Visa (Feb 2011 – September 2011) (7 months)
Context: Leading financial service organization, major agile project to deliver consumer value exchange services
Primary Contributions: Main coach for 2 successful teams. Trained project members to use Jira/Greenhopper and Confluence. Desgin, Adminstration and Configuration for project’s Jira/Greenhopper/Confluence tools. Scrum, Kanban and Constraints Management training and facilitation.
Primary Learning: “Get something done every day” (our CTO’s mantra) How to write a series of concise, focused, unambiguous, buildable stories.
Advisor Software Inc. (August 2010 – October 2010) (3 months)
Context: Asset Management Software provider to financial analysts
Primary Contributions: Scrummaster and Agile coaching for 50 person company. Scrum, XP and Story writing training and facilitation.
Primary Learning: Organizations are like families where history is important. Organizations are dynamic systems. Raising awareness and using visualization and facilitated discussion can increase visibility of those dynamics to reestablish effectiveness.
Tacit Knowledge (August 2007 – February 2010 (2 ½ years)
Context: Boutique IT Consulting firm in San Francisco providing e-Commerce solutions to big retailers like Kodak, Macys’ and Sephora.
Primary Contributions: Sharing deep insight and practices of agile testing. Evangelism and training in agile and lean processes to large ecommerce enterprises
Primary Learning: “Get something done every day” (our CTO’s mantra) How to write a series of concise, focused, unambiguous, buildable stories. How to communicate clearly within a distributed team.
MW2 Consulting at Santa Clara County (Government 3000-6000 employees)
Government Finance IT
December 2006 – June 2007 (7 months)
Context: Automating the property tax collection system for Santa Clara County.
Primary Contributions: Agile coaching and training, Introducing FIT table tests for requirements clarification and acceptance testing;
Primary Learning: The combination of collaborative requirements elicitation, FIT table tests and real data can expose hidden flaws missed by subject matter experts in 30-year-old business logic, Assume decrepit data when it’s 30 years old. Plan to spend time cleansing it until it passes inspection. Then estimate time to build an application to use it.
MW2 Consulting at HP (Privately Held; 201-500 employees)
Information Technology and Services Industry
October 2005 – October 2006 (1 year)
Context: 55 person widely distributed team (really several teams in a100 person extended team) responsible for the HP Shopping.com site undergoing an agile transition. (eCommerce)
Primary Contributions: Evangelism, coaching and training in agile and lean flow; Introduction of Rally Agile Lifecycle Management Tool, Lean Value Chain Assessment leading to the alleviation of a chronic workflow blockage, Created and implemented an effective developer audition process including team needs definition, candidate evaluation spreadsheet, and Java code curriculum
Primary Learning: Enterprise change has its friends and enemies, know them and treat both with care; Retrospectives require resolving action to build trust of the team; Collaboration is key to mutual understanding, motivation, and productivity.
Business Signatures (Privately Held; 51-200 employees)
Information Technology and Services Industry
October 2004 – September 2005 (1 year)
Context: A mature startup with complex enterprise java web traffic real-time analyzer and monitoring tool with a friendly user interface
Primary Contributions: Bringing a network to its knees with cleverly crafted load tests to put this content-aware network monitoring tool through its paces; Creating just in time user-level documentation
Primary Learning: Experiencing a classic startup ‘Pivot’ when they discovered Nagios did much of what their tool did and refocused development effort towards new banking customers desperate for fraud detection tools; The difference build and deployment automation makes to quality. We were churning out several releases per week and were still able to find defects, keep track and rollback any time we needed. It went from painful grinding chaos to an orchestrated dance.
Cisco
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees)
Information Technology and Services Industry
July 2004 – September 2004 (3 months)
Project manager for quality group developing Oracle intranet applications.
Bank of America
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees)
Banking Industry
April 2004 – July 2004 (4 months)
Test automation specialist, Team Liaison; Basic Six Sigma training
LogicHouse
(Privately Held; 11-50 employees)
Government IT Industry ($500 Million State Welfare Automation Project)
October 2002 – March 2004 (1 year 6 months)
Code reviewer, test automation specialist
Adobe
(Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; ADBE)
Information Technology and Services Industry
November 2001 – June 2002 (8 months)
Cross platform tester and test automation specialist for Acrobat
COVAD
(Public Company; 201-500 employees)
Telecommunications Industry
August 2000 – July 2001 (1 year)
Context: Major wholesaler ISP
Primary Contributions: Leadership of B2B and B2C testing; Created test automation of web self service application
Primary Learning: How effective and fun cross-functional ‘tiger’ teams can be
Pensare/Duke Fuqua School of Business
(Privately Held; 11-50 employees)
Information Technology and Services Industry
November 1999 – August 2000 (10 months)
Context: Early startup creating the next great multimedia educational platform for online MBAs
Primary Contributions: Proving valuable and timely feedback to developers on The Sun IPlanet server and J2EE architecture performance
Primary Learning: Choose your horse carefully. BEA and IBM had better faster servers to build upon, J2EE was bloated and not well thought out at the time. Startup got bought out but no get rich IPO.
PeopleSoft/Vantive
(Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; PSFT)
Information Technology and Services Industry
February 1996 – November 1999 (3 years 10 months)
Context: Leading CRM vendor with complex front and back end architecture.
Primary Contributions: Huge test automation suites; Introduction of Test Director and WinRunner tool suite to manage test library and test efforts
Primary Learning: Test automation chops; My effectiveness at and enjoyment of tools evaluation and training
Apple Computer
(Public Company; 5001-10,000 employees; APPL)
Information Technology and Services Industry
September 1993 – December 1994 (1 year 4 months)
Context: Will Apple survive the year? Apple during Newton, Mac OS 7-8 and Color LaserWriters, just before Jobs’ return.
Primary Contributions: Testing Mac OS and LaserWriter Driver
Primary Learning: I experienced my first full scale retrospective on the Color LaserWriter snafu. (printers were shipped with packing oil which stained first 100pp printed) I was blown away by the sensibility of bringing all people involved together for 2 days to discuss in the open, successes and failures and determine root causes so the entire organization could learn from them together. I said to the facilitator in awe: How did you get to do this job? (11 years later, I’m doing that job)
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