PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY:

• SAFe Agilist, PMP and CSM certified professional with 15 plus years of IT experience in multiple business domains, primarily in Life Insurance & Annuity and Retail.
• Strong exposure of managing large (Multi Million) cross functional projects/programs involving geographically dispersed teams of multiple vendors.
• Expertise in delivering projects using various SDLC methodologies such as Waterfall, Iterative (RUP) and Agile (SCRUM).
• Strong technical background with hands on experience in D Warehouse, Business Intelligence (BI) and Mainframe technologies.
• Expertise in managing projects involving industry leading Life & Annuity products wmA, Vantage, LifeComm, FAST (Flexible Architecture Simplified Technology), csA and nbA.
• Successful track record of managing projects of varying nature and complexity such as Data Conversion, Business Intelligence (BI)/Datawarehouse, Predictive Analytics, Policy Admin System (PAS) conversion and major enhancement to mainframe applications.
• Well versed with Lean, Agile and DevOps principles. Experienced in building efficient and effective Scrum/Project teams.
• Good exposure of creating project/program metrics to track project status & progress accurately.
• Adept in managing business and senior executive expectation.
• Proven track record of delivering projects on time and on budget using innovative ways and Agile & Lean practices.
• Strong Customer Centric Approach with excellent analytical, and leadership skills.
• Helped in standing - up first Scrum team for Life LOB of a customer and served as Scrum Master.
• Successfully managed a Policy Administration System (PAS) conversion project.
• Led a team to deliver a project in record 10 weeks by applying out of box thinking, Lean-Agile practices & principles and keeping team morale high.
• Successfully managed a multimillion data centralization/Data Conversion project to ensure correct & identical life is used by Life & Annuity admin and surround applications.
• Successfully managed testing team of $20M plus Business Intelligence/Datawarehouse program.
• Successfully managed $10M multiyear program involving geographically dispersed teams of multiple vendors.
• Led Predictive Analytic project for a leading Life insurance company to reduce the underwriting period from average duration of 27 days to 3 days.
• Identified multiple automation areas and successfully led team to automate those areas which resulted in saving of $80,000 per year for one of the customers.
• Led production support team to reduce the Batch Cycle duration by more than 2 hours, which helped customer in meeting their SLAs by providing financial feeds to third parties well before the cutoff time.

TECHNICAL EXPERTISE/TOOLS:

Project Management: Plan View, HP PPM, CA-Clarity, Version One, JIRA, Microsoft Project

Data warehouse: ETL, BO, COGNOS, COGNOS FM, Informatica DVO, Erwin Data Modeler

Mainframe: COBOL, CICS, JCL, Easytrive, QuickJob, SQL, Mainframe File aid and TSO

Databases: Oracle, DB2 and Teradata

Testing Tools: HP Quality Center

Others: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel & Microsoft Power Point, Microsoft Visio and C

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:

Confidential, CT

Sr. Scrum Master/Sr. Project Manager

Responsibilities:

• Worked with Enterprise Agile Transformation team and helped in completing Scrum feasibility assessment before building Scrum team.
• Built relationship with Product owner and other stake holders to facilitate team's interaction with them.
• Coached Product Owners in creation and maintenance of Product Backlog.
• Coached team members on Agile principles and providing general guidance on the methodology.
• Assisted team in developing DOR, DOD and Team’s Norms.
• Engaged with other Scrum Masters to increase the effectiveness of the application of Scrum in the organization.
• Helped team to solve problems rather than providing solution to them.
• Organized and facilitated different Scrum ceremonies such as daily stand-up, Sprint Planning, Backlog Grooming, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospectives, Release Planning.
• Provided all support and guidance to the team using a servant leadership style whenever possible, and led by example.
• Removed impediments by finding and working with the right personnel/team.
• Tracked and effectively communicated team velocity and sprint/release progress to all affected teams and management through status reporting.
• Updated Agile tracking system and encouraged teams to do the same to help team it tracking any variance.
• Worked with the Scrum Team and the Product Owner to negotiate the minimum viable product for delivery.
• Assisted with internal and external communication, improved transparency, and worked as information radiator.
• Conducted coaching sessions for leaderships to help them understand benefits of Agile over traditional approach.
• Manage stakeholders and sponsors requirement and expectations.
• Facilitate project meetings to bring project team members on same page, discuss dependencies, risks and issues.
• Identify project risks and issues proactively and work with project team to develop mitigation and contingency plans.
• Resolve dependencies and impediments on time to ensure continuous progress.
• Manage project scope, schedule and cost, following Lincoln’s Project Change Request process.
• Continuously track project progress against the project baseline and implement preventive and corrective measures to avoid any schedule slippage.
• Staff required resources by working with resource managers using Lincoln’s Plan View tool.
• Work with other project managers to understand project interdependencies and plan to avoid any adverse impact.
• Direct other project managers and leads assigned to project.
• Create Bi-Weekly status report, Stakeholder meeting deck, Steering Committee deck and Executive Steering Committee deck to share project details with stakeholders, senior management and leadership teams.
• Work with test lead to develop required testing metrics and reports to measure the testing status, progress and trend.
• Participate in defect triage meetings to ensure quick defect resolution.
• Develop support framework to ensure quick turnaround of post-production issues during warranty.
• Perform Project closure.

Tools: Plan View, Version One, MS Project, MS Word, MS Excel, MS Visio and HP Quality Center.

Confidential, NJ

Project Manager

Responsibilities:

• Worked with business and application owner to develop project proposal.
• Worked with impacted teams to gather estimates.
• Worked with application teams and developed detailed and realistic project plan considering applications interdependencies.
• Worked with resource managers to acquire required resources for the project.
• Managed large teams comprising members from multiple vendors and applications spread across various locations in USA and India.
• Created project communication plan and ensure effective communication among team members.
• Conducted daily meetings to assess the progress and find out any impediments or issues.
• Motivated team members and develop effective work environment to have a high productive team, to deliver the project on time with quality and within budget.
• Ensured team followed project development process outlined by customer.
• Participated in BRD and Design walkthroughs to ensure participation of required team members and stakeholders.
• Continuously tracked project progress against the project baseline and implemented preventive and corrective measures to avoid any cost or schedule slippage.
• Managed project finance by closely working with finance team and tracking all statement of works and time entry by team members.
• Developed project reports and metrics such as weekly status report, monthly executive status report to share with senior management and sponsors.
• Facilitated defect triage meeting to ensure quick defect turnaround.
• Worked with release management team to ensure the timely availability of non-prod environments for different level of testing.
• Performed Project closure.

Tools: HPPPM, MS Word, MS Excel, MS Project, MS Visio, HP Quality Center, DB2, COBOL, CICS, JCL.

Confidential, TN

Scrum Master/Test Manager

Responsibilities:

• Initially managed testing team of 21 team members and later managed 2 of 7 scrum teams, including members from cross functional teams.
• Participated in product, release and sprint backlog prioritization.
• Conducted daily Scrum to identify any impediment.
• Participated in decision making meetings as a member of project management team.
• Designed test estimation framework with help of test leads to be able to come up with revised test efforts quickly in this ever-changing project.
• Prepared Test Plan (mpp) and worked with Program manager to get it incorporated into program plan.
• Managed resource forecasting, performed resource gap analysis and developed resource roll-off plan.
• Along with track test lead created test strategy and test team structure to perform quality testing most effectively.
• Created Test Data Management Framework to ensure availability of required test data on time.
• Worked with test team in designing Test Objective and Test Scenario templates suitable for different testing tracks of project.
• Worked with test track leads and project managers of different tracks to create Defect entry guideline and ensured that all stakeholders are familiar with it so that defects are created and updated appropriately.
• Came up with defect triage process and facilitated defect triage meetings to ensure fast defect turnaround from development teams.
• Created testing metrics such as test execution report, defect distribution report and Test Status report to measure the testing status, defect trend and quality of the product at given point of time.
• Developed burn down chart to measure the daily progress of Scrum teams and took required measures to increase team velocity.
• Prepared weekly executive status report to share with senior management including Confidential CIO.
• Participated in project closure activities after each Release.

Tools: CA-Clarity, MS Word, MS Excel, MS Project, MS Visio, HP Quality Center, Teradata SQL Assistance, Erwin Data Modeler, ETL (Informatica), COGNOS and COGNOS Framework Manager.

Confidential, NC

Project Delivery Coordinator

Responsibilities:

• Accountable for all deliveries by LUS production support and enhancement teams as well as responsible for managing client expectations.
• Published weekly project status report to Confidential application manager.
• Prepared program level Monthly status report and Balance Score Card to share with Confidential senior management.
• Assigned different enhancement and maintenance tasks along with other production support activities to team members and tracked their progress using different MS tools.
• Estimated and reviewed different tasks. Helped team members in resolving technical and business queries.
• Led team to implement multiple value adds that helped in stabilizing the application and saving more than $80,000 per year for customer.
• Performed root cause analysis of every production abend along with team and took appropriate action to avoid it in future. This resulted in 50% reduction in production abend year over year.

Tools: C, VB, Micro Focus COBOL, mainframe, Btrieve database, MS Word, MS Excel, MS Project, MS Visio.

Confidential, NJ

Project Lead/Mainframe Developer

Responsibilities:

• Led team of 10 members of this mainframe based application for a year.
• Performed estimation of projects. Helped and guided team members in resolving technical and business queries.
• Assigned project, maintenance tasks and production support activities to team members and tracked their progress using different MS tools.
• Performed initial analysis, impact analysis and designed technical specification documents for projects.
• Performed peer review of design documents, unit test plan, code and unit test results.
• Performed coding and unit testing for multiple projects.

Tools: COBOL, JCL, DB2, CICS, Rexx, Easytrieve, MS Word, MS Excel, MS Project, MS Visio.

Confidential, TX

ETL/BO/Mainframe Developer

Responsibilities:

• Worked as ETL and Mainframe developer.
• Developed BO report as per report specification and unit tested.
• Wrote ETL mapping documents and perform peer review.

Tools: ETL (Informatica), BO (Business Object), COBOL, JCL, DB2, CICS, MS Word and MS Excel.