Strategic Technology Manager - Scrum Master - Agile Coach
What I Can Do For You
My Selected Accomplishments
My Selected Accomplishments
EXPERT TECHNOLOGIST
AUTOMATION ARCHITECT MANAGER
CERTIFIED SCRUM MASTER
PROFESSIONAL AGILE COACH
Strategic Technology Planning & Assessment / System Architecture, Design & Development
Enterprise Systems Planning & Integration / R&D & Full Lifecycle Systems Development
An award winning Manager accomplished in leading corporate strategic technology initiatives.
Extensive Fortune 1000, 500, 100, consulting, and small company experience with a focus on aligning technology to cost effectively meet today’s and tomorrow’s needs.
Strengths include:
- Over 20 years Leading and coaching Agile Frameworks.
- Experienced with Scrum teams and SAFe Enterprise Organizations to success.
- Agile coaching in Scrum, Kanban, XP, SAFe, and Hybrids to fit your developmental process.
- Building, implementing and managing enterprise-level IT systems.
- Delivering complex, high risk, software systems design and implementation projects
- Developing, leading and motivating cross-functional teams at all levels.
- Identifying and solving difficult IT and business problems; seizing opportunities for improvement.
My Selected Accomplishments
My Selected Accomplishments
My Selected Accomplishments
A results-oriented professional with progressive software management experience that directed the Software Development, Architecting, and Operations for the HDS IaaS and SaaS IoT Global Cloud and future versions. Specialized expertise in managing new feature development projects utilizing Agile Frameworks of Scrum, ScrumXP, Kanban, SAFe, and other hybrids. Including the coordination of sustaining bug fixes, processes and methods, software release, scheduling, software quality, and detailed documentation.
· Architected & maintained Hitachi’s first IoT Global IaaS & SaaS Cloud with uptime of >99.9%.
· Significantly reduced labor intensive record keeping by more than 90% by developing a Web application using advanced inventory tracking of entire HDS lab equipment of >$100 million.
· Improved equipment uptime by more than 5% by developing numerous test software and diagnostic packages that ran in the background monitoring equipment health predicting possible failures.
Successfully operated as CEO and President, two software consulting firms, Sysoft, Inc. and Software Decisions, Inc., handling major contracts with IBM, SyQuest Technologies, and many other major companies.
My Technical Strengths
My Selected Accomplishments
My Technical Strengths
Certifications:
- Certified Scrum Master
- Certified Agile Coach
- Certified DevOps Generalist
Practicing Agile frameworks for the past 20 years leading and coaching Scrum teams and enterprises to success.
Completed the formalized Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) Certified Scrum Master training.
Agile Frameworks and Functions
- Scrum, Kanban, ScrumXP, SAFe.
- Daily standup.
- Sprint planning.
- Sprint review.
- Sprint retrospective.
- Product backlog refinement.
- PI Planning.
- ART Sync.
- System Demo.
- Inspect & Adapt .
Software Development:
C, C++, C#, Java, XML, Assembly; Databases MS SQL & Access; Object Oriented Programming, Microsoft Visual Studio .Net, Microsoft Office, Excel, Word, MS Project, MS Visio, Google Docs, MS SQL Server, QualiSystems CloudShell
Operating Systems:
Windows, Linux
Management:
Budgeting, Forecasting, Effective Risk Assessment, Customer Service, Knowledge of Business Requirements, Training of Team Members, Reviews, Accountability of Team Requirements, Evaluation of how we do it better next time.
Project Management:
Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Lean, SAFe, Waterfall, SDLC, JIRA
Hardware:
System Design & Integration, Data Centers, Infrastructure, Test Engineering, Lab Automation, Layer 1 Net Scout 3912, MRV, Curtiss Wright; Wave2Wave AFM360 Robot, Servers, Fiber Switches, Storage, SAN Fabric, FCoE
Major Accomplishment: See the revolutionary private Global IaaS, SaaS, PaaS Cloud environment I architected, programmed, and maintained with >99.9% up time at Hitachi Data Systems on YouTube @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3aTNBF_uAU
A Technologists Opinions
IoT IoT IoT IoT IoT IoT - (>6400 LinkedIn Users Read This...)
A New Buzz Word with an Old History but an Unknown Insecure Future. Interesting how the industry creates a new acronym called “IoT” for the same thing I have been doing and calling “AoT” (Automation of Things) for the last 20 years. The concept of network smart devices was discussed as early as 1982, with a modified Coke machine at Carnegie Mellon University becoming the first Internet-connected appliance, able to report its inventory and whether newly loaded drinks were cold. Amazing how this new term, “IoT”, is revolutionizing our industry as companies are making the changeover to get a piece of that multi-billion dollar pie. The bad news is that we see layoffs because of the changeover, but the good news is that companies are compensating by filing new “IoT” positions. My biggest concern for this race to automate the World is our poor concern for internet security. We say we care, but look at all of the massive hacking going on and the ease at which it occurs. We had a Dot Com era, but what happened to the “Dot Secure” era?
Is Agile/Scrum Still the Right Way? (In Process...)
Even though I love the Agile/Scrum Software Development process, we need to re-examine it since it is quite old and everybody is continuously modifying it to fit their needs. Oh, and it's not a process, it's a "Framework". Our Agile methodologies have been around since the early nineties. Here is a little history as to why we made the initial changeover. In the early 1990s, as PC computing began to proliferate in the enterprise, software development faced a crisis. At the time, it was widely referred to as "the application development crisis," or "application delivery lag." Industry experts estimated that the time between a validated business need and an actual application in production was about three years. (A little exaggeration? Maybe a lot?)
Scrum was based on the concept that for the development of new complex products, the best results occur when small and self-organizing teams are given objectives rather than specific assignments. The team had the freedom to determine the best way of meeting those objectives. Scrum also defined time-boxed iterative development cycles whose goal was to deliver working software. Today, most teams that claim to practice an agile methodology say they are using Scrum. And eventually, we had the Agile Manifesto and its 12 principles of software development at Manifesto for Agile Software Development
Ok, now for a realistic summary. According to the Agile advocates, It’s a win-win solution for everybody, fast turnaround of new features, quick bug fixes, and constant revenue. The major downfall of Scrum is if you don't have a self discipline collaborative Scrum Team, you will fail. Also, two other members, Scrum Master and Product Owner, must do their jobs and maintain a cohesive collaborative team, or you will fail. And a Scrum team is not run by a Program Manager or Project Manager. The Scrum team is self-managing.
Here is a list of some of the modified Agile/Scrum processes that various companies are using.
The list of these modified Agile processes goes on and on, such as Extreme Programming (XP), Feature-driven development (FDD), Adaptive system development (ASD), Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), Lean Software Development (LSD), Kanban, Crystal Clear, Scrum, Agile Modeling (AM), Rational Unified Process (RUP), Lean vs Agile, Test-Driven Development (TDD), Rapid Application Development (RAD), Empirical Control Method, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), ScrumXP, Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), Large-scale Scrum (LeSS), Nexus (scaled Professional Scrum), Scrum at Scale, Enterprise Scrum, Setchu (Scrum-based lightweight framework), Xscale, Agile path, Holistic Software Development, Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF), Open Unified Process (OpenUP), Essential Unified Process (EssUP), Agile Unified Process (AUP), and….
My Favorite Websites
I have several websites that I have visited over the years of my professional career. One of my favorites is www.amazon.com where I've spent too much money on technical books. Every new computer science or software programming book that was published I'd examine on Amazon and make a decision to purchase. On average I would spend over $3000.00 a year on computer programming and technical books. Now all my books are on my Kindle where I can hold my entire library of over 2200 technical, fiction, and nonfiction books in one hand.
Another favorite website is www.microsoft.com where I've purchased numerous versions of Visual Studio using C, C++, C#, Visual Basic, assembly language, and whatever other software else I could find.
And then of course, another favorite, both yours and mine, www.google.com. If it wasn't for them, how else would we ever be able to find anything on the internet.
And of course we can't forget that one site where all the techies goes to exchange their ideas, www.linkedin.com where I've been a long time user. Currently I have over 13,500 connections on LinkedIn and continually growing. The best part about LinkedIn is that it's a place where technical professionals can exchange ideas and obtain positive feedback.
IoT IoT IoT IoT IoT IoT IoT (Does the NASDAQ $123.47 Debacle Affect the Future of IoT?)
It could be disastrous if we don’t have the vision to account for things that could happen in the future when IoT integrations become the standard.
On July 4, 2017, one of the major headlines on the internet stated, “A Data Glitch Causes Apple's Stock to Soar 348%, Pushing Its Market Cap to $3.37 Trillion”. A NASDAQ spokesman said "As part of its normal process, the UTP distributed test data and certain third parties improperly propagated the data. Nasdaq is working third party vendors to resolve the matter." Normal? It is a good thing it happened after the market had closed. Can you imagine the Global pandemonium that would have occurred during normal hours?
So what does this tell us about the future when IoT controls so many things in our environment? As an example, eventually IoT may control the entire U.S. and Canada Power Grid. Can you see somebody improperly propagating the data to the Power Grid causing an overload and shutting down the entire system? Case in point, the Northeast Blackout of 2003 where power was off for about seven hours, and some areas more than a day. There were 11 deaths and cost an estimated $6 billion.
Thousands of people walk out of downtown Manhattan towards the Brooklyn Bridge on August 14, 2003 in New York City after the Northeast Blackout. (Photo by Jonathan Fickies/Getty Images)
Could this be your IoT panic because you couldn’t see the “Big Picture”?
As Visionary IoT creators of automating the functions of the World, we need to foresee these possible future catastrophes and account for their possibilities now. We may be automating small things now and thinking they are big, but in the future, we will tie these items together, and add more and more items to centrallized controlling systems. We must put the hooks in now for the checks and balances required for the future.
Let’s don’t have another simple “Y2K $100 billion” bug because we forgot to compensate for the up and coming 2038 “Unix Millennium Bug.”
Every IoT solution must ask the question, “What If?”
Thousands Laid Off Due to IoT Taking Over the Internet! (In Process...)
Now there’s a shocking headline! Is it true? Yes, it’s true! Look at all of the companies making the changeover to the world of IoT and Social Innovation. They're all looking to obtain a piece of that multi Billion dollar pie. Some say multi Trillion dollar pie.
Is this a positive change? Yes it is. Companies large and small are restructuring for the move to IoT. Yes there are a lot of people being laid off during this move, but it is compensated by the hiring of people to fill the empty IoT requirements. It's not like the Dot Com crash where there was nothing to fill the void.
IoT's goal is to Automate the World!
IoT IoT IoT IoT IoT IoT IoT (Are They Listening to Us?)
This morning, around 11:30 AM (PDT), my wife and I were discussing items that we needed to purchase at the grocery store when Alexa, my Amazon Echo Dot, interrupted us. Alexa stated that she had just started a free three month trial with Amazon Fresh for me. We looked up in shock! Neither of us had activated Alexa.
Alexa then began to offer grocery items that were on sale and if we wanted them added to our Amazon Fresh account which I, in turn, said no. After offering two items, Alexa became silent.
We looked at each other in amazement! Nobody had activated Alexa by using her name or manually. We were just talking about grocery items we needed to buy.
Was Alexa listening to our conversations, or was this just a “Twilight Zone” coincidence? Or, maybe a generic sales pitch that coincided with our discussion?
We all know that in the future of IoT, things will be listening to all of our wants and needs. Let's pave that road to the future open-ended.