Benjamin Holtman
Scrum Master
Wright City,USA
Summary
Big picture seeing, intuitive, agile practitioner with over 10 years experience in IT who is passionate about helping organization improve performance through the adoption of agile practices. Looking for a new opportunity to make a positive impact on the organization and society at large.
Overview
11
11
years of professional experience
7
7
years of post-secondary education
3
3
Certifications
Work History
Scrum Master
Shelter Insurance
1 2019 - Current
- Evangelized the Scrum Framework and Agile practices through providing Scrum training to newly formed Scrum teams across the Enterprise at Shelter Insurance. Taught the basics of scrum such as scrum theory, ceremonies, roles, artifacts, definition of ready, definition of done, and Fibonacci pointing using Mural for maximum collaboration in a remote environment.
- Facilitated Scrum Rituals – sprint planning, backlog grooming, daily scrums, sprint reviews, and sprint retrospectives.
- Planned Agile best practices and encouraged team cohesion, overcoming impediments, and hurdles to productivity.
- Worked as part of a "dream team" of select scrum masters to help standardize the use of Jira across the organization.
- Helped to remove blockers to team cross-functionality by implementing skills matrix exercises periodically to help brake down silos on large teams as the company transition from mainframe technology to Java Technology.
- Automated team metrics generation to track velocity, cycle time, bug generation, and tech debt to help track and drive better performance in these areas.
- Helped the Product Owners with story generation and backlog grooming when overwhelmed with current duties.
- Helped teams develop and adopt teams norms for stronger team cohesion and performance.
- Volunteered to help a team that represents a bottleneck at the company and provided coaching on how to transition from being horizontally to vertically aligned.
- Increased team moral through virtual and in-person team building.
- Current Scrum Master for Document Solutions Java and Mainframe Team.
- Former Scrum Master for the IBM BPM and Oracle BPM Application Team and Agency Java Team.
Scrum Master
Centene
10.2018 - 01.2019
- Facilitated scrum ceremonies.
- Created dashboards, gathered metrics, measured and monitored team progress.
- As part of a SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) team, helped the team to better track its unplanned work on the Jira Kanban board which makes up at least 50% of its work. Communicated this to management for better capacity planning and goal setting during PI (Program Increment) events going forward.
- Developed JQL (Jira Query Language) quick filters for the team's Jira Kanban board in order to quickly capture unplanned work and stories that have not been pointed.
- Tracked and removed impediments for the scrum team; shielded team from outside distractions.
- Collaborated with product owner in defining / refining / prioritizing product backlog.
- Communicated activity and passed information to other teams via Scrum of Scrums and through team meetings with other groups in the release train to resolve testing and deployment dependencies.
- Worked on ways to help the SRE infrastructure team become more Scrum-like as the way the team does work tends to lend itself more to straight Kanban.
Senior Enterprise Application Development Analyst
Scottrade Inc
09.2013 - 03.2018
- Developed the UI (User Interface) for the Siebel UCM AML (Anti-Money Laundering) program making configuration, HTML, CSS, and full stack e-scripting (JavaScript) changes.
- Participated as a developer in the AML program which was a program that used SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework).
- Developed, unit tested, documented, and peer reviewed software changes for the Siebel CRM system.
- Conducted smoke and functional design testing for the Siebel CRM Upgrade Project.
- Performed on-call Production Support on a rotation with other developers.
- Experience using Agile Scrum Software Development Methodology in the role of developer and release manager for the Siebel Delivery Team.
- Liaison between several teams which include Siebel Application Support, Oracle DBAs, Database Development, Business Intelligence, End User Technology, Change Management, QA, Project Management, and developers and management on my team to ensure successful migration of code from the development environment to the QA environment and from the QA environment to the Production environment.
- Reached out to resources on other Agile teams to ensure they completed any steps that were dependencies during our team’s migrations.
- Assessed dependencies, created migration plans, and coordinated with resources for QA refresh/data masking deployments.
- During deployments, gave periodic updates with percentage complete, how far or behind we were based on our schedule, and any impediments we faced along the way.
- Developed deployment and rollback plans for Production software migrations using Microsoft Project in order to determine dependencies and assigned and coordinated the required resources to successfully migrate to the Production environment.
- Lead the Development, Application Support, and QA teams in Production software migrations on a periodic basis.
- During deployments, gave periodic updates with percentage complete, how far or behind we were based on our schedule, and any impediments we faced along the way.
- During migrations, pulled in additional resources as needed to troubleshoot issues that dealt with changes specific developers would make.
- Kept track of which stories each developer worked on in order to be able to pin point the best resource to tackle the problem.
- Managed the entire “Content Only” (configuration only) software development release cycle which included making configuration changes, developing migration plans, creating change requests, coordinating resources during these migrations, giving migration status updates during deployments, and validating migrations after deployment.
- Represented the team in front of change management for all our deployments into the QA and Production Software Environments as well as create the change requests for these deployments.
- Organized and coordinated all software migrations between the Development, QA, and Production environments for business required enhancements to the Siebel CRM System.
- Made sure that all environments were in sync at the end of each of our release cycles and that our secondary development environment was updated after going to the Production environment.
- Developed release notes to instruct Siebel Application Support on how to execute configuration and JavaScript code changes related to the Siebel CRM, UCM, and Trillium Systems.
- Developed ad hoc SQL queries per my team’s request.
- Developed migration plans for the Siebel Upgrade Project Dry Run and Go Live software migrations which represent a year of work to successfully upgrade from the Siebel CRM 8.0 to the 8.1 software version.
- Worked as part of 2 different teams using the Scrum Software Development framework.
Education
Master of Science - Information Systems
University of Missouri
Saint Louis 08.2011 - 05.2013
MBA - Business Administration
Southern Illinois University
Edwardsville, IL 08.2002 - 05.2004
Bachelor of Arts - Foreign Languages and Lit, General Business Administration
Southern Illinois University
Edwardsville, IL 08.1998 - 05.2002
Skills
Agile Methodologies
Scrum
Kanban
Scrum Trainer
Agile Coaching
Adaptive Planning
Jira
Emotional Intelligence
Lean
Process Tailoring
Facilitation
SAFe
Bilingual - Spanish
Certification
CSP-SM (Certified Scrum Professional - Scrum Master)
Timeline
Scrum Master
Centene
10.2018 - 01.2019
Senior Enterprise Application Development Analyst
Scottrade Inc
09.2013 - 03.2018
Master of Science - Information Systems
University of Missouri
08.2011 - 05.2013
MBA - Business Administration
Southern Illinois University
08.2002 - 05.2004
Bachelor of Arts - Foreign Languages and Lit, General Business Administration
Southern Illinois University
08.1998 - 05.2002
Scrum Master
Shelter Insurance
1 2019 - Current
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