The University of Kansas

Agile Coach and Scrum Master for Startups with Proven Solutions to Optimize Teams for High Performance

Leading strategic, high-visibility programs globally as a Principal Technical Program Manager for the #1 Decentralized Clinical Trial (DCT) Platform.
• Partnered with business, product, and technology leaders on mission-critical, complex programs and drove them from original concept through final implementation
• Led the Study Delivery Automation Program, encompassing 9 high-impact initiatives across 11 teams, automating study development with the support of LLM/GPT, resulting in a more efficient and cost effective study development journey
• Drove key platform team initiative to successful release and adoption by 6 experience teams in support of internationalization and OTA localization updates
• Led rapid prototyping and rollout of product team and initiative status reporting mechanism, resulting in team of 8 TPMs effectively managing initiative status reporting to stakeholders across the organization
• Developed and launched team formation training for 14 product teams, with 87% of teams reporting they were set up for success post-reorg.
• Aligned 8 TPMs on key team sprint-level metrics and reporting, while coaching 2 product teams hands-on, resulting in 40% increase in their predictability (say:do ratio) and 20% increase in team happiness score
• Rolled out mechanism for teams to plan their releases more effectively using Jira Release plugin and release milestone template, resulting in improved release coordination, leadership alignment, and reduced release cycle time

Medable, Inc

Principal Technical Program Manager

I'm a TPM/agile coach by day and personal transformation expert by night. My goal is to help growth-driven individuals find their own path to personal transformation through self-experimentation. I find that there’s a bridge between my work and personal life, in terms of conducting experiments and bringing a mindset of continuous improvement. My approach to learning is to dive into a topic deeply by designing my own self-experiments. Afterwards, I reflect on the experience and through this process, make new discoveries.

I'm the author of three personal transformation books, one of which became top in its category on Amazon. Most recently, I'm the author of Transformational Fasting: Reconnect with Yourself, Get Healthy, and Find Your Purpose.

Find out more at www.derekralston.com.

DerekRalston.Com

Author

Led delivery teams through agile maturity and coached Product Development leadership to improve effectiveness and business outcomes as a Senior Agile Coach and Staff TPM.

• Coached the organization to scale efficiently from 13 teams to 35+ teams
• Introduced and evolved mechanism to identify where delivery teams spend their unplanned time and how that impacts their planned initiatives, resulting in an orgwide reduction in unplanned work by 14%
• Drove group-level annual and quarterly planning efforts to successful outcomes, resulting in quarterly planned initiative milestones delivered within two weeks of their target dates
• Developed automated dashboards to support teams in their planning, forecasting, predictability, and focus muscles, resulting in 100% of users reporting the dashboards helped them achieve their planned goals
• Coached the organization in best practices for Jira and Sisense usage and customization, resulting in effective tool usage by teams and ability to reflect and adapt based on data insights
• Developed and rolled out rotating engineering leadership role, Agile Champion, resulting in continuous improvement within Delivery Teams and scaled agility within Product Development
• Partnered with Content Marketing and Community teams, resulting in effective Agile Content Marketing Strategy

PagerDuty

Staff Technical Program Manager / Senior Agile Coach

Group Agile Coach for delivery teams focused on applying automation and data science to help operations teams cut through noise, reduce downtime, and improve business outcomes.

• Coached Scrum and Kanban teams toward continuous improvement, areas of focus include building discipline around agile planning, making metrics actionable, developing focus, managing unplanned work, planning and facilitating effective team kickoffs and offsites
• Improved delivery teams’ capability to effectively manage unplanned work Engineering-wide, resulting in increased team focus and value delivery
• Up leveled and scaled continuous improvement practices across the entire organization with RetroDuty initiative
• Developed strong agile intern program, coached and mentored interns through their terms, helping them grow their skills and deliver value to the organization
• Expert collaborator within the Agile Leadership Team and Agile Community, regularly led discussions and knowledge sharing which reduced the complexity of projects and processes across the organization

Agile Coach

Scrum Master for delivery teams focused on building features for enterprise customers as well as modernizing PagerDuty’s monolithic architecture.

Scrum Master

Trusted leader focused on maturing the Agile practices, processes and tools across the organization.

• Streamlined team Jira usage to single project with simplified workflows, resulting in improved engineering productivity
• Initiated and co-facilitated team health check workshops across 7 teams, fostering a culture of continuous improvement
• Developed interactive training courses on agile software development and Jira, trained new hires
• Led Scrum Master learning meetings and team offsites for sharing new ideas and practices
• Organized and planned companywide bug squash events, resulting in higher quality releases

Consensus Corporation

Agile Leader

Scrum Master for feature teams focused on major replatforming effort for SaaS omnichannel ecommerce platform.

• Coached 2 onsite teams and 2 offshore teams as Scrum Master, resulting in improved predictability and delivery of working software
• Developed interactive Confluence page diagram with Agile team guidelines
• Refined Scrum ceremonies and release planning process
• Piloted and evangelized Community of Practices to foster collaboration and best practices across teams

Drove Product Development as Scrum Master and Release Project Manager for eClinical and EDC SaaS solution.

• Organized on-time quarterly releases and weekly patches in a regulated environment, resulting in predictable delivery of value to customers
• Executed process improvements across Engineering & IT (20 US, 30 India FTEs), resulting in increased team productivity
• Managed Engineering Scrum team processes, IT Ops Kanban team processes, fostering a culture of continuous improvement within the organization
• Customized and implemented Microsoft Team Foundation Server (Azure DevOps Server) for user story and bug tracking and trained 4 teams
• Developed and stewarded Engineering & IT KPIs and metrics, resulting in data-driven decision making and a focus on business impact

Medrio

Technical Program Manager / Scrum Master

Managed complex software projects in fast-paced, challenging client environments, specializing in IT Project Management and Quality Management and working primarily in the wireless telecommunications industry. Promoted from Analyst to Consultant to Senior Consultant.

Consulting Project Highlights:

IT Project Manager   |   Prepaid Wireless Co.   |   11 Months
• Managed phased, multi-million dollar vendor integration project to tight timeline and budget
• Led product team testing strategy and execution for program launching new handsets, modems, payment plans, payment cards to three retailers nationwide
• Managed project risks and timeline effectively, interfacing with Director and VP level clients daily

IT Project Manager   |   Prepaid Wireless Co.   |   6 Months
• Managed complex vendor integration for wireless telecommunications provider involving four payment vendors
• Orchestrated project timeline and managed dependencies effectively, utilizing regular status check-ins with project team and vendors

Platform Testing Lead   |   Leading Wireless Co.   |   8 months
• Led test definition and execution for major wireless telecommunications billing platform release, coordinating efforts across 4 testing organizations and vendors
• Led the identification and rationalization of “gating” defects defects to assist leadership with prioritizing and resolving release defects resulting in reduced risk to the release

UAT Lead   |   Prepaid Wireless Co.   |   5 months
• Led a team of 4 testers, coordinating testing development, execution, and defect management for user acceptance testing
• Maintained project schedule and reported issues/risks to executive leadership daily

Derek Ralston