Kurt Seifert
Texas, USA
Kurt Seifert has flirted with project and process management all of his life. Starting out when he was young working on his families Porsche 914s, he campaigned in SCCA club racing. Although most would think it would be all mechanical, he gravitated to; preparation tasks, travel scheduling, and competition data gathering. Moving on, post college, he ended up in a role in the Windsurfing industry (not far from racing cars actually) doing Sales, Race Team and Trade show management for a global company. Again, complex management of 'stuff' race team, R&D, equipment, scheduling, and trade shows, was my passion although, he had a 'sales' title. Kurt moved into technology in his next professional career. As a Director of Sales for Hosting for one of the world’s most admired brands, he had a change meeting as part of a new data center with the Dir of Operation who handed him his card which had a title of PMP, which he had never heard of before. In discussion over dinner, Kurt finally put a 'name' to what he had been doing most of his life - Project Manager. The constraints of PMP structure quickly showed their limitations and he found himself at Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor at a class on a new way to work.
Work experience
AT&T, Director of Program Innovation and Operations
December 2012 - Present, Dallas, Texas, United States
Kurt’s role(s) has evolved over the years. It began as an Agile transformation project in 2012. He built the teams from the ground up, ramping from 1 team to over 25 by January 2014. His role included almost every aspect from hiring the Scrum master and PO roles to daily standup with the Agile coaches. He worked the Program, Project, and release backlogs with the POs to maintain a healthy backlog for the teams to consume. Working with Executive leadership he held Quarterly Product Vision Team meetings across the various projects. For the first 18 months the focus was on educating the Business on Agile methodology and how Scrum works. The ceremonies, roles, cadences were the focus, during the startup phase. Into 2014 it became apparent that a Product Definition team would need to help agree the standard teams, and the intra-team roles in order to successfully 'bake' the Vision & technical Solutions. The complexity of the Business and technical environment could not be encapsulated into the team itself. Kurt ran the PDT team as a Scrum team with a Scrum Master, and himself as the PO. They have daily standup and work through backlog just as a dev scrum team would. They hold sprint retrospectives and are continually striving to be better each sprint. See more at: https://www.scrumalliance.org/community/profile/kseifert2#sthash.OASRRjB4.dpuf