Michael Starr

Experience

• 

  Cisco Systems

  May 2012 - Aug 2012

  IT Analyst

  Summer intern doing mobile development in Communication and Collaboration IT

• 

  Cisco

  Jul 2014 - Nov 2017

  » Managed portfolio of 11 IT Services with $180 million annual run rate» Implemented Agile best practices into portfolio management process such as continuous backlog refinement, portfolio kanbans, objective prioritization » Analyzed economic trade-offs and ROI of incremental investments and presented optimization and prioritization plans to IT service owners and executives » Agile Coach in Global Infrastructure Services, Customer Success, IT Business Operations» Helped train over 2000 full-time Cisco employees accross Operations, Sales and Security in Agile, Scrum, Scaled Agile, Kanban » Coordinated across 10 scrum teams as the head Scrum-master to optimize value delivery as a team of Agile teams» Facilitated Program Increment Planning events for the Agile Release Train to catalyze alignment and synchronization across the scrum teams and stakeholders» Managed and mitigated program-level risks and impediments with potential business impact»Resulted in increased feature throughput for the Train from 10 features per quarter to 25 features/Q » Drove adoption of Agile methodologies and Continuous Delivery tool-set to enable IT teams to execute application development efficiently» Created communication strategy and curated newsletter and community of practice content to accelerate and sustain Agile transformation in IT» Resulted in the transformation of 3,000 people from Waterfall to Agile delivery methods in a 12-month period and increased productivity of application development teams by over 30%

  • Portfolio Manager

    Sept 2016 - Nov 2017

  • Agile Coach

    Jul 2016 - Nov 2017

  • Release Train Engineer - IT Business Operations ART

    Sept 2015 - Jul 2016

  • IT Analyst - Continuous Delivery Program

    Jul 2014 - Sept 2015
• 

  Ciena

  Jul 2018 - Jun 2021

  » Trained over 1600 employees across IT, Sales Engineering, Legal, Supply Chain, R&D, HR in Agile, Scrum, Kanban, and Scaled Agile (SAFe)» Coached the EMEA Sales Engineering team in implementing a custom Agile approach to work with customers, prioritize requests, automate metrics collection and reporting. Ultimately resulting in delivering better customer outcomes.» Performed Release Train Engineer (RTE) role for Enterprise Data Strategy Program and implemented a synchronized cadence across Agile teams, system demos every sprint, and program retrospectives with IT and Business leadership» Created online Agile Center of Excellence with self-service training, blogs, articles yielding over 1000 site visits per quarter Show less » Implemented quarterly Service Reviews leveraging Objectives and Key Results (OKR) methodology to foster customer centric and value driven service discussions. » Created and implemented standards for planning and tracking work using Epics and Stories in Jira, and digitized the IT Service Catalog to map work (including bugs and incidents) to Services » Facilitated portfolio planning and prioritization with IT leadership, resulting in smaller committed batch sizes per quarter and increased delivery predictability Show less

  • Enterprise Agile Coach

    Jul 2018 - Jun 2021

  • Service Manager - IT Service Management & IT Portfolio Management

    Jul 2018 - Jun 2021
• 

  ServiceNow

  Jun 2021 - now

  Program Manager for Generative AI Program (Internal Use IT) Program Manager for AI Search, Virtual Agent, and AI Platform Services

  • Program Manager

    Apr 2023 - now

  • Program Manager

    Jun 2021 - May 2024