Twenty-plus years leading Agile delivery — and four decades in engineering and quality before and beneath it. Financial services, telecom, aviation, healthcare, and federal programs. Regulated, audited, high-stakes work.
70→92%
Sprint predictability lifted
−30%
Average cycle time, via Kanban flow & bottleneck analysis
+25%
Throughput, while holding compliance & audit standards
105–125%
Of planned work delivered, sustained
−40%
Manual reporting, via AI dashboarding
Zero
Audit findings across regulated release cycles
Experience
Senior Scrum Master Most recent
Charles Schwab
Feb 2025 – May 2026
- Led a 15–17 person onshore/offshore Kanban team supporting 10b5-1 trading plans, optimizing the end-to-end value stream for flow and delivery predictability.
- Analyzed production issues via Splunk logs, partnering with engineers to identify root causes and restore system stability.
- Coordinated cross-team “front door” requests to secure dependency support for releases, ensuring on-time delivery.
- Established periodic health reporting with Green/Yellow/Red thresholds and pre-planned mitigation actions.
- Onboarded ART resources by provisioning access to Confluence, Jira, Bitbucket, and Bamboo.
- Drove continuous improvement through value stream mapping with AI-supported pattern recognition; used Copilot automation to cut manual ART reporting by 40% across three concurrent Agile teams — a live delivery operation, not a pilot.
- Teams consistently exceeded commitments — delivering 105–125% of planned work across three teams (two Scrum, one Kanban).
Portfolio Management Support
RTE-level responsibilities carried in a Scrum Master seat.
- Portfolio commitments set in PI Planning — used PI Planning as the forum where portfolio expectations were ironed out and committed — constraints and bottlenecks named, capacity agreed, and mitigation owned before the PI started.
- WIP and capacity — agreed WIP limits with leadership during planning so the portfolio committed only to what it could finish.
- Epic and feature slicing — worked with Portfolio Owners and Product Managers to break XL and Large epics into manageable increments, slicing features where dependencies did not apply.
- Cross-organizational alignment — mapped dependencies in planning, then facilitated Scrum of Scrums to keep them visible and in focus throughout PI delivery.
- Portfolio flow metrics — between planning events, tracked cycle time, throughput, and lead time across value streams to expose organizational bottlenecks above the team level.
- Forecast transparency — managed feedback loops and provided data-driven forecasting from team sprint velocity, improving predictability and delivery confidence.
- Lean and value stream budgeting — coached leaders away from traditional project-based funding toward Lean budgeting and value stream budgeting that funds outcomes.
How I coach the portfolio →
Volunteer Scrum Master Coach
Independent · pro bono
Jan 2024 – Feb 2025
- Provided situational coaching to Scrum and Kanban teams across Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Dev Team roles.
- Coached on backlog refinement, effective daily standups, WIP limit management, and sprint execution.
- Delivered coaching on managing unplanned work, swimlane design, and continuous improvement retrospectives.
- Volunteered these services to teams without access to professional Agile coaching resources.
Senior Scrum Master / RTE
LPL Financial
Dec 2021 – Dec 2023
- Coordinated planning, execution, and delivery of Program Increments across the ART.
- Facilitated PI Planning, retrospectives, sprint reviews, and daily standups.
- Monitored KPIs to assess ART health — velocity trend, Say/Do ratio, carry-over, and predictability reporting.
- Collaborated with DevOps and the Change Advisory Board during releases, including certificate updates in Dev and Production.
- Championed Community of Practice participation for best practices across release trains.
Portfolio Management Support
Portfolio-facing work owned as RTE for the ART.
- Portfolio commitments set in PI Planning — ironed out portfolio expectations in PI Planning and left the event with them committed — bottlenecks named, owners assigned against them, and mitigation confirmed.
- WIP ceilings — advised the leadership team on limits that held commitment inside demonstrated capacity.
- Epic decomposition with Portfolio Owners — coached Portfolio Owners and Product Management to reduce XL epics to independently deliverable features wherever a dependency-free split existed.
- Cross-organizational dependency management — mapped dependencies at planning and ran Scrum of Scrums as the standing forum for them across the PI.
- Portfolio flow reporting — between events, reported lead time, cycle time, and throughput at the portfolio level, translating team data into where the organization was actually constrained.
- Forecast transparency — delivered velocity-based portfolio forecasts, with feedback loops that re-cut the forecast as sprints closed.
- Lean budgeting adoption — moved funding conversations off project-based allocation and onto the value stream.
How I coach the portfolio →
- Led multiple scrum teams in maturing existing Scrum practices and advancing their Agile journey.
- Validated teams' execution of SAFe principles, systems thinking, and risk/variability mitigation.
- Championed continuous improvement through the Agile Community of Practice.
- Used ServiceNow for resource requests, delivery change requests, and incident management.
Senior Scrum Master
Charles Schwab
Apr 2021 – Aug 2021
- Created and managed delivery plans for two agile teams with minimal technical debt.
- Provided sprint performance metrics — velocity trend, carry-over trend, defect trend, and completion trend.
- Conducted all Scrum ceremonies including client demos; interfaced with Product Owners on backlog and sprint activities.
Agile Manager / Scrum Master
AT&T
Oct 2018 – Aug 2020
- Created delivery plans for four agile teams; managed epics and user stories via IBM Rational Jazz RTC and AgileCraft.
- Served as RTE and coach during PI Planning events; assured cadence across independent teams.
- Mentored teams on Agile best practices and coached for continuous process improvement.
Project Manager / Senior Scrum Master
American Airlines
Oct 2017 – Oct 2018
- Managed IT Financial Systems projects across enterprise, vendors, external agencies, and partners.
- Defined requirements, scope, budget and funding, risks and issues; prepared stakeholder KPI updates.
- Maintained the Rally project backlog, project spending, and resource forecast.
- Mentored the Product Owner on backlog creation and coached teams in vertical story slicing.
- Ensured audit-quality documentation and testing delivery; active member of the AA Community of Practice.
Earlier engagements
Internal Revenue ServiceFeb 2016 – Jul 2017
Project Manager / Scrum Master
Federal program delivery; SAFe at scale across a ~125-person Agile transformation. Held MBI clearance during the engagement (since expired).
Cigna Health CareFeb 2013 – Dec 2015
Scrum Master / Agile Coach
Certified Scrum Master and coach across healthcare delivery teams in a regulated environment.
Before Agile — the quality spine
The metrics obsession is not a recent pitch. It is where I started. Field Engineer at Martin Marietta (formerly GE Aerospace) for nine years in aerospace and defense. Process Improvement Engineer, Quality Assurance at Kodak Health Imaging. QA and test leadership through Deloitte & Touche, XO Communications, Citigroup, Capital One, Fidelity Investments, and JCPenney — and Scrum Master since roughly 2004, at Verizon, practicing Agile almost from the Manifesto's start.
Why it matters now: most Delivery Managers arrive as an ex-PM learning Agile or an ex-Scrum-Master learning governance. I came up through engineering and quality first — which is why release readiness, test strategy, and non-functional requirements are conversations I have, not ones I escalate.
How I work — named methods
- Ishikawa / fishbone analysis. Analytical problem-solving to decompose ambiguous problems into causes you can actually act on.
- Open–Narrow–Close decisioning. How I facilitate cross-team working sessions — open the space, narrow the options, close on a commitment. It is how a room of competing priorities leaves with one decision.
- Green / Yellow / Red health reporting. Periodic status against defined thresholds, each with a pre-planned mitigation. Leaders see the problem and the response in the same view.
- Value stream mapping with flow metrics. Cycle time, WIP, throughput, and predictability — measured, not asserted. See the full approach →
- Shu-Ha-Ri coaching to independence. Three scrum teams taken to “Ha” maturity — running their own practice without me.
Education & credentials
BS, Electronic Engineering
DeVry Institute of Technology — 1984. The start of the engineering and quality spine.
PMP Trained
D&L Training — 2018. Project-management discipline behind the Agile practice.
AI Governance Certified
2026 — Introduction to AI Governance and AI Governance for Organizations: Applying ISO/IEC 38507:2022, with working knowledge of NIST AI RMF principles. The governance layer on top of the AI-enabled delivery work already running at Charles Schwab. How I govern AI delivery →
Certified ScrumMaster (CSM)
Certified Scrum Professional (CSP)
Leading SAFe trained
PMI Gen AI for Project Managers
Coaching Skills for Leaders & Managers
Jira Align Program Essentials
Jira Fundamentals
Kanban — Lean Scheduling & JIT
Rally Super User
MBI federal clearance (held 2016–17, expired)
Tools & platforms
JiraJira AlignRallyConfluence
PlanviewIBM Jazz RTCAgileCraftServiceNow
SplunkGitHubBitbucketBamboo
JenkinsMicrosoft CopilotChatGPT
ScrumKanbanXPSAFeLean
SDLCCI/CD & DevOpsValue Stream MappingFlow MetricsRAG Metrics
Available now.
My Charles Schwab engagement closed in May 2026. I'm taking on Delivery Manager, RTE, Scrum Master, AI Governance Advisor, and coaching work — full-time or contract, fractional or embedded, on-site, hybrid, or remote.
If your teams are shipping AI-enabled features, the governance comes with the seat — ISO/IEC 38507:2022 and NIST AI RMF principles applied inside your PI cadence, not filed in a policy document. How I govern AI delivery →
Book a conversation →