Laura Henderson

• Oversee Project Delivery: Manage multiple projects, ensuring they are completed on time and within budget while coordinating efforts across two scrum teams.

• Utilize Tracking Tools: Leverage JIRA and other project management tools to monitor progress on epics, features, and user stories.

• Collaborate with Stakeholders: Work closely with the Product Owner to define project scope, timelines, and resource allocation, ensuring alignment with business objectives.

• Identify Risks and Issues: Proactively communicate potential risks and issues, collaborating with teams to develop effective mitigation strategies.

• Support Sprint Planning: Assist teams in managing backlogs, planning sprints/releases, and setting clear sprint goals that align with project timelines.

• Facilitate Team Success: Empower teams to achieve their goals by removing obstacles and providing necessary support.

• Enhance Collaboration: Utilize tools like Mural and Miro to promote effective teamwork and communication.

• Manage Impediments: Address and resolve any impediments that may affect project progress.

• Prioritize Backlog: Facilitate backlog management and prioritization to ensure focus on critical tasks.

• Forecast Resource Needs: Manage work allocation and assess resource requirements, implementing proactive risk management strategies.

• Foster Communication: Encourage open discussions among team members and stakeholders to ensure alignment and transparency.

• Adhere to Project Management Principles: Ensure adherence to project management methodologies while enforcing time constraints to maintain productivity.

• Promote Continuous Improvement: Advocate for ongoing improvement in project processes and team efficiency.

• Build Stakeholder Trust: Maintain clear communication with business teams and stakeholders, fostering transparency and trust regarding project deliverables.

• Coordinate Release Management: Collaborate with Release Management on release schedules, content, and availability to ensure successful deployments.

• Report Progress: Regularly update stakeholders with project metrics and status reports to keep them informed of progress and outcomes.

• Adapt Project Processes: Adjust project management practices as necessary to align with team goals and maturity, fostering an agile and responsive environment.

· Team Leadership and Strategic Oversight: Led two cross-functional teams, facilitating Agile ceremonies and effectively removing impediments to ensure high-quality project delivery.

· Vision and Direction: Provided strategic leadership and direction, managing dependencies across teams to align efforts with organizational objectives and long-term goals.

· Stakeholder Collaboration: Collaborated closely with Product stakeholders to ensure teams thoroughly understood business objectives and project requirements, driving alignment across all levels.

· Cross-Functional Liaison: Served as a key liaison between Product management, development teams, and executive leadership, ensuring that all project goals and requirements were met on time and within budget.

· Testing and Quality Assurance Management: Oversaw the testing process for critical systems, coordinating testing teams, establishing Steps to Reproduce (STR), and ensuring efficient ticket creation and resolution.

· Detailed Ticket Oversight: Ensured developer tickets were comprehensive and clearly defined, coordinating assignments to the most suitable team members for optimal productivity.

· Sprint Planning and Resource Allocation: Designed and executed 2-week sprint plans, ensuring balanced workloads for developers and alignment with organizational priorities to maximize team performance.

· Support During Sprint Execution: Actively supported developers throughout sprint execution by clarifying priorities, mitigating distractions, and providing detailed task elaboration.

· Process Optimization: Developed and implemented processes that improved team efficiency in handling customer feedback, testing, and sprint preparation, enhancing communication and estimation practices.

· Quality Assurance Leadership: Ensured rigorous quality assurance protocols were in place prior to production releases, overseeing the release cycle and participating in manual testing as needed.

· User Acceptance Testing (UAT) Oversight: Managed the validation process for medical software, ensuring compliance with industry regulations and standards.

· Progress Analysis and Reporting: Analyzed project metrics, including burndown charts and key performance indicators, to assess progress and provide actionable feedback to senior management and stakeholders.

· Developed strong relationships with business partners, technical teams and key vendors to ensure smooth communication and requirement elicitation process across teams.

· Analyzed business partners operations to understand strengths and weaknesses to determine opportunities to improve and/or automate processes and functions.

· Drove business partner strategic goals, business value streams, and lead the definition of high-level business EPICs, features and requirements.

· Led value stream gap analysis and feasibility studies to assess cost, benefit, efficiency and opportunities to leverage Lean techniques to improve business and technical operations.

· Assisted business partners and IT partners to analyze business processes, functions and procedures and identify potential projects that will lead to improved business results, save costs, and achieve strategic goals.

· Led business cases and elicit requirements using various elicitation techniques that will achieve business improvements.

· Drove the definition of project scope, objectives, requirements, dependencies, and technical feasibility. Involve all relevant stakeholders to ensure alignment with business goals and vendor managed solutions to ensure delivery of business value.

· Led in defining detailed requirements in the form of business requirement documents, breakdown EPICs into features and features into user stories and acceptance criteria. Document any process and procedure changes that support project and business goals.

· Assisted in the development of statements of work and vendor contracts. Gain buy in and approval from subject matter experts, and stakeholders. Ensure statement of work and vendor contracts meet project needs and are approved and executed in a timely manner.

· Ensured team members and stakeholders understand project objectives and set appropriate expectations for delivery.

· Organized project team members and interested stakeholders to ensure effective communication and understanding of project scope, project deadlines, project integrations, activity assignment and ensure deliverables are met.

· Participated in project planning sessions with Project Managers and Scrum Masters, business stakeholders, project teams to analyze business requirements and articulate the solution.

· Partnered with business staff, workstream leaders, vendors, and the IT team to validate and ensure appropriate project scope, project schedules, resource plans, communication plans, risk and issue management, decision and escalation management, status reporting.

Prepared and presented project status updates, reports and plans at executive levels.