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Resume and Cover Letter of MatthewHall78

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Matthew Hall

728 Maltby Court, Victoria, BC V9B 0R5 (250) 896-4059 | mmhall@gmail.com

Cover Letter

Competency Profile for: Band 3 - Senior Product Manager

  • When in a leadership role I strive to be curious of the opinions of others and leverage the collective abilities of the team to develop and implement plans for complex projects.
  • As a leader I ensure that decisions are based on measurement, and the value delivered, in order to be effective in the utilization of resources for the organization.
  • I look for opportunities to help others learn how to plan, organize and co-ordinate the work more effectively.
  • When conflicts occur I take an interest in the needs of others and use those opportunities as a chance for positive change.
  • I look for ways to build effective teams and establish partnerships to enhance the ability of my team to deliver results and overcome barriers.
  • I am always looking for ways to solve problems creatively and to empower my team to do the same.

Experience Snapshot

Experience Years Related Education
Product Owner (current) 1.5 Certified Scrum Product Owner
Scrum Master 2 Advanced Certified Scrum Master
Business Portfolio Manager 6 Business Analysis - Associate Certification courses
Project Manager, Business Analyst 9 Bachelor of Science Degree, Computer Science/ Psychology
Junior Implementation Analyst 1.5 Diploma in Business Administration, eBusiness and Information Systems
Web Developer 3  

Job Requirements

Leading Agile Teams: 2 years experience

Scrum Master Role

From Jan 2017 to Dec 2018, as the Scrum Master, I coached the product owner and the scrum team on ways to efficiently manage their work and stay focused on the goals and vision of the project. The transportation fuels reporting system (TFRS) project was unique in many ways:

  • Formed of a new Agile team using the innovative “sprint with us” procurement process
  • Coordinated and setup a physical lab space for the team to work, and made arrangments for the purchase of equipment
  • Lead the transition between software development methodologies, from a traditional project management approach to following the agile principles and values
  • Learned about DevOps pipelines and cloud native technologies
  • Adopted new product management tools for backlog management and product roadmaps
  • Encouraged developers who had to learn new programming languages

During all of that time we were working in an open lab space under the constant microscope of executives who were touring the building every couple days. Even with all that overhead and all those pressures the product team was still able deliver a minimal viable product to production in under a year.

Product Owner Role

From Jan 2019 to now, similar to my previous Scrum Master role, as a Product Owner I also began at square one:

  • Start up a new team beginning with contract procurement of developers, and
  • Build a high functioning team with contractors and some other recently hired full time staff.

Our mandate at the outset of the project was to look at a set of previously built common services and make it easy to onboard to them. This began a very exciting journey into how we can evolve and modernize existing applications to take advantage of the latest architectural principles such as:

  • DevOps
  • Cloud Platforms
  • Open Source products
  • Open APIs and microservices

During the past 22 months my team has created 14 code repositories with which we use to accomplish the following:

  • deployed an application to conduct automated onboarding of api access
  • launched two common components apis (email messaging and document generation) each with a stand alone showcase application
  • responded to the Covid-19 pandemic with a custom application for industrial sites to report their protocols
  • built a catalogue to explain all the services
  • piloted a dashboard solution to help with the IITD cost reduction strategy
  • piloted an system logging solution to help with the need to monitor the uptime and errors of services
  • Soon to release the MVP of a new government wide form designer and publishing service.
  • We have established a capacity to deploy changes rapidly, evident by the average number of pull requests merged over the past 18 months (783 pull requests in under 400 business days).

Delivering Digital Products and Managing Service Offerings: 13 years experience

  • Between April 2007 and now I have worked in the following roles:
    • Business Analyst (2007)
    • Project Manager (2012)
    • Business Portfolio Manager (2014)
    • Scrum Master (2016)
    • Product Owner (2019)
  • The most recent eight of the last 13 years have been on projects work, and prior to that I was supporting the delivery of continuous improvement enhancements and break fixes for multiple business critical applications.

Analysis of User Research and Continuous Improvement of Digital Services: 13 years experience

9 years experience in the capacity of a Business Analyst, Project Manager and Business Portfolio Manager which involved

  • assessing the needs of users and
  • preparing documentation for the development team based on the analysis of requirements gathering

4 years experience is as a Scrum Team member and Product Owner role reviewing the user research prepared by the UX Researcher/Designer of the team. This involves the following:

  • Sitting in on UX feedback sessions
  • Collaborating with the UX researcher to interpret the feedback
  • Revise our previous hypotheses on how to achieve the product vision
  • Refactoring product roadmaps and product features based on new hypotheses

Digital Service experience using agile practices, open source, and cloud platforms: 4 to 6 years experience

Agile Practices: 4 years experience

  • 2016 to current working full time on Agile Teams using the Scrum Framework
    • Oct 2016 to Dec 2018 in the Scrum Master role
    • Jan 2019 to current, in the Product Owner role
  • Oct 2016 to current delivering monthly Agile Fundamentals courses

Open Source: 6 years experience

  • 6 years experience using open source software to implement Line of Business solutions based on IITD architectural principles
  • The recent 4 years in particular I have been on a software team that is managing its code on Github as Open Source Apache 2.0 licensed software
  • A lot of our work involves the evaluation and selection of other open source libraries for the inclusion in our product solutions in order to achieve the required capabilities
  • The past 2 years on the Common Service Showcase Team I have been focused on determining what makes an open source common component easy to onboard to
  • We have documented a set of core characteristics and a list of delivery channels aimed at meeting the needs of development teams who require flexibility to implement common services in a way that aligns to their operational requirements

Cloud Platforms: 4 years experience

  • 4 years experience working with OpenShift project namespaces and developing with DevOps principles
    • I lead my team in all planning activities for development and continuous improvement efforts
    • I challenge the team to incorporate the adoption of cloud native architectural principles and microservice architectures into each iteration of our products
    • We follow the “infrastructure as code” design principles, and continually streamline our code integration and deployment processes leveraging automated delivery pipelines (Continuous Integration and Continous Delivery)
    • Other cloud hosted services we use include those which provide services to our team’s product such as static code analysis, database backups, and uptime monitoring
    • Our code includes unit tests, api test, and functional user interface tests, all of which are automated, and where possible, built out following test driven development principles
    • We follow an API first approach in order to build in a way that enables us to adapt quickly to changing requirements

Prioritization of work in planning based on user needs, costs, value delivered, and return on investment: 13 years experience

Traditional Project Management:

  • 9 years experience in traditional project management and business analysis conducting prioritization of issues based on business value, impact to operations, and cost estimates

Agile Product Management:

  • 4 years experience creating product roadmaps linked to the overall product vision to deliver a solution based on user needs. I link the biweekly planning goals to the overall product vision. I revise the plans biweekly based on user feedback and adapt the plan to those changing requirements
  • 4 years experience tracking the effort of tasks and calculating the team velocity by which they complete work
    • Used those velocity statistics to plan future product delivery increments
    • The team costs are monitored and tracked
    • The costs are linked to the individual products we are building in order to calculate the total cost of ownerships for each piece of software we develop
    • Total cost of ownership is used in break even analysis and return on investment calculations
  • 4 years experience (2 years and a scrum master and 2 years as a product owner) creating and prioritizing backlog items in the form of user stories linked to the value to delivery to users
  • Over the past 4 years working on Agile projects I have formally identified and tracks value metrics used to report out on project success and return on investment and maintain realtime dashboards of those performance metrics

Managing complex projects with business transformations, strategic communications, and oversight of system integrators: 8 years experience

Business Transformation:

  • From 2012 to 2015 the Mines Project kicked off a business transformation that is continuing strong to this day. During my time on the project we built an application (Mines Information To Go) that introduced the utilization of tablets for inspectors and a way to have access to their systems information while offline at a mine.
  • For the Low Carbon Fuels branch between 2015 and 2018 I provided a leading role to introduce their business area to the principles of Agile in software development. I helped to coach and mentor 3 of their staff as they took on a business leadership role at various stages of the project. During this project I challenged our product owner to establish a new positive relationship the Fuel Supplier staff who would be using our system. Much to the surprise of the Low Carbon Fuels branch the Fuel Supplier staff were happy to collaborate with us in the development of the product. The surprise came from the fact that previously the fuel supplier companies were actually lobbying against the legislation that led to this products development.
  • Following the project with the Low Carbon Fuels branch I took on a role as Product Owner to focus on the evolution and modernization of Common Services with the goal to reduce the duplication of software development work. This business transformation is one that involves demonstrating to other development teams the long term economic value of investing in common components for the developer community. The successes we are now seeing with the email service my team built, with over a dozen other software teams reusing the product from all across government, is evident that the common service approach is a welcomed transformational change to how we go about the business of software development.

Strategic Communications:

From 2012 to present, as the project lead, I initiate strategic communications to understand the attitudes of staff, executives and users of the future product in order to plan out actions to take and information to curate and disseminate. I do this all for the purpose of achieving the overall strategic goal of the projects.

  • In the Mines Project I prepared a specific presentation to help another Executive Director to convey the vision of the project to a Sponsor, who had been unconvinced up until that time, who immediately got it and responded with, “Ok, let’s do that.”
  • On the Common Service Showcase Team the majority of my communication involves planning ahead to identify the stakeholder relationships to establish and and the partnerships to create and leverage in order to achieve the product vision. Carrying out these communications often involves creative use of tools and communication channels. Some of the relationships I have established include:
    • Other teams who are building common components
    • Governance level sponsors and directors who influence the adoption and funding of what we are building
    • Business Portfolio Managers who have awareness of many existing products and connections to business areas
    • Innovators who are building disruptive technologies that we want to prepare for and leverage
    • Platform services who we rely on for foundational technology
    • Training and communications groups who provide an avenue for outreach and product awareness
    • Other corporate-wide groups or subject matter experts such as privacy and security professionals

Oversight of System Integrators:

Since 2012 I have been in a lead role on complex IM/IT projects. In each project there was a project sponsor and a level of financial governance which I was responsible to account for on behalf of the project team.

  • From 2012 to 2015 I was the Business Portfolio Manager for the Mines and Mineral Resources Automation and System Integration Project
  • From 2015 to 2019 I was the Business Portfolio Manager, and then The Scrum Master for the Transportation Fuels Reporting System. During that time the project governance shifted somewhat as it moved from a traditional project management approach to an Agile approach
  • Since 2019 I have been the Product Owner for the Common Services Showcase Team where I now consult with an agile leadership group who provide project oversight and funding approval

Managing organizational change: 4 years experience

From Oct 2016 to current, The organizational change I have been championing is the implementation of an agile culture within the BC Government.

  • I was among the first few to form agile teams
  • I was the first BC Government employee to take on the Scrum Master role
  • I started up the Scrum Master guild which is now a thriving and growing group of professionals
  • I am actively collaborating with other Agile professionals to continue to mentor, train and coach staff who starting to work on this Agile software development approach
  • I am currently promoting this organizational change by facilitating monthly courses in Agile Fundamentals. I have co-facilitated over 50 courses and trained hundreds of people

View formatted Resume on GitHub: resume.md
View formatted Cover Letter on GitHub: coverLetter.md

Author Date version
Matthew Hall 2020-09-24 3.0.1