Sally Elatta

Sally Elatta

Agile and Process Improvement Coach

Greater Omaha Area

Current
  • Agile and Process Improvement Coach at AgileTransformation.com
Past

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8 more...

Education
  • University Of Nebraska at Omaha
  • Kirkwood Community College
Recommended
Sally has 22 recommendations 22 people have recommended Sally
Connections
257 connections
Industry
Information Technology and Services

Sally Elatta’s Summary

I am simply a transformer. Someone who is really passionate about transforming individuals, teams and organizations to doing what they do better.
I have a unique mix of technical and business background. I am driven by transforming the IT organization into performing and delivering ROI from a business point of view.
Building high performing teams and moving the organization culture towards achieving lean, efficient and effective processes is my true passion.
I have played many roles throughout my career and have had the opportunity to coach and work closely with many teams in different organizations as a consultant. This collective exposure has given me an appreciation for how these roles operate and how they can all fit together to truly deliver value and align with the company's strategic goals.
I value instilling soft skills and leadership qualities in the people I coach. I believe in Servant Leadership as the way to lead change and create a culture of empowered teams, as opposed to Command and Control.
I have coached and trained Executives, Managers, Architects, Project Managers, BAs, Testers, Developers, Business Product Owners and end users on improving the processes and technologies they use.
I evaluate my performance based on results I've delivered, so my client endorsements here mean a lot to me!

Sally Elatta’s Specialties:

SCRUM Master certification. SCRUM Certified Practitioner, Agile and Process Improvement Coaching, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) implementation, Java and .Net training & mentoring, Websphere Certified Specialist, RAD Certification, Sun Java Certified Programmer, ASP.net Microsoft Certification.

Sally Elatta’s Experience

  • Agile and Process Improvement Coach

    AgileTransformation.com

    (Information Technology and Services industry)

    July 2009 — Present (5 months)

    Founder of AgileTransformation.com. The company offers:
    - Strategic Process Improvement Coaching
    - Training (Agile, Leadership, Soft Skills and Technical)
    - End to End Project Coaching and Execution
    For more information, visit www.AgileTransformation.com or contact sales@agiletransformation.com.

  • Agile Coach

    Blue Cross Blue Shield

    (Non-Profit; Insurance industry)

    June 2008 — March 2009 (10 months)

    Responsible for leading 4 large Scrum of Scrum teams alongside another Agile Coach through the re-write of legacy reports and extracts. The team is utilizing new Business Intelligence technologies to rebuild the reports against the company's Enterprise Data Warehouse and data mart environments. The team is also making available an AdHoc environment for business users to utilize and develop reports against. This project is time sensitive.

  • V.P. Training & Development - Agile Coach

    ASC Information Technology

    (Privately Held; Information Technology and Services industry)

    June 2005 — March 2009 (3 years 10 months)

     Consult and coach various clients on specific projects or general process improvement as needed. This may include providing Agile or SOA coaching, architecture guidance or review, mentoring developers on new technologies and so on.
     Responsible for putting together public training seminars on Agile, SOA and other topics. Frequent guest speaker at conferences and various organizations.
     Established the Training & Development Center for ASCIT. The center provides advanced training, coaching and in-house development services for clients.
     Responsible for delivering Agile, SOA, .Net and J2EE training courses in addition to developing custom courseware on specialized topics.
     Responsible for providing a specialized one on one skill assessment service for employees to gauge their current level. Deliver a customized learning roadmap based on assessment findings.
     Founder of the Omaha Agile Development user group. http://www.omahaagiledevelopment.org

  • Agile Coach

    Northern Natural Gas (NNG)

    (Privately Held; Oil & Energy industry)

    June 2007 — November 2008 (1 year 6 months)

    * NNG had a challenge of completing 3 major enhancement projects within a very strict deadline and a short timeframe. They turned to Agile because it promised to deliver all or partial value on that date instead of the all or nothing traditional delivery model.
    I coached 3 teams through this, alongside another ScrumMaster. The project was a success and delivered all of the features requested plus some additional ones. We had a high quality stable release.
    * I continued to coach Agile at the enterprise level across multiple teams and for a Business and IT Process Improvement initiative.
    * I coached the leadership team through developing a Vision, Roadmap and high level Release schedule for a large system re-write project. This included a process for gathering all the high level features and developing high level estimates and planning the first release and Iteration 0.

  • Agile Coach & Trainer

    Mutual of Omaha

    (Privately Held; Insurance industry)

    July 2006 — November 2008 (2 years 5 months)

    - Introduced Agile and Scrum to the organization and provided a popular 2 day Agile course to a large number of individuals. Currently responsible for coaching ScrumMasters on several pilot projects. Also provided a 1 day intensive Agile training for executive level management. Working with the Agile Transition board to help with enterprise agile adoption.
    - Developed a custom Effective Facilitation for Team Leaders course that aims to enhance the soft skills of Project Managers, Business Analysts, Managers and others responsible for leading group collaboration sessions. The course received high reviews and was taught to 100+ students.

    - Developed a popular Java Journey intensive training program to upgrade the skills of large groups of employees with mainframe and legacy background to learning Java technologies. Program included personalized assessments, self study roadmaps, JSP, Struts, Architecture Patterns and Best Practices and an final end to end 3 week project.

  • Agile Coach & Trainer

    Valmont Industries

    (Public Company; Machinery industry)

    June 2006 — September 2008 (2 years 4 months)

    - Trained the Irrigation team on .Net technologies using our Employee Skills Upgrade program which included personalized assessments, self study resources, classroom courses and a final project. Courses taught were ASP.net 2.0, .Net Architecture Patterns and Best Practices.
    - Worked with the Irrigation team as an Agile Coach for their V20 project and helped with building the initial backlog of stories, story estimates, dependency and priority in addition to meeting with the team monthly to perform a planning session for each iteration.
    - Recently introduced more formal Scrum techniques to the team who's manager is now a certified ScrumMaster and will continue to work with the 3 other ScrumMasters on implementing these techniques.
    - Responsible for managing the implementation of an Agile Onshore project development effort at the ASCIT Development Center that will include coordination with an offshore team in India.

  • Agile Coach

    OPPD

    (Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; Utilities industry)

    January 2008 — March 2008 (3 months)

    Helped coach the first pilot agile team to apply agile and scrum practices to their project which involved a large backlog of ongoing bugs and enhancements. Worked with a great ScrumMaster who is very passionate about Agile and he has a great team too. The collaboration of the product owner and collaboration within the team is key to the success of this group.

  • Web Architect

    Omnium Worldwide Inc

    (Information Technology and Services industry)

    September 2003 — June 2005 (1 year 10 months)

    Responsible for overseeing company web projects which include development using J2EE and .Net technologies. Developed methodologies and processes for web project development and management which are based on the RUP process. Responsible for gathering requirements via use cases, analysis, architecture & development of projects requested within the time and budget constraints.
    Responsible for training and mentoring developers on J2EE technologies using WebSphere Studio Development Client (WSDC) as the IDE and WAS for iSeries as the server. Developed 1 week courses that included: J2EE overview, JSPs, Servlets, WSAD intro and advanced, Advanced Java, iSeries Development with WDSC, Web Services. Responsible for aiding with the design of an integration system that can interface with the web and integrate with the various software and legacy systems using web services, BizTalk and .Net technologies.

  • Sr Software Engineer

    Priority Technologies Inc

    (Information Technology and Services industry)

    September 2001 — September 2003 (2 years 1 month)

    Involved in the analysis, design, and development of J2EE applications for clients. Responsibilities have included requirements gathering, Use Case elaboration, designing UML sequence and class diagrams, developing JSP pages using struts framework, developing Servlets (struts actions), developing EJBs for the business and data tier, connecting to legacy systems or rational databases, supporting the Meteor project which is based on Web Services. Developed the business and data tier logic using Stateless beans and Entity beans. The architecture incorporates many of the proven J2EE patterns. Additional duties involved training and mentoring client developers on J2EE technologies and methodologies throughout the project. Also, delivered onsite and open enrollment hands-on training for clients such as FDR, First National, UP, Mutual of Omaha, Borders and many others . An active member in the industry by presenting seminars at organization such as the WebSphere User Group in Omaha.

  • J2EE Instructor -Part-Time

    Nebraska Business Development Center

    (Information Technology and Services industry)

    February 2001 — August 2002 (1 year 7 months)

    Ms. Elatta co-developed the a J2EE endorsement program for NBDC including all course materials for the JSP, Servlet and JMS classes.

  • Web Developer

    GiftCertificates.com

    (Information Technology and Services industry)

    October 1999 — July 2001 (1 year 10 months)

    Primary responsibility was supporting and developing the B2C e-commerce order process for the GiftCertificates.com website including the shopping cart, my account, checkout and online catalog features using primarily java servlets. Also developed and maintained some Cold Fusion pages for the previous website using custom tags, server side includes, and WDDX connecting to java servlets.

  • Oracle/Software Developer

    OPPD

    (Public Company; Information Technology and Services industry)

    October 1998 — October 1999 (1 year 1 month)

    Developed procedures , functions, Reports and Forms to support the Surge Guard system using PL/SQL, Oracle Forms (Developer2000), Reports, and Query Builder. Provided database analysis and design using Designer 2000 and Rational Rose for creation of DFD, ERD, process flow, and use case diagrams. Additionally, provided system implementation, testing, and User Guide development. Responsibilities included data conversion from mainframe flat file system to a relational database (Oracle) system for the Surge Guard system in addition to aiding in the creation of JSP & Cold Fusion websites for various small projects that were posted to the intranet.

Sally Elatta’s Education

  • University Of Nebraska at Omaha

    BS , MIS , July 1998 — December 1999

    Dean List student, 3.78 GPA
    Graduated with Honors

  • Kirkwood Community College

    AS , Computer Science , July 1995 — June 1998

    Dean List Student, GPA 3.6

    Activities and Societies:
    Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society

Additional Information

Sally Elatta’s Interests:

Love traveling and seeing new places, enjoy music & culture. Enjoy learning about leadership and processes improvement and keeping up with new technologies and trends. Passionate Agilist!

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