SUMMARY:

• 25 years of progressive growth in the Product and Project Management with globally distributed teams.
• 15 plus years of Agile Experience across insurance, media and product development sectors.
• Focus on pragmatic agile with context - based solutions within the Agile principles.
• Extensively worked in waterfall methodology - critical success factor to help others make the transition to agile as most organizations move from waterfall to agile.
• Formal education in Organizational Change Management helping with Change component of agile transformations.
• Experience in DevOps and CI/CD adoptions along with Agile process
• Experience in lean startup based Minimum Viable Product development process
• Proven ability to adapt to changing priorities and requirements, multi-task and juggle competing priorities and deadlines.
• Deep awareness of the cultural nuances of countries

EXPERIENCE DETAILS:

Confidential

Agile Coach

Responsibilities:

• Enterprise agile coach for SAFe implementation for a major division that has four key portfolios and 400 plus technology resources that work across bankruptcy, claims, complaints and social media.
• Responsible for strategic and operational aspects of agile transformation for Portfolio/Program/Team levels for SAFe
• Evolved an agile framework that is based on SAFe but enriched with concepts from other frameworks like LESS and NEXUS.
• Successfully coached both technology and business to achieve business agility by collaborative agile framework.
• Evolved the roadmap for the SAFe implementation based on SAFe guidelines covering change agent training, value stream mapping, identifying and launching ARTs, Program Increment (PI) Planning up to sustaining and improvement.
• Introduced the concept of “sharpening the Saw” based on Steven Covey to allow teams to take time to learn and upskill via weekly agile sessions conducted by the coaches and other experts.
• Guided multiple ARTs with their PI planning and rolling wave planning approach, conducted Inspect & Adopt workshops
• As SPC provided multiple SAFe certification training sessions for various agile roles
• Coaching the team on Kanban and scrum and helping with choice of one over other.
• Coaching to portfolio leaders to identify value streams, launching ARTs, establishing agile teams.
• Coaching the Product owners and Scrum masters to identify anti patterns to agile and help resolving them as part of building high performance teams.
• Grooming of product leadership to slice and dice the epics and capabilities into features and further granular components.
• Focused on helping the Portfolios and teams to adhere to guard rails of SAFe allowing flexibility and empowerment to inspect and adapt.
• Helping the transformation to stay up to date with SAFe rollouts like 4.6 making needed changes to agile framework as needed
• Tools used - Rally for Agile and Blueprint for requirement management

Confidential

Agile Coach

Responsibilities:

• Enterprise agile coach as part of the Agile COE and SAFe 4.5 is chosen framework.
• Focused on Independent Retirement Domain that has 250 plus resources to be transformed to Agile from waterfall.
• Responsible for the following services to help with Agile adoption
• Agility 101:Principles and mindset requires of team and departments to be successful in the world of Agility.
• Executive Coaching:Shared Common Module for Executive leaders.
• What do they need to change in how they think and operate to ensure success within their divisions,
• Geared toward departments that are ready to make the shift to Agile.
• Helps leaders think through team structures that drive success. Discusses some of the challenges that scale brings to Agile and how SAFe can be used to keep it all running smooth
• Department Assessment - A guided self-assessment for a department. Helps to identify where you are it in your journey and what training and guidance is required to achieve your fullest potential.
• Team Assessment - A guided self-assessment that helps a team learn about what they are doing well and what has room for improvement.
• Covers all key roles, behaviors and mindset that are critical for maximizing team success.
• Customized Agile Bootcamp:Review Scrum roles, responsibilities, ceremonies, artifacts and focus on value-driven delivery .
• Product Owner Pre-requisition Training:Customized content providing information on who can take up the role of Product Owner.
• Product Owner Training:Customized content with role and responsibilities of the PO role with focus on Agile requirements.
• Brief intro to Agile and ceremonies needed to support delivery teams.
• Scrum Master Training:Customized content with emphasis on Servant Leadership and helping create self managing and self-organizing teams.
• Discuss attributes needed for effective Delivery Lead.
• Agile for Business Leaders - Executive course. Intro to Value Driven framework.
• Using Lean and Agile as foundation, achieve buy-in from Business Leadership.
• Jira/Confluence/Portfolio - Training on the tools which help to enable a smooth journey to agile while providing metrics to reinforce key behaviors.

Confidential

Agile Coach

Responsibilities:

• Enterprise agile coach for the specialty and horizontal service group that has 4 key portfolios and 400 technology resources that work across bankruptcy, claims, complaints and social media etc.
• Coaching and mentoring at all levels for the full SAFe- Portfolio/Value Stream/Large solution/Program/Team.
• Conducted due diligence and discovery to understand current maturity level
• Established a LACE (Lean Agile Center of Excellence) with key members from each portfolio to drive the overall SAFe implementation strategy.
• Guided multiple ARTs with their PI planning and key ceremonies like system demo, solution demo, Inspect & Adopt workshops.
• Conduct role based class room sessions.
• Coaching the team on Kanban and scrum and helping with choice of one over other.
• Coaching to portfolio leaders to identify value streams, launching ARTs, establishing agile teams.
• Coaching the Product owners and Scrum masters to identify anti patterns to agile and help resolving them as part of building high performance teams.
• Grooming of product leadership to slice and dice the epics and capabilities into features and further granular components.
• Focused on helping the Portfolios and teams to adhere to guard rails of SAFe allowing flexibility and empowerment to inspect and adapt.

Tools: used - Rally for Agile and Blueprint for requirement management

Confidential

Agile Coach

Responsibilities:

• Leading the Agile transformation for the digital content management group.
• Assessment of current SDLC, Intake process from Portfolio/Program level and develop roadmap with multiple options with relative merits to be shared with client leadership.
• Stakeholder interviews, team level scrum ceremony review, SAFe based ART rationalization across portfolios.
• Successfully completed the high-level blueprint for transformation with implementation partner selection.
• Leadership coaching at value stream level

Tools: used - Jira

Confidential

Agile Coach

Responsibilities:

• Agile coach and transformation leader for the most ambitious product development in OTT streaming platform.
• SAFE 4.0 full SAFe implementation coaching at Portfolio/Value Stream/Program/Team levels
• Overall team size of around 200 resources that supported 2 value streams.
• Functioning as an Agile Coach for change leaders and executives to design SAFe Agile transformation covering 10 ARTs using SAFe 4.0 Framework.
• RTE training and hands-on role play and mentoring, managing the PI events, weekly SOS, PI level retrospectives etc.
• Functioned as a Scrum Master helping various teams to understand the SAFe 4.0 Agile concepts like normalized story point estimates, PI planning, release burn down management etc.
• Jira and AgileCraft
• Achieved major success with transforming some of the most difficult teams by effective coaching to become very much self-organized and high performing.

Confidential

Agile Coach/Program Manager

Responsibilities:

• Enterprise coach for the Agile Transformation at a major product development organization over 12 months following SAFe 3.0 framework.
• Led the DevOps adoption by handling the tooling for CI/CD and cross skilling of resources needed to bring the synergy for success.
• Trained the group on various roles per SAFe guidelines such as RTE, Product Manager, Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Scrum Team.
• Used JIRA to create user stories, tasks, epics etc. and ensure feature links were established. Also added various gadgets in JIRA like burn down charts, bubble charts, cumulative flow diagrams etc. to manage daily scrums
• Working with AgileCraft for all Portfolio level views and value stream vision to track the progress in the rolling wave model.
• Train the teams on using key tools like Burn down chart, Velocity measures, and Sprint task estimation using Fibonacci series or T-shirt model.
• Managed overall program management of moving to Scaled Agile using the principles of SAFe for globally distributed teams from US, India and Poland with well-defined value streams that delivered in cadence to the release plan.
• Championed the concept of Lean Startup and Minimum Viable product successfully
• Manage all phases of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) for custom solutions.
• Responsible to choose the relevant methodology (waterfall/Agile/Kanban) as needed for the program/project to ensure success.
• Create runbooks as part of the product development.
• Evangelize the LEAN concepts for performance management across the portfolio.
• Enforced Kanban principles as a scrum master that resulted in reduction of cycle time by 20% thus increasing team's throughput in less than 8 weeks.
• Successfully guided the client adoption of Agile framework by establishing a lightweight efficient Agile process, adapted to be most easily applied, capable of handling changes to project plan.
• Capable of moderating Agile retrospectives, making them constructive in nature for team members and focused on results that result in higher level of performance.
• Accountable to manage the cost, scope and schedule of all programs and projects across the application ecosystem.

Confidential

Agile Coach/PM

Responsibilities:

• Agile Transformation of large media client.
• Responsible to transform a waterfall driven ecosystem to adopt Agile as a way of life by coaching the team on Scrum concepts and approaches.
• Successfully introduced Kanban as well as Scrum to complete Agile adoption that included a high performing SAFe driven release process.
• Functioned as a RTE (Release Train Engineer) for the SAFe adoption that covered more than 100 resources across multiple cross functional teams. Managed the scrum of scrums, program boards, PI planning activities etc.
• Established Project Management training to get all the Project Managers, teams and IT management staff to adhere to the EPMO standards.
• Deployed LEAN using visual boards and Kaizen events to enhance operational efficiencies.
• Successfully completed key product offering in the theatrical group from soup to nuts across product conceptualization, gap analysis and implementation.
• Facilitated agile adoption Retrospective for the organization with the leadership and guided teams with outcome resulting in enhanced performance.
• Coached/mentored a cross functional team of 30 plus resources to deliver quality products, which led to over $2M in revenue annually.
• Used Agile Scrum practices to help the team increase their velocity by 63% within the first year of Agile adoption.
• Facilitated Release Planning, Sprint Planning, Backlog Grooming, and Retrospective meetings.
• Presented to client C-Level team the status of key initiatives and showcase the value provided.

Confidential

Program Executive

Responsibilities:

• Responsible for International teams spread across India, China and Thailand.
• Agile Transformation for large insurance client.
• Successfully introduced the co-existence of waterfall and Agile to make use of the most appropriate methodology to bring optimum value to business partners.
• Successfully took the client through the journey of adopting (and adapting to) Agile.
• Fostered productive multi-cultural teams via effective translation of requirements on each side, which contributed to success of delivery in the ITO landscape.
• Established CSM training for all Project Managers on the team. 90% of staff were certified in 12 months.
• Managed the major organizational change initiative of re-deployment of onsite delivery functions to near-shore and offshore.
• Achieved SLA in the first year of contracted service to avoid financial penalties.
• Consistently maintained high ratings in the client satisfaction survey over the years for key programs.
• Deployed Lean methodologies like Kaizen and Visual boards to bring operational efficiency.
• Established relationships with the client’s Information Technology (IT) and executives as a trusted advisor who understands their issues, needs, and requirements.