strategic direction in gathering requirements and development specifications to design and integrate into applications.  Direct application software design and development services and technical leadership for existing architecture or new deployments. Create an environment that attracts and develops skilled professional staff engaged in coding, testing, implementing, and maintaining large software applications.

Sr. Director - Solutions Engineering

Direct technology delivery focused on enterprise services (Service Oriented Architecture and the Enterprise Service Bus)  enterprise information management (the Enterprise Data Warehouse) and enterprise database management (MSSQL DBMS).
Direct enterprise information management solutions, division staff and resources. 
Direct solutions delivery, process and policy assurance, budgeting and financial management, resource planning, management reporting and the attainment of cross-organizational objectives and service levels. Collaborate with IT management teams, key decision-makers and global stakeholders to identify, recommend, develop, implement and support cost-effective, strategically - aligned enterprise data management solutions for all aspects of the global organization.
As Strategic Business Partner, and Agile Coach, participate in the development and execution of strategies to drive agile adoption throughout the organization. Examples include defining an Agile maturity model, establishing best practices, teaching Agile related classes and guiding the Managing Directors, Product Managers and project leads in the establishment of Agile practices.

Director - Enterprise Technology, SBP

Douglas County

Responsible for the day-to-day operations of the Elections office in a medium-sized County, providing direct supervision, coordination, and technical guidance to staff, maintaining a high level of morale, ensuring service excellence and increasing team productivity. Supported advanced technical needs of office staff, as well as Directors and Elected Officials both inside and outside of Douglas County, including hardware/software support, project management, business analysis, and vendor relations.   Utilized sophisticated technology skills to streamline processes and reduce overhead by implementing methodologies to improve support, manage customer expectations, and build strong cross-agency relationships. Recognized leader in the State by the Colorado Department of State (CDOS) with regards to voting systems technology and statewide voter registration database management.

Senior Product Manager

Senior System Analyst

Reformed PMP turned Agile delivery expert | Helping you earn more 💵 | Agile certification pays - get yours today at your own pace. KaiRise.com

Instructor-led agile training is one of the worst ways to up-skill your workforce. There are 3 gigantic problems with old-school, instructor led training.

🚫 It pulls workers away from their daily jobs to take training
🚫 It takes forever to schedule, coordinate and run
🚫 It doesn’t scale

◾️What I do

I'm a partner at KaiRise, with three decades of experience helping enterprises implement agility. We've cracked the code on how to train your staff in a way that actually generates results.

◾️How We Help?

I’ve distilled what I’ve learned into the fastest most effective way to earn the ICAgile Certified Professional Certification. We created the world’s first on-demand ICAgile accredited course.

It’s used at enterprises around the world to transform the learning experience, while stretching budget dollars and…

👉Is Available 24/7
👉Is Trusted & Certified 
👉Has Bite-sized learning for seamless integration into daily tasks
👉Has zero death by powerpoint or forgetting everything you’ve just learned
👉Will certify your workforce in half the time of regular training

◾️Expected Results

✅ 40% reduction in training costs
✅ 30% increase in the volume of certifications issued
✅ 50% reduction in the time to complete training
✅ 72 Net Promoter Score (excellent)

◾️Don't just take my word for it

“Absolutely loved the content, format, and instruction style of this course. The self-pacing was great for my learning style. Would recommend it to practically anyone!”
Stella Griffith - Sr. Business Analyst at Fidelity Investments

“Great Course and Engaging Style. From the bite-sized learning modules to the reinforcement through quizzes and interactive activities, this course is a great intro to the world of Agile.”
Ian Santo Domingo - Principal & Managing Director at Vault Consulting

“I am a Certified ScrumMaster, but I truly believe this course has set me up for broader organizational success. I can't say enough great things about Agile Foundations!”
Lindsey Parker - Strategic Projects Coordinator at Fellowship of Christian Athletes

And many more at www.KaiRise.com

◾️My Background

With three decades of hands-on experience, completed 16 agile certifications, and having trained thousands, I've garnered over 10,000 followers and earned recognition as a top voice in the Agile Community by LinkedIn. My journey has taken me through diverse landscapes, from startups and nonprofits to global corporations and government agencies.

◾️Contact

Ready to change your enterprise training experience? Send me a LinkedIn DM and let's explore if we're a fit. 

💻www.KaiRise.com

Mike Lyons

The Home Depot

Manage the Orange Apron Media (Retail Media) Project Management team, within the Marketing PMO, as they provide project management support and process guidance for the organization’s delivery of marketing assets.

-        Manage an Orange Apron Media Project Management team, focusing on Onsite & Offsite Banner offerings (3 associates, 2 contractors)

-        Actively manage the intake queue and assign work, while managing capacity (leveraging Workload Balancer)

-        Ensure adherence to standards and process (leveraging Playbooks, Smartsheets and Workfront)

-        Create reporting and dashboarding to reflect the work accomplished by the team

Program Manager - Orange Apron Media

Managed the Creative Services Project Management team, within the Marketing PMO, as they provide project management support and process guidance for the organization’s delivery of marketing assets.

-        Managed a team of 3 Creative Project Managers for 3 years

o    Coached, mentored, and worked on career development with team members

o    Managed Project Manager capacity and assignments

o    Project Managers managed the project life cycle from the logistics of getting product on-hand, to styling and producing the asset creation, to delivering the marketing assets (assets include: photo, video, augmented reality, CGI, etc.)

-        Continuous evaluation of existing processes for optimization

-        Worked to create strong collaborative relationships with our partners and the project’s requester(s)

-        Created weekly programmatic reporting to include: current workload, YoY, individual capacity, etc.

-        Provided Program Management oversight of the cross-functional Contentful initiative for Marketing. Driving decision making, defining delivery and driving delivery. Including: reporting, meeting facilitation, process creation and process optimization, and leading leaders.

-        Supported our Marketing Resource Management team

o    Served as a subject matter expert for Workfront Scenario Planner. Including: leading a team on scenario execution, creating process for intake and execution of scenarios, facilitating discovery sessions, creating reporting for scenarios, creating scenario standard outputs and presenting scenario outputs to stakeholders

o    Created reporting and processes around Workload Balancer

 

Program Manager - Creative Services

Provide agile program and project oversight over a variety of online marketing efforts.

-     Serve as a key member in the creation of process and standards for the new Online Marketing Agile Project Management Office (PMO).
       --    Includes (in conjunction with my Agile Program Management peers): defining and documenting process, defining pod & program level reporting, tracking pod level performance,  creation of a PMO Playbook which defines the roles and processes, creation and facilitation of a Community of Practice, facilitation of scrum of scrums, creation of a time management tool for use by pod members and day to day scrum ceremony facilitation, developed and facilitated Agile Lite training for new pods members, created extensive new pod training for greater roll-out of Agility
       --  Collaborating to define the organizational roles within the new Agile PMO (to include Program Manager, Scrum Master, and Agile Coach)
       --  Assist in onboarding Scrum Masters and a an Agile Coach into the Agile PMO organization.
-    Serve as a scrum master to the pod(s). In this role I helped the team align to our organizational defined agile guidelines and help remove impediments. In addition I also coached the pod members on process (with a specific focus on the Scrum Product Owners).
-    Serve as a scrum coach for the organization. Coaching upward within the organization. This includes conducting both pod level and leadership level agile training.

Program Manager - Audience Marketing 

Provide Program and Project oversight for the Bottom of the Funnel efforts.

-        Served 6 months as the Program/Project Manager for the Bottom of the Funnel Community (5 squads). Supporting efforts for: Add to Cart, Payments, Private Label Credit Cards, Authentication & Risk, and general cart enhancements.
-        2 Years serving as the Program/Project Manager for the Search and Recommendations Community. Specifically focusing on the Recommendations and Data Science Squads (5-7 squads). Supported efforts includes, but are not limited to: Feature Based Recommendations, Frequently Bought Together, Alternatives, Essential Accessories, and general personalization.
-        Provided project management level support for community defined initiatives.
-        Served as an escalation for squad issues and needs.
-        Provided regular management level (from Directors to the CEO) reporting on the squad’s & community progress.
-        Trained to serve as a facilitator for Design Sprints. Design Sprints are an accelerated innovation exercise where an idea can quickly move from idea to testing in a short period of time.
-        Managed the project, with a core team of less than 10, to migrated corporate usage from Clickstream to Quantum Metrics.  Managed the internal super user training and the user-base training remotely during COVID-19 quarantine.
-        Served as the PMO point of contact for the Merchandising Capabilities Enablement (MCE) organization, being the primary communication hub, creating a standardize engagement model, and implementing process.
-        Managed the quarterly structured organizational survey including: administration, distribution, communication, analyzing and reporting against the results.
-        Managed a 2020 special project to educate t on business story-telling.
-        Served on the leadership team for the new Capacity Planning  process. Included enforcing standard usage, making document changes & enhancements.

Senior Online Business Project Manager - Program Manager

Contracted thru The Proven Method.

Provide  Project Management/Scrum Master oversight of 5 teams and oversee deliverable schedules and financials.
- Facilitate scrum ceremonies across 5 teams (Planning, Stand-ups, Demos, Retrospectives and Grooming)
- Train teams and product owners on roles and responsibilities..
- Provide ongoing scrum coaching.
- Provide regular project updates to Senior Management.
- Help remove team member roadblocks, serving as an escalation .
- Oversee team's delivery to coincide with road-map commitments. 
- Monitor and oversee project financials.
- Developed Scrum Training 
- Conduct Scrum Training (internal to teams and external to teams)
- Consult on scrum and kanban process implementation within my peer group.

Project Manager (Contractor)

Self-Employed

Provide Scrum coaching and consulting for a local small business.
- Work with business owners to understand business needs.
- Develop training materials specific to business needs.
- Train key stakeholders/business owners  on scrum roles.
- Train key stakeholders/business owners on scrum ceremonies. 
- Consult on best scrum implementation based on business needs.
- Provide situational consultation as needed.

Scrum Consultant 

IQVIA

Provide program management and project management oversight of various client efforts..
- Served 8 months as the Project Manager/Scrum Master for a reporting and business intelligence team: conducted daily stand-ups, facilitated retrospectives, co-facilitated sprint planning, and served as an escalation point for issues and obstacles.
- Served as the lead for a client sales discovery process for the next generation platform.
- Serve as a Client Engagement Lead for an existing client’s program. Serve as a bridge between the client’s legacy platform and next generation platform work.  Serve as an escalation point for client issues and client requests.
- Provide program management oversight for next generation platform work for client. Next generation program currently consists of 3 projects spanning 3+ teams.
- Provide Scrum guidance and coaching.
- Provide weekly project/program status management reporting.
- Provide direction and oversight for multiple project managers working with my program.

IT Program Manager, Associate Director

Anthem

Provide project management and scrum oversight for initiatives within the Innovation Studio.
- Serve as the scrum master through prototyping efforts.
- Provide management level reporting against all initiatives in the Innovation Studio.
- Help define project management and scrum processes for the different work phases.
- Facilitated  Innovation workshop sessions.

IT Project Manager/Scrum Master

Greenway Health

- Serve as the scrum master for 3 teams. 
-- Provide oversight for Kanban team(s) working from a bug backlog.
--Two additional teams are scrum teams working new functionality.
- Scrum Master responsibilities include: coaching on scrum principles, mentoring peers, conducting the morning stand-up, organizing and facilitating the scrum ceremonies (stand-up, sprint planning, sprint retrospective, sprint demo), loosely overseeing off-shore resources assigned to team(s) and providing organizational updates on team progress.
- Serve as a consultant on the formation of organizational scrum standards.
- Participate in organizational release planning.

Senior Agile Project Manager/Scrum Master

Provide portfolio and product management assistance to the Interoperability management team. Provide project management oversight over Interoperability projects and serve as a Scrum Master for a scrum development teams. Serve as the SME for methodology and process within the Interoperability department.

- Report directly to the VP of Interoperability.
- Provide weekly reporting on overall portfolio status. Reporting includes: project status, project risks, vendor status, associated timelines, and overall effort priorities.
- Implemented formal Kanban methodology for HIE Interfaces.
- Manage projects that span across multiple functional teams and departments.
- Worked  with newly established product team to transition product management of interoperability portfolio.
- Interact with the product team to provide current project status and determine new project priorities.
- Serve as the scrum master on newly established scrum development teams.

Senior Project Manager/Scrum Master

KPMG

Thomson Reuters division acquired by KPMG.
Serve as the product owner for the accounting application for facilitating client indirect tax payments to the jurisdictions. Serve as scrum team member or Scrum Master for additional projects providing analysis and testing support.
- Serve as the Scrum Product Owner for tax accounting application used to define client indirect taxes and send tax information to a third party payment vendor.
- Provide guidance and direction around tasks/user stories worked within scrum sprint.
- Provide analysis and testing support of enhancements of the product.
- Serve as Scrum Team member on additional projects. Specifically providing analysis and testing support.
- Serve as a Scrum Master for a project to complete work related to the KPMG acquisition. 
- Provide overall scrum guidance to department.

Senior Business Analyst

The Church at Chapel Hill

Provided vision and oversight over the small group ministry and small group leaders.	
- Oversaw all small group leaders (90+).
- Oversaw all small group coaches (6+).
- Developed small group training curriculum.
- Conducted regular small group training.
- Planned small group events.
- Maintained small group data in the database.
- Provide monthly reporting to senior leadership.
- Wrote small group curriculum.

Co-Director of Small Groups

Thomson Reuters

Serve as the product owner for the accounting application for facilitating client tax payments to the jurisdictions. Serve as scrum team member for other applications providing analysis and testing support.
- Serve as the Scrum Product Owner for tax accounting application used to define client taxes and send tax information to a third party payment vendor.
- Provide guidance and direction around tasks/user stories worked within scrum sprint.
- Provide analysis and testing support of product enhancements.
- Serve as Scrum Team member on additional projects. Specifically providing analysis and testing support.
- Provide general scrum guidance to department.

Business Systems Analyst

SunTrust Bank

Served as a Business Analyst/Project Manager for website redesign project. Served as SME for the online banking product.
- Served as a Business Analyst/Project Manager for a website redesign project. Responsibilities included: provided project management oversight over sub-efforts within a larger website redesign project, managed development team for several website redesign project sub-efforts, served as primary business contact for multiple vendors, facilitated vendor Statements of Work creation and approval and oversaw multiple 3rd party integrations including: data feeds, foreign translation, data analytics (Omniture), and chat.
- Serve as SME for SunTrust’s online banking product. 
- Manage requirements through the project lifecycle using SharePoint and Requisite Pro
- Work with internal clients on requirement gathering.

Business Analyst III, AVP

Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.

Served 3 years on an Agile – Scrum team as a Scrum Product Owner and a Scrum Master on multiple web-based projects for CNN. Projects included: designing & implementing scheduling functionality into a resource management website, website redesign for a media sharing site which included 3rd party API video integration and implementing new search functionality on multiple websites.

- Served as Product Owner and Scrum Master for a team utilizing Agile Scrum methodology working in 2 week and 3 week sprints.
- As the Scrum Master, I created and managed the sprint burn-down and facilitated the sprint retrospective.
- As the Scrum Product Owner, I conducted end of sprint client product demonstrations, created user   stories from the client's requests, interacted regularly with the CNN project sponsors and product users on requirements and user stories, managed the feature backlog for multiple products, managed the  backlog priority and planned sprints & releases.
- Conducted Scrum sprint walk-through and sprint design sessions.
- Created wireframes and web mock-ups using Visio and Balsamiq. 
- Provided product analysis and created necessary business artifacts.
- Utilized Caliber, Wiki’s, Rally and SharePoint to track requirements and project artifacts.
- Created and executed product certification test cases in Quality Center.
- Provided production support and later provided Tier 2 support for business applications.
- Coordinated AD HOC client reporting with production support.
- Managed internal client relationship for CNN Rights and Clearances.
- Conducted an Agile training for Business Analyst peer group.
- Lead a peer knowledge-sharing group for Business Analyst.

Advanced Business Systems Analyst/Scrum Product Owner

I am a people centric, process passionate person that looks to leverage those passions to make the people around me better. I have demonstrated experience in business analysis, project management, vendor relationship management, program management, product management, team management and client management. I have worked in a variety of industries including banking, credit card processing, news/media, health IT, insurance and retail. I have worked in both mainframe and web development environments. I consider myself an 'agilist.' I have years of Agile – Scrum experience functioning as both a Scrum Product Owner and Scrum Master. I am a Certified Scrum Master (CSM & A-CSM) and Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO). I have both observed and implemented kanban. I have experience in coaching and training new teams on the implementation of Scrum.

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The Battle

Mike Lyons

Jeremy C. Smith CSM, CSPO, A-CSM

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