Thomas Fortenberry

Advanced Agile Adoption by spearheading the adoption of Agile culture, mindset, frameworks, processes, skills, roles, techniques, and tools to support the organization in achieving its strategic goals and serving its customers more effectively.

Defined Team Roles and Responsibilities by establishing clear roles, directions, responsibilities, performance requirements, and targets for the team, ensuring alignment with organizational objectives and fostering accountability.

Built Cross-Organization Coalitions and developed and nurtured cross-organization coalitions, identifying opportunities for collaboration and uncovering challenges to drive continuous improvement and innovation.

Coordinated Executive Training and organized and facilitated C-Level SAFe for Executives Training, equipping senior leaders with the knowledge and skills to lead Agile transformations and drive strategic initiatives.

Managed Digital Customer Experience IT Portfolio while overseeing a diverse portfolio of programs, projects, and initiatives aimed at enhancing the digital customer experience. Led efforts in Value Stream Mapping to transition the Project Management Office (PMO) from traditional waterfall methodologies to the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).

Release Train Engineer and Release Manager for the Digital Customer Engagement organization, facilitating Program Increment (PI) Planning and ensuring alignment with business objectives.

Project & Portfolio Management LEAN/Agile champion, driving the implementation of LEAN/Agile principles and practices across Enterprise IT projects and portfolio work. Promoted a culture of continuous improvement and operational excellence.

• Manage and optimize the flow of value through ART and Solution Train through Program and Solution Kanban, metric dashboards, and assessments
• Establish, communicate, and facilitate PI Planning readiness by fostering continuous exploration, driving vision, and building roadmaps, through Pre and Post-PI Planning sessions
• Facilitate PI planning events and summarize team PI Objectives into Program PI Objectives and publish them for visibility and transparency
• Managed risks and dependencies, escalated and tracked impediments while providing input on resourcing to address critical bottlenecks
• Improved flow of value through value streams by improving and assessing practices associated with DevOps and Release on Demand in the Continuous Delivery Pipeline
• Understand and operated within Lean Budgets and ensure adherence to Guardrails
• Facilitated System/Solution Demos and driving relentless improvement via Inspect and Adapt workshops

• Lean-Agile change agent responsible for leading all levels of Emerson, working with Lean-Agile leadership to transform the enterprise from waterfall to Scaled Agile.
• Took charge of designing and developing a comprehensive plan to transform the Digital Engagement organization to Scaled Agile methodology. The result was the creation of Emerson's very first global Agile Release train.
• Lead and facilitated the Digital Operations Agile Release Train (ART), consisting of 12 Agile teams.
• Continuously trained all Agile team roles in Lean-Agile practices and team level operations within an ART.
• Responsible for ongoing coaching, training, and development of the Release Train engineer and Solution Train Engineer roles.

• Managed six distributed Scrum teams and implemented Agile principles and values to deliver features every 3 weeks.
• Lead Agile coach for the Digital Engagement Team
• Transitioned 3 platforms from Waterfall to Agile, including the training of Scrum and JIRA
• Coached 3 team members on how to become scrum product owners and multiple dev teams how to use Scrum
• Led the implementation and global re-branding of the Emerson Fans, Workshop Vacs, and Pro-Team e-commerce sites
• Coached three distributed platforms on Agile and lead teams in implementing three-week sprints resulting in an 87% client satisfaction improvement rate
• Currently program managing the implementation re-branding and global release of all Emerson.com sites and subsidiaries
• Effectively worked with all project/product teams to ensure
  road-mapped timelines were met with quantitative results to our stakeholders

• Corporate IT Release Manager responsible for all global executions of Emerson.com web delivery and corporate branded e-commerce sites
• Successfully deployed over 150+ releases into our production environments resulting in a 97% achievement rate
• Spearheaded the Corporate IT Web Delivery roll-out procedures for Incident Reporting, Hot Fixes and Emergency on demand production releases
• Program managed the road-maps and timelines for Emerson.com and various corporate initiatives
• Trained distributed teams, product stakeholders, and corporate level management on all release management procedures
• Nominated thrice for the Emerson CIO award
• Received Green Star recognition from Gartner for my Release Management implementation at Emerson Electric