Tamara Runyon, CST

Tamara Runyon
Founder, Trainer, and Managing Director of Applied Scrum

"[Tamara] is humble, calm and poised in her class and carries a heart-warming kindness for her students and their learning experience. I am sure anyone trained and mentored by her, will have a very clear understanding and strong foundation in Scrum and Systems thinking."

Tamara (Sulaiman) Runyon is a Scrum trainer and enterprise Agile coach with more than 30 years experience in business management and software development. Prior to establishing Agile Project Management Institute (APMI) in 2014, she worked with both hardware and software teams at Intel Corporation as an enterprise Agile coach. Tamara has worked with several renowned organizations in the Scrum and Agile industry, including CollabNet and Solutions IQ, focusing on training and coaching ScrumMasters, Product Owners, and Scrum teams.

In 2008, Tamara founded Applied Scrum, LLC, an Agile consulting business and division of APMI focused on helping organizations adopt and scale Agile practices. In her work at Applied Scrum, she has worked with such companies as Key Bank, CapitalOne, Washington Mutual, AOL, Gerson-Lehrman Group, GHX, Sandia, BEA, and many others across the world.

As a thought leader, Tamara sat on the Board of Directors of the Agile Alliance from 2008 - 2012 and has held multiple volunteer positions for the Agile Alliance conferences over the years, including Track Chair. She has spoken at the Agile Project Leadership Network and the Northwest Software Quality Conference, as well as being a regular presenter at various Agile conferences since 2006.

Tamara has authored and contributed to several industry publications, including being the lead author of the research paper "AgileEVM - Earned Value Management in Scrum Projects”. Her techniques in AgileEVM are now used by major corporations in the defense industry. Tamara is a regular contributor to industry publications such as ProjectManagement.com (formerly Gantthead), The Agile Journal, InfoQ, and Methods&Tools where she publishes her ideas and experiences on Agile project management with Scrum.

As an educator and coach, Tamara possesses a wide range of professional expertise in assessing and coaching Agile adoptions, as well as training and mentoring teams, ScrumMasters and Product Owners who are new to Agile and the Scrum Framework.

Find out more about Tamara on LinkedIn.