Sierra Kenney Koral

Experience

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  Japanese Exchange and Teaching Program (JET Program)

  Aug 2004 - Aug 2006

  English Teacher, Nakagoto High School

  • Selected to participate in Japan’s largest cultural exchange program, run by Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and local governments.• Created original English lesson plans and exams and team-taught with Japanese teachers to deliver lessons to high school, middle school and elementary school students.

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  Approach International Student Center

  Mar 2007 - Aug 2008

  Student Affairs Coordinator

  • Managed and trained office staff in registration, placement testing, and orientation procedures for current and prospective students.• Hired and managed work-study employees to perform clerical office duties as needed.• Researched and managed new projects and special programs such as Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission and the Manhattan GMAT partnership.• Monitored attendance and academic progress for approx. 260 students.

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  Emerald Necklace Martial Arts

  Sept 2008 - Jul 2010

  Program Director / Children’s Program Instructor

  * Provided administrative, marketing and operational support for traditional karate dojo.* Maintained consistent communication with current members for retention purposes and responded to inquiries online, by phone and in person.* Managed payroll for all dojo staff and collect student tuition.

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  Everest Institute

  Jan 2009 - May 2010

  GED Program Director/ GED Instructor

  • Established a new GED program for the Brighton campus.• Developed a curriculum for a new GED training program and manage all course materials such as textbooks, practice tests and homework assignments.• Taught small groups (2-8 students) in the five GED subject areas: mathematics, language arts – reading and writing, social studies and science.

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  Pearson North America

  May 2010 - Apr 2013

  Worked with VP of Project Management and VP of Engineering to ensure project manager shared resources across initiatives. Gained valuable knowledge on scrum and agile principles and methodologies.* Selected by executive management to plan, organize, and lead the first-ever effort to stress test Pearson’s production environment to 3x predicted load, including end-to-end testing of high-availability enterprise products to improve customer experience. * Coach teams in good agile practices, such as daily scrums, iteration planning, release planning, product demos and retrospectives for multiple teams simultaneously, including remote teams in India & Sri Lanka.* Assembled and trained a new QA automation team tasked with developing a full regression testing strategy on multiple Pearson products. Set up and trained the team to use JIRA’s Greenhopper and led iteration and release planning and ensure best practices are being following. Show less * Coordinated feature definition and user story prioritization with product management and integration partners throughout the software development lifecycle.* Arranged and facilitated all PMO meetings and trainings, authoring agendas, authored and maintained meeting minutes and action items.* Trained new PMO hires on industry-standard software development and collaboration toolsets like Confluence, Rally, JIRA, easyCMDB, WebEx, Oracle time tracking and SVN.* Successfully managed all aspects of development and implementation (writing requirements, stakeholder demos, releases and trainings) of a division-wide Confluence macro for managing the Pre-Production Environment schedule. Show less

  • Technical Project Manager, Certified Scrum Master

    Sept 2012 - Apr 2013

  • Project Coordinator

    May 2010 - Aug 2012
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  Verndale

  Apr 2013 - Mar 2014

  Production Lead / Scrum Master

  Managed multiple web-based CMS projects through the implementation phase, including front end, back-end development and quality assurance testing in Sitecore, EpiServer and Kentico content management systems. Oversee infrastructure and systems reviews and decisions.* Responsible for ensuring engineering best practices such as code reviews (Crucible), continuous integration (TeamCity), and unit testing are realized. Act as a liaison between engineering department and project management, designers, UX, digital strategists, and technical analysts.* Manage long-term and short-term projects with aggressive timelines, conservative budgets and ensure legacy products are replaced with high quality and efficient solutions that meet customer needs. Facilitate web service and third-party integrations with companies such as Google, learning management systems (LMS), and authentication services.* Lead multiple concurrent teams, including co-development projects with client teams and train teams on Verndale processes and project management tracking tools such as 37signals Basecamp, fogcreek’s FogBugz. Lead distributed and offshore development teams. Show less

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  McGraw-Hill Higher Education

  Mar 2014 - Jul 2016

  Program Manager

  "Chief Promise Keeper" for complex program, with end-to-end perspective for teams supporting new, rapidly changing business unit. Accountable to stakeholders and senior leadership on status of customer pilots and company initiatives and raised flags to focus attention and drive resolution of issues, such as security gaps and legal compliance.* Established Agile Scrum teams and developed processes, adapting practices to accommodate common challenges, such as remote and distributed teams, ramping up new hires unfamiliar with legacy software, and breaking down large projects into executable steps.* Ensured commitments were met for quarterly plan by instilling sense of urgency and "sweating details" with development teams, facilitating release and sprint planning sessions, and executing on plans.* Identified dependencies from product owner and engineering lead, gained agreement on approach, and created and executed go-forward plans. Show less

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  Steelcase

  Nov 2016 - now

  Owned Smart + Connected desk and conference room reservation portfolio: DeskWizard and RoomWizard and SetupWizard. Directed work of multiple, global software teams with efficiency. Monitored and evaluated product value and quality at each stage of software development lifecycle, including Alpha, Beta, production release and immediate post-launch support.*Managed all product backlogs for Android and iOS apps, cloud-based IoT device management portals, and public APIs, while balancing technical debt based on severity, security and cost.*Created thousands of user stories by communicating user problem statements and negotiating acceptance criteria, re-prioritizing based on changing market needs.*Oversaw all stages of product management from conception to delivery including market research, UI/UX wire-framing, design iterations, and user testing for 2 mobile apps, APIs and IoT portals.*Liaised with development team and end-users to deliver high value releases daily.*Engaged in all Scrum meetings and demoed new product features at bi-weekly sprint reviews. Show less Servant scrum leader coaching and mentoring Agile team(s) to be empowered, self-directed and transparent meanwhile escalating problems not be solved within team(s), removing blockers and proposing innovative solutions.* Coached Steelcase technology development and scrum teams by facilitating identification and mitigation of cross-team and cross-product dependencies, and by keeping teams aware of concurrencies and interdependencies with other products and projects where applicable.* Facilitated scrum ceremonies and provide process/framework leadership to Agile teams for adherence to Steelcase/industry standard.* Monitored product backlog for adherence to standards and coach/mentor Product Owners in grooming, striving for 100% visibility into all user stories in backlog and sprints. Show less

  • Agile Product Owner

    Sept 2020 - now

  • Agile Program Manager

    May 2019 - Sept 2020

  • Scrum Master

    Nov 2016 - May 2019
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  Crestron Electronics

  May 2022 - now

  Senior Product Owner