Summary
Overview
Work History
Education
Skills
Additional Information
Certification
Timeline
Generic

Leenu Chawla

Agile Coach
Oakville

Summary

Certified in Scrum, ICP Agile, SAFe, and Design Thinking with over two decades of IT experience, specializing in Agile methodologies for eighteen years. Skilled in spearheading Agile adoption at team and portfolio levels to enhance value delivery, quality improvement, and waste reduction. Proficient in executing global Agile adoption strategies, facilitating workshops, and transitioning teams from waterfall to Agile practices. Solid foundation in product strategy, road mapping, user-centered design, stakeholder management, and prioritizing customer needs. Demonstrated success in delivering innovative products, leading Design Thinking workshops, and managing intricate projects with exceptional communication and critical thinking abilities.

Overview

19
19
years of professional experience
5
5
Certifications

Work History

Portfolio Agile Coach

Toyota Motors North America
05.2021 - Current
  • Company Overview: On Assignment with Toyota Motors North America via Arisoft Gbl. ON, Canada
  • Lead the Agile transformation within Toyota, helping teams create a vision and strategy to drive the change across the organization for Agile product delivery.
  • Foster a culture of self-organization and high performance, emphasizing the three pillars of Scrum: transparency, inspection, and adaptation.
  • Build high-performing teams with shared mental models, a clear mission, and defined roles, focusing on effective communication and the DevSecOps journey.
  • Coach leadership to foster an environment that promotes failing fast, celebrating failures, and psychological safety for enhancing business agility.
  • Work with product management leadership teams to help build strategic backlog and derive OKRs for each quarter.
  • Coach leadership in building portfolio kanban.
  • Initiated PO Buddy Program at Toyota Motors North America to help support new and existing Product Owners in their roles and responsibilities.
  • Assist teams with release management, impediment management, value stream mapping, impact mapping, empathy maps, and customer journey maps.
  • Promote Toyota Principles in ways of working, including genchi genbutsu, jidoka, just-in-time, kaizen, nemawashi, pull system, and PDCA.
  • Coach Scrum Masters to achieve goals and necessary outcomes for all Agile ceremonies, including Daily Stand Ups, Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, Retrospectives, and Backlog Refinements.
  • Coach teams on continuous discovery, outcome-based approach and co-creating better solutions for customers.
  • Conduct Agile maturity assessments for teams, identify opportunities, and provide coaching through nemawashi sessions.
  • Lead story writing, story mapping, design sprint, and design thinking workshops.
  • Train all roles on agile teams to ensure the enterprise delivers business value.
  • Apply conflict management and process improvement techniques, considering the 12 Agile principles.
  • Facilitate and coach quarterly/ PI planning sessions for Scrum teams to interact with multiple partner teams and build prioritized roadmaps.
  • Implement innovative learning methods to accelerate collaboration and communities of practice within the program, such as Coffee and Learn, Lunch and Learns, and COP meetings.
  • Coach teams on extreme programming practices for software development, including test-driven development and behavior-driven development.
  • Help teams identify waste (MUDA), Unevenness (Mura) and Overburden /Over processing (Muri) through Value Stream Mapping workshop.
  • Facilitate Scrum Master quality circles for the portfolio.
  • Coach individuals from Scrum Teams and Leadership in one-on-one sessions as needed.
  • Lead program-wide retrospectives (Multi-learn Retrospectives).
  • Author a Playbook on Agile Ways of Working for the iPlus program.
  • Conduct periodic Agile Methodology refreshers for teams.
  • On Assignment with Toyota Motors North America via Arisoft Gbl. ON, Canada

Agile Delivery Manager

Cancer Research UK
01.2015 - 09.2016
  • Company Overview: Cancer Research is a registered Charity in England, which works with a vision to bring forward the day when all cancers are cured. The Charity fundraise money to support the research done by the scientists into all types of cancers across all age groups.
  • Help scrum teams with scrum values and principles to set best practices.
  • Successfully transition teams from ground levels to high-performing teams.
  • Assist in transitioning projects from Scrum to Kanban as needed.
  • Quickly ramp up development, proposition managers, product managers, and business owners in Kanban methodologies.
  • Deliver an online financial payment portal for fundraising while transitioning from Java to Drupal.
  • Effectively run ceremonies for the teams.
  • Maintain effective communication and positive relationships with teams, business stakeholders, and product owners.
  • Introduce Impact mapping workshops emphasizing digital collaboration.
  • Encourage proposition managers and POs to apply innovative approaches in implementing the digital strategy.
  • Collaborate in user testing and UX sessions, focusing on designing improved user journeys.
  • Emphasize the importance of social and analytics within digital teams.
  • Manage agile release train coordination and lead releases in the organization.
  • Active member of the Community of Practices (CoP).
  • Conduct workshops on Agile Methodology, story writing, team values, estimation, story mapping, and MVP-based releases.
  • Conduct agile maturity surveys to identify training needs and skill set improvement.
  • Coach and mentor PMs and BAs from non-agile teams to map their workflow to agile methodologies.
  • Address charity-wide impediments affecting release frequency.
  • Share success data in charity monthly updates on agile transitions.
  • Apply the Shu Ha Ri agile coaching practice to new agile projects.
  • Build test methodologies and introduce engineering practices such as TDD, CI, code reviews, refactoring, and BDD.
  • Quickly ramp up teams to deliver valuable business outcomes.
  • Introduce design workshops to new scrum teams.
  • Identify and eradicate areas of waste to increase business value.
  • Cancer Research is a registered Charity in England, which works with a vision to bring forward the day when all cancers are cured. The Charity fundraise money to support the research done by the scientists into all types of cancers across all age groups.

Agile Trainer

Conscires Agile Practices
08.2013 - 12.2014
  • Conducted 1 Day workshop in Barcelona for Agile Project Management using Scrum Practices.
  • Conducted 1 Day workshop in Germany for Agile Project Management using Scrum Practices.
  • Conducted several online webinars on the Introduction to Scrum practices, Planning and estimation techniques.

SR Scrum Master / Agile Coach

SOPRA Group India (Axway)
09.2006 - 08.2013
  • Transitioned teams from Waterfall to Agile methods in product development.
  • Conducted workshops on Agile and its best practices to introduce Agile methods to teams.
  • Worked with geographically distributed teams (India, France, and United States).
  • Trained and prepared Scrum teams by training Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and Development teams.
  • Introduced teams to self-organization and self-empowerment.
  • Identified improvement opportunities and designed and delivered training on organizational change enablement.
  • Reconciled Scrum practices with legacy project lifecycle standards.
  • Trained and coached Project Managers, Technical Leads to map their roles in the new Agile environment.
  • Shared productivity and performance metrics with stakeholders and teams by making them transparent and visible on team boards.
  • Conducted one-on-one coaching sessions with individuals facing challenges with methodology changes.
  • Conduct 1:1 coaching session as and when required.
  • Facilitated all agile ceremonies and helped the team receive the required outcomes from those.
  • Trained budding Scrum Masters on excellence in facilitating Scrum Rituals.
  • Coordinated with senior management to nurture a culture required for setting up Agile teams.
  • Conduct Story Writing Workshop.
  • Conducted workshops for Testing Team members and developers transitioning from the waterfall model to Agile methods.
  • Introduced Risk-based testing approach to fit Agile ways of working and collaboration with developers.

Education

Bachelor of Science - Botany Hons

Delhi University

Skills

    Scaling agile

    User story creation

    Adaptive planning

    Scrum framework expertise

    Agile transformation

    Stakeholder management

    Agile coaching

    Agile metrics tracking

Additional Information

  • Conducted various training sessions and workshops on Agile Methodology for multiple teams in my previous organization (CRUK).
  • Conducted several workshops for Agile and Scrum across organization for various divisions in Sopra (Previous organization)
  • Participated in Tampere Goes Agile (Annual Agile Meet) In Finland.
  • Represented my ex-employer’s Agile Test Process Methodology in NASSCOM meet in the month of March 2013.

Certification

Certified Scrum Professional (Scrum Alliance)

Timeline

Portfolio Agile Coach

Toyota Motors North America
05.2021 - Current

Agile Delivery Manager

Cancer Research UK
01.2015 - 09.2016

Agile Trainer

Conscires Agile Practices
08.2013 - 12.2014

SR Scrum Master / Agile Coach

SOPRA Group India (Axway)
09.2006 - 08.2013

Bachelor of Science - Botany Hons

Delhi University

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Leenu ChawlaAgile Coach