KAREN EFEREYAN
New York,NY
Summary
Passionate, motivated, results-driven, and goal-oriented Scrum Master with over 7 years’ experience within the IT industry and experienced in SAFe. Scrum master with a knack record of delivering high quality large-scale software and web development projects, quickly and within budget, while working with different teams. Successfully stood up a team from forming to performing stage using the Agile mindset. An expert in establishing effective collaboration among self-organized and cross-functional teams by delivering incremental value. I am well known for exceptional communication, interpersonal and leadership skills, and ability in managing multiple complex projects by leveraging on problem-solving skills. Passionate about facilitating the flow of value. I have strong emotional intelligence and organizational awareness with the ability to challenge organizational norms and influence decisions without formal authority.
Overview
7
7
years of professional experience
Work History
Senior Scrum Master III
City National Bank
08.2022 - Current
- Serving as a scrum master for two diverse teams working on integrating credit card rewards systems and digital account opening for efficient agile practices and mindset
- Work with teams of developers and other cross-functional team members on design thinking concepts and technology-driven digital product innovation, user experience management, and digital transformation
- Responsible for establishing disciplined, effective agile teams which embrace and exhibit the agile mindset and culture by instructing the teams in agile principles and practices
- Constantly developing collaborative working relationships with multiple levels of functional managers, and steering committees with a focus on scaling agile within the organization
- Work closely with the Project Management Office (PMO) to strategize and prioritize tasks, effectively managing Work in Progress (WIP) and promoting operational excellence
- Facilitate regular retrospectives to pinpoint bottlenecks and operational inefficiencies within the team’s processes
- Spearhead process enhancements that culminated into a noteworthy 20% boost in team velocity
- Use design thinking concept in an innovative and collaborative approach to problem-solving that puts the users first to create customer-centered products and services
- Coach scrum teams on how to effectively groom user stories; ensure they are well-defined, well written, and properly formatted (The Who, what, Why) and follow the definition of Ready
- Prioritize customer-centric approach by collaborating closely with the Product Owner to align feature prioritization with customer feedback and market demands
- Implemented DEEP (Detailed, Emergent, Estimated, Prioritized) and WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First) techniques to backlog item prioritization, resulting in the timely delivery of features that directly supported strategic business goals and maintained compliance requirements
- Collaborated with Product Owner and team to decompose Features into stories, size the stories with Fibonacci, determine the capacity, and load the iterations based on the capacity
- Work with RTE to facilitate PI planning; using Business Context, Roadmap, Vision, and 10 top features to produce synthesized PI Objectives and Program Board that highlights new feature delivery dates, feature dependencies among teams, and with other ARTs and relevant milestones
- Proficiently utilize Agile tools, such as JIRA and Confluence, to diligently monitor team progress, track user stories, and facilitate transparent collaboration among team members, enhancing project visibility and streamlined workflows
- Determine the team capacity (velocity) from historical data
- Created Work Break down structure (user stories) and corresponding activities (tasks)
- Orchestrate monthly sprint review sessions for multiple cross-functional teams, effectively enhancing project transparency and contributing to 83% increase in stakeholder satisfaction
- Conduct pre-Program Increment (PI) planning sessions to comprehensively review upcoming objectives, dependencies, and potential risks
- Promoted shared understanding and alignment among all participants, facilitating successful PI execution
- Effectively manage geographically dispersed Agile teams, ensuring fluid communication, seamless collaboration, and alignment via virtual Scrum ceremonies on Zoom and online collaboration tools like Slack
- Resulted in improved team efficiency and overall project outcomes
- Help leadership understand associated continuous integration, continuous delivery (CICD) implications, and the structure required to sufficiently support the software development
- Responsible for guiding teams on the first principle of Agile Coaching in working software delivery
- Work to build high-performing product delivery teams
- Work with Product Owner to create the product roadmap and schedule releases per business value
- Foster a strong spirit of communication and collaboration between teams to align program goals, deliver final products, and ensure leadership transparency to impediments and progress.
Senior Scrum Master
Citibank
01.2020 - 07.2022
- Led a scrum team in the enhancement and expansion of the bank’s fraud detection algorithm which helped to reduce fraudulent transactions
- Oversaw diverse Scrum team comprised of 1 Product Owner, 5 MuleSoft Engineers, 2 QAs, 3 UI Designers, and Integration Specialist, a DevOps Engineer, and a data analyst to seamlessly integrate digital payment solutions into the bank’s existing infrastructure
- Effectively utilized Scrum ceremonies to adapt to evolving requirements and successfully delivered dependable and user-friendly payment experience
- Led a team on CITICONNECTCASH web-based application typically for collection management processes using Java and Oracle
- Proactively identified and addressed project risks, applying the ROAM risk management model
- Significantly streamlined workflows, minimized disruptions, and contributed to 25% enhancement in team velocity
- Coordinated backlog refinement sessions in collaboration with Product Owner, utilizing the INVEST criteria to distill intricate technical stories, fostering team comprehension and facilitating efficient execution of tasks
- Partnered with the Agile Teams and Product Owners to maintain and refine the program backlog using WSJF in a SAFe environment
- Coached Product Owner, on the utilization of MOSCOW prioritization method to align requirements with core stakeholder needs and strategically deliver maximum value to the organization
- Applied the Kaizen principle to foster a culture of continuous improvement within the team, empowering team members to propose and implement incremental process enhancements
- Resulted in a 15% increase in team efficiency over the course of three sprints
- Ensuring users stories are written in the right format using techniques such as the 3 Cs, 3W, user personas and validate it with INVEST model, and acceptance criteria using the Given, When, Then format
- Create disciplined and efficient agile teams, instilling a strong agile mindset and culture
- Provided guidance to the teams, imparting agile principles and practices, fostering a collaborative and adaptive work environment
- Work with product owners to manage the backlog and prioritize new requests
- Effectively led Scrum of Scrums sessions, ensuring seamless coordination and communication between multiple Agile teams, while addressing inter-team dependencies to maintain project alignment and drive collective success, leading to a 15% reduction in integration delays
- Work in close collaboration with the Release train Engineer (RTE) to facilitate effective Inspect and Adapt sessions, Scrum of Scrums and Agile Release Train (ART) Sync, ensuring cross-team retrospectives, identifying improvement opportunities, and ensuring alignment on actionable items for enhanced Agile project performance
- Continuously built strong, collaborative partnerships with functional managers across various levels and steering committees
- Emphasized scaling agile methodologies throughout the organization, ensuring alignment and cooperation at every level
- Forecast product delivery timeline and support in planning delivery roadmaps, MVP, and milestones
- Support agile team during pre-PI planning, break out session to come up with the draft plan for the quarter, identify and mitigate risk and track dependencies across multiple teams within the ARTs
- Collaborates with scrum team in the use of personas in the creation of customer-type/end-user of the product/services
- Determined the team capacity (velocity) from historical data
- Created Work Break down structure (user stories) and corresponding activities (tasks)
- Responsible for guiding teams on the first principle of Agile Coaching in working software delivery
- Collaborated closely with my scrum team to establish explicit acceptance criteria and a well-defined ‘Definition of Done’ for user stories and tasks
- Conducted detailed discussions, ensuring mutual understanding and alignment within the team, resulting in higher-quality deliverables and improved sprint outcomes
- Collect and analyze data to track progress, velocity and other key performance indicators
- Translated stakeholder requirements and metrics into clear directives for the Scrum teams, ensuring a shared understanding of project objectives
- Accurately reported project risks, successes, and failures, providing critical insights for informed decision-making and continuous improvement initiatives.
Senior Scrum Master/Project Manager
Northwestern Mutual
07.2017 - 12.2019
- Led team composed 5 software engineers, 2 UI designers, 1 robotic process automation developer and data scientist to develop ‘AutoClaimed’, an automated digital claim processing platform, reducing claim processing time by 60% and saving the company millions of dollars yearly
- Implemented the Shu-Ha-Ri technique with the teams so that they understand the Agile mindset and work towards satisfying the customers
- Organized and facilitated sprint planning, daily stand-up meetings, sprint reviews, and sprint retrospect
- Created 5+ coaching sessions to teach “Definition of ready” and “Definition of done” to developers and ensure their adoption in consideration of Product backlog items
- Coached teams and businesses on how to adopt the Agile Manifesto, Principles, and SAFe Principles
- Worked with Product Owner to create the product roadmap and schedule releases per business value
- Guided the teams in evaluating upcoming sprint’s backlog items, breaking them down into manageable tasks using work breakdown structures, and estimating effort required for each tasking using Fibonacci sequence for Planning Poker
- Assisted Product Owner in backlog refinement in preparation for PI planning and Sprint planning
- Introduced a dependency tracking system, allowing teams to visualize, manage and communicate dependencies effectively, resulting in a 20% reduction in delayed deliveries
- Fostered collaborative partnerships with external vendors and third-party teams, actively overseeing integration initiatives to ensure seamless alignment with project objectives and adherence to established timelines
- Protected development team from outside distractions, impediments, or team conflicts, and maintain focus on sprint backlog and project timeline
- Worked with developers to improve their intra-team communication and improve transparency in their sprint objectives
- Cultivated psychologically safe and trusting environment within the scrum team, where team members comfortably share their ideas and take risks
- Provided Agile training sessions for the scrum teams as needed within the organization
- Coached the Product Owner to prioritize and refine user stories in the Product Backlog using the INVEST criteria and DEEP concept
- Helped team identify and break free from anti-patterns impacting their velocity and improvement
- Facilitated the scrum ceremonies: Backlog refinement, Sprint planning, Daily stand-up, Sprint Review/Demo, and Sprint Retrospective where team members are fully engaged
- Helped teams to escalate dependencies, bottlenecks, and risk items that were identified during our PI Planning event to my RTE to mitigate them from affecting the sprint
- Prepared and presented status updates weekly and monthly
- Using Jira and Azure DevOps to track the progress of workflow
- Facilitated Discussion, decision making, and conflict resolution.
Scrum Master/Project Manager
Brain Trust
06.2016 - 07.2017
- Collaborated with stakeholders to define project requirements, scope, and success criteria, ensuring alignment with business goals
- Fostered strong relationships with stakeholders, including executives, product owners, and team members to ensure alignment with project objectives and facilitate effective communication
- Proactively identified and managed project risks, creating risk mitigation plans, ensuring timely resolution of issues, and minimizing project disruptions
- Utilized Jira to track tasks, monitor progress, and generate reports that highlighted sprint performance and project milestones
- Proficiently facilitated Scrum ceremonies, including sprint planning, daily standups, sprint reviews, ensuring team adhered to agile principles and continuously improved their processes, resulting in 15% increase in team velocity
- Worked with product owner to facilitate backlog refinement sessions, aiding the creation and prioritization of user stories and tasks
- Managed and resolved team conflicts and dynamic business requirements to keep operations running at high performance while also encouraging team cohesion and creating team-building opportunities
- Coached 2 teams to higher levels of maturity by improving their process and ensuring they adhered to the scrum framework
- Used agile methods and processes to coach 2 Product Owners through complex solving and solution strategies
- Ensured team engagement in all scrum ceremonies by defining purpose and benefit while helping them focus on all sprint goals
- Mentored 2 distributed agile teams in their scrum adoption facilitating ceremonies and sprints processes and being a true leader to more than 10 professional digital transformations
- Managed the agile process by developing a set of metrics from company data to track improvements in organizational efficiency.
Education
BSc - Computer Science
University of Ilorin
Certified Scrum Master (CSM -
Master -
PSM -
Certified SAFe 5.0 Agilist. -
Scaled Agile Inc
Skills
- Hands-on experience with agile frameworks such as Scrum, Kanban, SAFe️ 50, Lean, and eXtreme programming
- Working knowledge with developers to implement the CALMR concept of DevOps and 4 dimensions of the Continuous Delivery Pipeline Continuous Exploration (CE), Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Deployment (CD), and Release on Demand
- Excellent understanding of agile principles and practices such as XP (CI, Test First; TDD, ATDD, Refactoring, Pair Programming, Collective Code Ownership, etc
- Experience coaching agile mindset shifts and behaviors across multiple scrum teams including Senior Leadership
- Experience in collaborating with stakeholders to manage their expectations and engaging them to address project issues
- Experience working with agile collaboration tools like Jira, Confluence, Rally, and VersionOne
- Sprint Planning
- Project Management
- Agile Best Practices
- Risk Identification
- Stakeholder Relations
- Requirements Gathering
- Status Reporting
- Project Management Software
Timeline
Senior Scrum Master III
City National Bank
08.2022 - Current
Senior Scrum Master
Citibank
01.2020 - 07.2022
Senior Scrum Master/Project Manager
Northwestern Mutual
07.2017 - 12.2019
Scrum Master/Project Manager
Brain Trust
06.2016 - 07.2017
BSc - Computer Science
University of Ilorin
Certified Scrum Master (CSM -
Master -
PSM -
Certified SAFe 5.0 Agilist. -
Scaled Agile Inc
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