Scrum Day 2023 welcomes Moira Klos to its roster of captivating speakers. Moira is the chief people officer for WPS Health Solutions, Wisconsin’s leading health benefits provider. She is passionate about transforming cultures, enhancing the employee experience, and improving and simplifying how work gets done.
Moira's official backstory
Moira has dedicated her career to organizational transformation as an in-house leader and consultant for financial, health care, government, manufacturing, and nonprofit clients. Her innovative practices have been featured in Harvard Business Review and Gartner case profiles.
She has a bachelor’s degree in secondary education and a master’s degree in adult education with a human resources development concentration, both from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Moira’s introduction to Scrum
Moira has employed quality/continuous improvement and lean methodologies throughout her career. Yet under her leadership, the WPS HR team was working in a traditional way in 2018, resulting in operational work consuming most of the time and focus and important initiative work waning. Moira states, “At the end of the year, we had wasted a great deal of time in meetings spinning our wheels, completed only 30% of our initiatives, and faced the reality that our completed initiatives didn’t have a significant impact on our business."
“Based on my experience, I knew there was a better way and that was confirmed when a manager approached me to say he couldn’t work this way anymore.” With that epiphany, the HR team’s journey began.
Biggest surprise using Scrum
Moira knew that if her HR teams stayed the course using Scrum, it would transform how they worked. “What surprised me was just how quickly and significantly it has impacted mindset, behavior, and our results,” she states. Each team adopted the new approach over different timeframes, but all are now on board. “A member from a team that took a bit longer to gain full adoption ended up thanking me for moving to Agile and sticking with it because it’s made a huge difference regarding results, team member engagement and happiness — that’s powerful!”
What Moira looks forward to at Scrum Day 2023?
Moira says she’s eager to learn what others are doing and plans to take ideas and practices back to her teams. “I also hope that our experience at WPS can inspire other non-technical teams to see what Agile can do for them.”
Scrum Day is scheduled for September 14, 2023, at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison, Wisconsin.