Eindhoven, North Brabant, Netherlands
A seasoned Scrum Master with a background in project, programme and operational management. I successfully functioned as the Scrum of Scrums Master for distributed software development teams while working on product delivery for Bayer Consumer Health. My business operations experience enables me to identify and implement process improvements and standards in teams. I believe assessing where you are and identifying how to improve is the only way forward. Inspect & adapt, always!
I find solutions and make tangible improvements to processes that have a lasting, positive impact on our long-term business goals and productivity. I work in the senior management team to define and put in place standard operating procedures and governance models with guides for best practices. I am responsible for change management in both business processes and project team deployments. - Identified individuals and teams with low utilisation using data from our time tracking software. Used these findings to increase R&D and individual certifications by 80% in the last 6 months, together with the Technical Director. - Introduced a new company-wide Confluence space to serve as a single source of truth for all employees, housing company policies, guidelines, processes, and an overview of our annual goals. This solved a problem for onboarding new joiners and making information accessible for existing employees. - Created and launched a Kanban board to track approval and onboarding of third party suppliers. This ensures our division remains SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act) compliant and improves the experience of external partners working with us. - Working with the senior development management team, recognised individuals who were unhappy or felt stagnated in their current divisions. Over the course of two months, they were redeployed to different projects, resulting in happier individuals and more motivated delivery teams.
I work as the Scrum of Scrums Master for distributed software development teams in South Africa and Vietnam, and a vendor supplier for our client. My focus is on product delivery and process adherence for Bayer Consumer Health, working collaboratively with scrum professionals and integration partners in their organisation. - With technical leads, I created and maintain a formalised standard operating procedure and programme governance model, with best practices to guide and deliver our work. This is documented in a clearly defined Confluence shared knowledge centre for our internal and external project stakeholders. In the last quarter our programme saw decreases in scope creep and errors due to misunderstandings, saving time and ensuring higher quality of deliveries. - Introduced both client and team health checks to gauge satisfaction and our continuous improvement, and team satisfaction and growth. Findings are documented and reported back internally and externally. This creates an early-response environment for budding issues and concerns and is directly related to the low occurrence of escalations and high client satisfaction. - Continually monitor the financial performance of the programme and transparently communicate the status of budgets with the client and Wunderman Thompson management. This ensures delivery teams are adequately staffed when demands from client increases. It also resulted in prioritising internal resources and relationship management to a client business unit with healthy margins. - Regularly review and monitor our programme for adherence to processes, etiquettes, and reporting requirements. The introduction of document templates for technical and project management staff ensures reviews are easy to conduct and reports are shared in consistent and predictable fashion. The Wunderman Thompson document templates are now standard for all teams working on the programme, including client vendors outside of Wunderman Thompson.
Working exclusively on Bayer's global move from legacy systems to an Acquia hosted Drupal 8 environment, I am functioning as the project lead for this initiative. The program has multiple stakeholders across the organisation with competing priorities and functional requirements. Various technical integrations are also dependent on and managed by Bayer's internal system teams, requiring external suppliers to liaise and collaborate together for successful delivery. This includes leadership, client engagement, technology, and external providers and stakeholders for integration, UX and UI design. - Improved the dedicated team's understanding of Agile and Scrum Ceremonies, resulting in better communication and a shared dedication to ceremonies. - Decreased the time to deliver work package documents to clients by 2 weeks, by gathering and analysing business requirements with technical leads and completing scoping documentation with the input from team and stakeholders. This also ensures our documents and plans are aligned between all departments. - Streamlined processes when I introduced a dedicated folder management system in SharePoint, making it easy for all team members and stakeholders to find documents related to estimates, requirements, UI designs, and QA tests and feedback. - Continuously improve the delivery and estimation process with insights from sprint and project retrospectives. All learnings are incorporated in the following projects and shared as recommendations within the business, culminating in more efficient deliveries. - Increased the profitability of projects by 25% after requirements were thoroughly understood and priced, and decreasing the amount of assumed risk to no more than 15% of the committed work. - Successfully delivered 6 large technology projects to date, with 4 more due before EOY 2019. This proven ability to deliver secured at least 5 more projects of a similar scale for 2020, with one retaining a full team for Q1 2020.
Appointed expressly to be second-in-charge to the UK Head of Operations, working with the development team, overseeing the project management team, and liaising with client partners servicing the UK market. All work is delivered to the UK from a cross-functional team based in South Africa. Clients include Communisis, TSB, and Co-op Insurance. - Increased communication and impediments resolutions in the team by facilitating daily scrums with project teams. - Improved the implementation of Agile Scrum in the UK team, working closely with the development team by coaching and increasing Scrum knowledge in the UK organisation. - Decreased the time for confirming project requirements by working with solution architects and business analysts. - Ensured that global security standards are met for GDPR and internal security requirements. - Relationship management of key client partner, based in the UK. Stakeholder communication and management. - Created and maintained project related documents (technical- and data specs, project charters, project plans, etc.). - Ensured manual and automated QC requirements are met by the team, before delivering products to the client. - Check final deliverables against requirements to ensure compliance and meeting project expectations. - Lead weekly calls for project requirements and status meetings. - Second escalation point for support and technical project concerns.
Manage all digital projects for advertising agency clients including web development, online advertising, social media strategy and campaigns, and liaising with media agencies (for PPC and SEO). Communicate project status updates with clients on a regular basis. Manage internal creative and client services team members to ensure on-time, on budget, and top quality delivery of all digital advertising and online marketing projects. Utilise latest technologies like Drupal and WordPress, working in an agile environment, using valuable tools such as Trello, Slack, Microsoft Office and Google Docs. Clients include Nedbank, Amstel, Randgold Resources, Ster Kinekor, the JSE, Nestle, DStv, Menlyn Park, Pernod Ricard, and Internet Solutions.
- Run projects with lean UX and design. - Manage project teams using waterfall, Agile, and Scrum methodologies, dependent on project requirements. - Develop, manage, schedule and enforce timelines internally and externally for various clients’ projects. - Manage client’s websites and mobile development with proven management track record in handling multiple client projects. - Direct creative, design and development teams on current and on-going projects, and work together to scope projects for proposal purposes. - Manage quality assurance and go-live procedures with a clear understanding of time management and how long component activities should take. - Review project budgets and resolve discrepancies. - Requirements gathering, working closely with UX teams. - Set up, participate in, and lead daily or weekly project team and client conference calls and meetings. - Manage monthly billings for each client, including recognising and forecasting revenue.
- Create and maintain project documentation (Quotes, CE, SOW). - Load all projects, tasks and time-frames to Wrike, Origin’s online project management software. All project related documentation. - Manage user experience design (UXD), visual and interaction design departments within Origin Interactive’s studio to deliver projects for a diverse range of clients including financial, healthcare and mining sectors. - Deliver internal and external digital projects within time and budget. - Manage a team of junior and mid-level staff, including performance reviews. - Lead client workshops with UX consultants and UX director. - Manage meetings and deadlines across internal and external deliverables. - Ensure that weekly deliverables are updated and tracked, using internally shared Google Drive documents. - Setting up digital projects for mobile and tablet solutions; native applications, mobi-sites and responsive design for W8, iOS6 and Android 4.1+ - Audit time-sheets captured by studio teams using Harvest. Achievements Introduced Wrike project management software in the absence of an existing solution to better allocate resources, track project statuses and be able to share project details with clients. This had a measurable impact on delivery of items to deadlines by the studio teams. Created standard naming conventions and a standard folder structure for projects being saved and shared on the server, together with the creative director. This system now ensures that any project-related file can easily be found, resulting in a system that is easier to use and client-deliverable items being sent more efficiently. Implemented a diversifying of risk with client-relationship-ownership, by asking each member of the team to liaise with clients at key points in a project. This ensures that the client is familiar with the Origin team. It also guarantees that all internal staff takes ownership of critical relationships, should another member fall sick or leave the company.