Christopher Vestal

Facilitates Scrum team activities and removes impediments – either through direct action or escalating appropriately. Manages Jira and MS Azure Boards to tailor the tools to the expressed needs of teams. Encourages a positive, rewarding environment that promotes engagement and motivation. Works collaboratively to identify and act on opportunities for continual improvement through retrospectives and openness. Ensures teams celebrate success whenever possible to build positive feedback loops and a trusting environment. Coaches on productivity and flow optimization while insulating and empowering teams to self-organize. Provides mentoring to new product owners, scrum masters, and developers on their respective roles within Agile/Scrum. Works with internal customers and Product Owners to encourage continual exploration and discovery to feed backlog. Hosts Scrum of Scrums to ensure dependencies and impacts are identified and understood. Ensures vertical alignment with business leaders and internal customers throughout product development and delivery. Coordinates with Change Advisory Board and supports all efforts related to product releases. Assesses agile maturity at team and organizational level and offers recommendations to measurably improve dynamics. Steps in as needed to resolve internal friction or conflict through de-escalation and change management approaches. Assists as needed in a business analyst capacity to research, discover, and capture underlying business processes. Collaborates with trusted partners and software vendors to ensure alignment, appropriate assets, and accountability. Leads Lean/Agile Community of Practice to evangelize and share Agile Thinking outside of IT. Measures team and program performance based on business value – emphasizing outcomes over outputs.

Guided winning innovation challenge team using Lean Startup to conceptualize and develop new Incident Command solution for tactical, onscene dispatch. Bridge between Mobile and CAD team to ensure cadence and quality between Scrum teams. Mentored developers and QA analysts in Scrum Agile.

Led two separate divisions within ScanOnline: NTI Software and the Managed Services Group. Responsible for the initial launch of the managed services division. Evaluated, selected and deployed ITSM incident response and alert management platforms. Worked with customers to develop processes that ensure proper response and adherence to service level agreements. Implemented best practices to support ITIL framework within a co-managed environment with our customers. Developed strategy for scaling managed services team, which is currently projected to double in size by end of year. Collaborated with customers around reporting needs to ensure they gain the business intelligence and visibility into operations required to make informed decisions around capacity and future growth. Tracked and monitored incidents to ensure overall quality of service and provided reports to senior management and customers to prove contractual compliance with service level agreements. Within NTI software division, I was responsible for moving from waterfall methodology to Scrum Agile. Led the initiative to improve testing and deployment of software products by integrating and streamlining QA processes. Worked from an enterprise architecture perspective to engineer requirement processes which allowed traceability and end-to-end management. Oversaw introduction of rapid application development tools to decrease time to market of critical custom mobile applications.

Ensured quality of geolocation and mapping solutions embedded in InterAct Public Safety Products used by Dispatchers and First-Responders. Responsible for manual testing of GIS mapping interfaces. Created test cases for both manual and automated testing. Built and maintained test case repository in HP ALM (Quality Center). Created and maintained network of virtual machines to test complex system integration between mapping solutions and separate products that had to work together flawlessly to provide best location and routing information for emergency response. This included field testing in preparation to deploy to Tier 1 customers at the Federal and State government level: address validation, reverse geocoding, GPS calculations, re-routing algorithms, mobile mapping interfaces, remote locating of public safety assets, response line-up, proximity/response-time dispatching. Participated in STIG assessments of software to be deployed on hardened machines to meet specific Federal guidelines and requirements. Became certified as scrum master and participated in release and sprint planning sessions.

Researched potential solutions, built partnerships, and assisted in brokering deals with prospective vendors to bring in the best technologies, products and services: Guided initial conversations around business value proposition that led to partnership between Market America and ChannelAdvisor which has allowed Shop.com to be positioned with an equal footing beside other leading online retail channels such as Amazon, Google, eBay and Sears. Researched and evaluated online personalization and product recommendation solutions that could handle Market America's scale and unique business infrastructure. Brokered partnership with a leading Email Service Provider to replace internal email solution. Over 100,000 email accounts were migrated without any negative customer impact. Collaborated on affinity marketing framework to allow up-sell of premium services to distributor base - turning a cost center into a profit center. Designed and conducted a perceptual study for three distinct groups to compare the quality of cost-effective automated translation solutions. Evaluated and recommended language service partnerships to drastically reduce both cost and time-to-live. Researched lead generation and lead management platforms to manage prospects and facilitate frequent contact for recruiting efforts by MA Distributors. Recommended adoption of a Public Relations SaaS platform as a "force multiplier" that allowed MA to inject ideas and content into future articles of major news outlets and magazines. Worked extensively with Conquer Entertainment, the music and entertainment division of MA, to develop an online music discovery and lifestyle merchandising platform that could be grafted into the MA business model with minimal disruption to existing IT infrastructure. Researched and advised on best methods to monetize video content and track user engagement on MeetOn.com.