SUMMARY

• Solution - driven IT professional with 17+ years of experience and proven track record of managing and delivering software solutions in Financial Services domain.
• 9+ years of Project Management experience while leading multi-million dollar initiatives across multiple technologies, working with geographically spread teams in multi-vendor scenario.
• Thorough working knowledge of all phases of Software Development Lifecycle - Waterfall and Agile (SAFe).
• Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), SAFe Practitioner (SP), SAFe Agilist (SA) and PRINCE2® Practitioner.
• Expert at driving the adoption and enforcement of Scrum rules, removing impediments and fostering self-management.
• Strong business acumen, techno functional and problem solving skills, excellent communication, documentation and presentation skills.
• Hands-on experience of project management tools such as MS Office, CA PPM (Clarity), CA Agile Central (Rally), MS Project, Visio, Quality Center and SharePoint.
• Technical background in JavaScript, C/C++, Unix Shell Scripting, HTML, CSS, VB Script, VB Macros, IBM Notes and Domino.
• Bachelor of Technology in Electronics Engineering.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

IT Project Manager

Confidential, Tempe

Responsibilities:

• Leading initiatives from idea to go-live, developing vision, identifying & managing stakeholders, directing and leading teams from initiation through final delivery.
• Defining initiative scope and goals, developing strategy, creating, executing work plans and revising to meet changing needs.
• Estimating cost, effectively managing resources and financials while tracking milestones and deliverables.
• Creating and managing project deliverables such as Project Charter, Requirement Specification Document
• Project Plan, High Level and Detailed Design, Build Report, SIT and UAT Reports and obtaining sign off from stakeholders.
• Managing and tracking day do day execution, helping teams sort out impediments and ensuring initiatives are delivered on time and within budget.
• Managing work allocation to team, leading project and portfolio meetings, conducting audits and review sessions for ensuring quality and compliance.
• Proactively managing changes in scope, identifying risks, issues and devising mitigation plans.
• Regular and ad-hoc status reporting and presentations to business and senior leadership.
• Setting and continually managing expectations with the team and other stakeholders.

Scrum Master/IT Project Manager

Confidential, Phoenix, USA

Responsibilities:

• Managing end to end delivery of multiple initiatives under US Loyalty.
• Leading meetings with business (product) owners and SMEs to break high level needs into prioritized features.
• Coordinating with Business and Technical Architecture team to come up with the high level solution approach, the Point of Departure (POD) and Point of Arrival (POA) diagrams.
• Estimating high level cost and managing budget & financials throughput the initiative life cycle.
• Conducting feature break down sessions to define user stories and helping team with story point estimations.
• Planning and leading Sprint Planning, Daily Standup, Demo, and Sprint Retrospective.
• Helping team break down user stories into tasks, managing the scrum board ensuring the progress of user stories. Managing dependencies with cross functional teams and resolving impediments.
• Capturing and managing retrospective items and ensuring proper assignment and closure.
• Managing Rally and Clarity set-up, ensuring both are up-to date at any point of time.
• Tracking the progress and ensuring updates to burndown chart. Regular status reporting to customer and senior leaders.
• Shielding team from external distractions, team conflicts and keeping them focused on the work to ensure defect free deliverables.
• Creating and managing project deliverables across all phases of SDLC such as Agile Charter, Release Plan, UAT Report and obtaining sign off from stakeholders.
• Coaching and reinforcing scrum methodology and agile framework to team members and stakeholders.
• Encouraging collaboration between the scrum team and product owner, keeping the product backlog groomed.
• Played an instrumental role in agile transformation journey of the portfolio, helping leaders define roles and responsibilities, outline processes and ensure smooth adoption.

IT Project Manager

Responsibilities:

• Defining initiative scope and goals, developing strategy, creating, executing work plans and revising to meet changing needs.
• Estimating cost, effectively managing resources and financials while tracking milestones and deliverables.
• Managing work allocation to team, providing constructive feedback and managing their career progression.
• Setting and continually managing expectations with the team and other stakeholders.
• Working with project management teams to develop and implement process improvements.
• Driving program level continuous improvements, sharing learning and best practices.
• Formulating processes & procedures for effective functioning of the PMO group.
• Regular and ad-hoc status reporting and presentations to business and senior leadership.

End to End Test Manager

Confidential

Responsibilities:

• End to End test management of multiple large projects, while leading teams of Test Managers & Test Engineers, ensuring SLA adherence, capacity planning, tracking and compliance of audit requirements.
• Defining and implementing Test Strategy, Test Plan and Test Cases, ensuring testing goals were aligned with the overall project objectives.
• Leading test related meetings, driving implementation of end-to-end capabilities for the project.
• Managing Test Data request, testing scope, schedule, resources and budget. Coordinating with all the stake holders and teams involved.
• System testing of various applications involved in the Card processing System and Integration testing for the entire card services flow.
• Reduced the cost by $70K+ in two of the large initiatives by implementing Risk Based Testing, i.e. ranking the requirements by their risk score derived based on the business value, similarity with previous implementations & complexity; focusing End to End testing (SIT and UAT) on the higher ranked ones, while reducing the number of test cases (and number of test cycles) for low ranked ones.
• This not only helped cutting the cost but also the testing schedule by more than 2 weeks.
• Received appreciation from Director of customer organization for demonstrating exemplary management capabilities in two of the Top 100 projects and was awarded

Project Leader

Confidential

Responsibilities:

• Defined, planned and spearheaded knowledge transition from client ensuring a successful takeover of customer’s CRM applications.
• Received a 5/5 transition-feedback rating from the ABN AMRO Engagement Manager, which helped us in building strong relationship with the customer
• I was also awarded appreciation certificate for my contribution towards successful transition of the multimillion contract.
• Set-up the offshore team with peak size of 26 and led end to end execution of various projects under the client portfolio, which included managing offshore resources, coordinating with onshore team and client, planning, budgeting, tracking, reporting and ensuring smooth execution across all phases of SDLC.

Technology Lead

Confidential

Responsibilities:

• First point of contact for all technical issues and queries related to the application.
• Maintaining and supporting the application.
• End to end handling of various enhancements to the application, which included requirements elicitation, estimation, planning, designing, coding, testing and implementation.