David Rico

I am a visionary Agile practitioner with a growth mindset and a comprehensive understanding of various project management methodologies, including Waterfall, Agile, Scrum, Lean, and SAFe. My passion is creating team environments by cultivating psychological safety, diversity, inclusion, and fun. I improve organizations' competitiveness by achieving faster time-to-market, predictability, and value delivery. My experiences in software engineering, telecommunications, and non-profit will help your organization achieve business agility.

Clifton Strengths: Analytical, Ideation, Responsibility, Futuristic, and Belief.

Let's talk and learn more about each other!

David Rico

Agile Coach 

As an Agile practitioner with a growth mindset, I offer a comprehensive understanding of project management methodologies–including Waterfall, Agile, Scrum, Scale, and Lean. My passion is to inspire teams and organizations to deliver value through the empirical process and to create environments where team members experience psychological safety, diversity, and inclusion. I have a track record of utilizing critical thinking, judgment, excellent organization, and communication skills to improve time-to-market, predictability, and value delivery. My experiences in software engineering, telecom, and non-profit will help you to achieve business agility and deliver value to the stakeholders.

CERTIFICATIONS

• ICP-ENT (ICAgile Certified Professional - Agility in the Enterprise) - ICAgile. 
• ICP-CAT (ICAgile Certified Professional - Coaching Agile Transformations) - ICAgile. 
• SAFe SM 6.0 (Scaled Agile Framework Scrum Master) – Scaled Agile.
• PSM (Professional Scrum Master) - Scrum.org.
• SPOC (Scrum Product Owner Certified) - SCRUMstudy.
• PMP (Project Manager Professional) - PMI, Certification.
• LSSGB (Lean Six Sigma Green Belt) - IASSC, Certification.
• ITIL v4 (ITSM) - Axelos, Certification.
• COBIT (GRC) - ISACA, Certification.

AREAS OF EXPERTISE

Program Management | Project Management | Project Planning | Strategy | Leadership Coaching | Agile Methodologies   Communication | Management | Facilitation | Team Building | Negotiation | Conflict Resolution | Training and Education 

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Enterprise Agile Coach Team Manager/Agile Coach Simpli.fi, Fort Worth, TX                    May 2021 to January 2023

• Played a critical role in partnering with the SVP of Engineering to ensure the organization's Agile transformation aligned with the vision and objectives. Evaluated various Agile frameworks, including Scrum, Lean, Kanban, and SAFe, to determine the most effective large solution implementation. Utilized the leading change model to create a roadmap.
• Led a team of four diverse Agile coaches and a Jira administrator. Utilize the scaled large solution for scalability and Kanban to visualize the work within the development, IT, security, and product teams. The team supported mergers and acquisitions, product development, product launches, and the overall digital advertising platform architecture.
• Coached and mentored a cross-functional value stream on continuous improvement utilizing Scrum and Kanban; the team included developers, infrastructure, product, UX, data scientists, technical writers, and DevOps team members working with modern application architectures, technology, cloud infrastructure, developer tooling, and documentation.
• Created an evaluation framework to align Agile coaches' performance with organizational goals, resulting in a 90% positive response from the development team. Utilized the Kanban framework to visualize our objective progress. 
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• Spearheaded a hybrid 3-day Summit with a $100,000 budget focused on Next-Gen technologies. 
• As the change agent, I utilized value stream mapping and Kanban to identify workflow and value improvements. It increased value delivery, predictability, transparency, inspection, adaptability, and flexibility. Adopting Agile principles, events, and metrics resulted in a 20% improvement in delivery.
• Increased the communities of practice from six to twelve by creating a framework and injecting energy and innovation.
• Boosted JIRA utilization by 25% among cross-functional value stream team members by adopting best practices.
• Evaluated and improved the hiring process, cutting the time-to-fill by one week or 25%.

Sr. Project Manager/Business Coach/PO, Boy Scouts of America, Irving, TX           September 2017 to August 2020

• Managed a program of 15 projects by utilizing the Kanban framework to visualize progress against the milestones. Integrated membership growth, marketing, and employee engagement, featuring geofencing and leadership training. Enhanced the employee newsletter, which improved the click-through rate by 2%. Collaborated with cross-functional teams, including product, marketing, and social media. 
• Delivered 100+ training sessions in person and virtually, utilizing new tools and resources to increase membership growth based on lean principles. Around 80% of the field executives provided great feedback and felt more at ease.
• Acted as Product Owner while partnering with a DevOps team and stakeholders to deploy self-serving tools, enabling executives to assist with marketing analytics and collaborate with the IT department in streamlining digital workflows. Impacted over 2.5 million youth and families by implementing online registrations over filling out paper forms.
• Served as a membership SME (Subject Matter Expert) to CEOs in Florida. With the implementation of target marketing, outreach campaigns, and relationship cultivation via social media, membership growth increased by 10%. During that year, Florida was the only state to meet and exceed the business objectives.
• Influenced Latino initiatives at the national level and edited marketing materials and videos for field distribution. 
• Strengthen relationships and national partnerships by improving lines of communication with diverse national faith-based board members and committees. Delivered updates and presentations to the National Catholic Committee on Scouting, The United Methodist Church, and the National Association of Presbyterian Scouters.

Project Management/Field Director, Boy Scouts of America, LHC - Hurst, TX             June 2008 to September 2017 

• Directed efforts to deliver value to over eight thousand youth and adults with a monetary impact of over $1,000,000.
• Oversaw a program with four diverse project managers, ten assistants, and over 160 indirect volunteers. 
• Stewarded a $500,000 budget for project operations, including planning, execution, monitoring, and closing.
• Utilized the Earned Value Management system to control the project scope, schedule, and budget.
• Fostered strong relationships with senior-level executives, board members, and volunteers through monthly meetings, verbal communication, and collaboration to achieve the organization's objectives and milestones.
• Developed resources and led biweekly training sessions, focusing on Agile process improvement techniques.
• Collaborated with board members to develop a strategic plan to transform Microsoft's software offerings into a SaaS model. It helped reduce costs by 25%, increase accessibility, and improve stakeholders' satisfaction.
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• Earned the Gold Journey to Excellence recognition for achieving the performance goals from 2011 to 2016.

Business Quality Assurance Analyst Sprint/Nextel (Call Center) - Fort Worth, TX         November 2003 to May 2008

• Championed data-driven decision-making and improvement measurements by creating KPI reporting, including Average Speed of Answering, First-Call Resolution, Average Handle Time, Customer Satisfaction Score, and Net Promoter Score. 
• Monitored and audited 6,000+ calls, improving "First-Call Resolution" by 10% via the KPI reporting and survey feedback.
• Trained 300+ specialists on business initiatives, products, technology, wireless cards, IT support, procedures, sales strategies, critical thinking, decision-making, problem-solving, negotiation, customer relations, and time management.
• Updated the web-based tools with policies, methods, best practices, and solutions to technical issues.
• Worked with four cross-functional teams to track deliverables, identify and evaluate risks, and create mitigation plans.
• Supported Sprint retail stores and other direct 3rd party vendors with training, resources, mentoring, and advice. 
• Earned the Sprint President's Club Award - Sales performance, top 1% sales producer in the US in 2004.

Software Development Life Cycle Methodologies: Waterfall, Agile, Kanban, Scrum, Lean, Spotify, XP, and Scaled Agile.

• Agile artifacts: product vision, backlog prioritization (user stories, bugs, issues/tasks), sprint vision, DoD (Definition of done), product increment, burndown chart, and MVP (Minimum Viable Product).
• Events: project vision, release planning, sprint planning, daily stand-ups, reviews, retrospectives, and post-mortems.
• Skills: Process improvement techniques, software systems SDLC implementation, project scheduling, remote team collaboration, culture, conflict resolution, strategy, process design, public speaking, coaching, mentoring, facilitation, virtual and in-person training, product development, documentation, and relationship management.
• Tools: JIRA, Confluence, Miro, Mural, Slack, Trello, Google Workspace, Zoom, Teams, GitHub, WordPress, Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Publisher, Project, Visio, Access, Power BI, Blackbaud non-profit CRM, and Progression app. 

Bachelor of Science (BS): Telecommunications Management. DeVry University - Irving, Texas. Honors: Cum Laude.