Sr. Scrum Master, Agild Program Manager

RAHUL SHARMA

San Francisco Bay Area / Santa Clara, CA

***********.***@*****.***, M: +1-858-***-****

www.linkedin.com/in/rahulsharmaportfolio

Highly organized and goal oriented Agile Program Manager / Sr. Scrum Master, with 8.5+ years of experience facilitating software delivery efforts across complex cross-functional organizations.

SUMMARY:

Agile Transformation:

Experience guiding and coaching multiple delivery teams on highly strategic and multi-million dollar (Cloud and IaaS) initiatives like Cisco InterCloud Fabric, Cisco Cloud Services and Qualcomm (Legal IT) PAD, through end-to-end scaled agile transformations via initiation, planning, design, deployment and a servant-leadership model.

Managed upstream / downstream change resistance and expectations; in partnership with Agile Coaches, Engineering Management, Product Management, IT and other cross-functional teams in a Continuous Delivery DevOPS model.

Guided multiple Product Owners on the importance of vertically sliced user stories with succinct narratives / user-scenarios and acceptance criteria (aligned with the INVEST principle), to ensure that the teams deliver incremental value each sprint.

Demonstrated experience in assisting multiple scrum team(s) with cross-program dependency coordination, impediment / blocker identification (visualization, resolution / escalation); in a highly complex program with 30+ Scrum / Kanban teams, 10+ Product Owners and 15+ Scrum Masters.

Promoted the importance of agile values / mindset and incremental delivery, via a combination of Cisco Agile Playbook, SAFe and TDD, evolving the delivery teams to become a self-organizing / self-managing unit.

Received Qualcomm 'Diamond QualStar’ award, for leading the integration of QA and Dev. processes in a hybrid SCRUM model, thereby enhancing team efficiency by 30%.

Program / Project and Release Management:

Agile Program Manager, with hands-on experience supporting end-to-end / continuous delivery on highly complex and strategic programs, via project initiation and by facilitating planning / design discussions, release execution / deployments.

Coordinated multiple multi-day / multi-team Release Planning efforts, as a Release Planning Lead.

Assisted PMO / RMO teams with tracking / visualizations of feature health, program risks and minor / major releases, by ensuring delivery team / backlog commitments are in alignment with the proposed schedule / timelines.

Extensive experience, working across complex / sensitive organizational boundaries and promoting cross group / inter-team communications, with a goal of building consensus, toward streamlining stakeholder and engineering expectations.

Maintained and tracked program / project / delivery-team schedules, forecasts and artefacts via various tools like Rally, Box, Confluence, JIRA, Smartsheets, Wiki, Automated Excel Reports, Salesforce.com etc.

CERTIFICATIONS:

Certified Scrum Master (2012)

ITIL v3 Foundation (2011)

SimSkill Projects Simulation Program (2010)

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:

CISCO SYSTEMS INC., San Jose, CA May 2014 - Nov 2015

Title (Role): Project Manager (Sr. Scrum Master) Program(s): InterCloud Fabric (ICF), Cisco Cloud Services (CCS)

Sr. Scrum Master / Agile Program Manager on Cisco's multi-million dollar strategic (scaled agile) InterCloud initiatives.

Supported multiple agile teams running on separate / common backlogs and delivering the UI, UX, REST API experiences for ICF and CCS (OpenStack based Enterprise IaaS platform); in partnership with Agile Coaches, Engineering Management, Product Management, IT, Release Management and other cross functional teams, in a Continuous Delivery DevOPS model.

In alignment with Cisco’s Agile Playbook, lead agile adoption / transformation, by facilitating quarterly release planning, daily standups, 3-Amigos / PLT grooming meets, look-ahead sessions, Scrum Master guilds, Scrum-of-Scrums and key scrum ceremonies like sprint planning, sprint demos, release / sprint retrospectives etc.

Coached the delivery teams and Product Owners on the importance of INVEST principle and vertical slicing in grooming stories and getting them to a “Definition of Ready”.

Helped team iterate towards a continually prospering “Definition of Done” and how the same drives the delivery of quality (and potentially shippable) stories.

Assisted multiple agile team(s) with obstacle / impediment visualization, escalation and resolution via program’s digital obstacle board(s).

Delivered automated Story Groomed Confidence Metrics app, via Excel-Rally-Plugin, Custom Queries and Excel Pivot Tables.

Coordinated complex cross-program dependencies, engaging with 10+ Product Owners, 15+ Scrum Masters, SMEs, TMEs.

Worked with assigned Product Owners on continually prioritize vertically sliced (and groomed) user stories, with a goal to always maintain a healthy rank-stacked backlog for delivery team(s) consumption.

Acted as Stand-in Product Owner, supporting Visual / UX reviews (redline specifications) efforts, defect scrub sessions etc.

Utilized tools like Rally, WebEx, Confluence, Box, Wiki, Smartsheets, Excel etc., to support program data / metrics.

Helped teams and management appreciate agile metrics such as ‘Planned vs. Actual Velocity’, ‘Capacity Based / Commitment Driven Planning’, ‘Feature-Story’ mappings, Product Owner (PO) ‘Continual Acceptance’, ‘Release / Milestone Burn-ups’ etc.

Collaborated with engineering management, to ensure the teams are tactically aligning deliverables for ‘Continuous Delivery’, via aspects like Automated / Functional Testing, TDD, Pre-Commit Sanity, Build Integration etc.

Tracked cross-program health by identifying program / release / feature risks and rolling up product roadmap progress to senior leadership and business stakeholders, via a weekly leadership sync-up forum.

QUALCOMM INC., San Diego, CA Jun 2011 - Mar 2014

Title (Role): Sr. Systems Analyst (Scrum / Project Analyst, QA) Group(s): Business Catalyst Services, Strategic IP

As a Scrum Master Analyst, facilitated team’s backlog grooming, sprint planning, user-scenario documentation, velocity tracking, iteration review sessions (demos / retrospectives), blocker / obstacle resolution etc. needs.

As a Project Analyst, coordinated delivery of multiple (Java, SFDC, Drupal CMS based) Web / SaaS applications in an SOA environment.

Supported QA / UAT efforts by performing extensive Ad-Hoc, Exploratory, Black Box, Smoke, Regression, ETL / Data Sanity testing and assisted with documentation of BRD’s / functional requirements, stories, use cases, test plans.

Qualcomm 'Diamond QualStar’ award, for leading the integration of QA and Dev. processes in a hybrid SCRUM model, thereby enhancing team efficiency by 30%.

As a PMO member, promoted the importance of continuous improvement and transparency to build high-performance teams and instilled the thinking data driven process improvement approaches, via analysis like ‘QA Automation ROI @ 6 quarters’, ‘Incremental build health analyses’ etc.

Maintained Project artefacts in various systems like Confluence, JIRA, Microsoft Project, Visio, Salesforce.com etc.

Facilitated the ISO 20000 SLM / BRM Audit Interviews, ITIL Service Catalog data aggregation efforts.

TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES Oct 2007 - May 2010

CLIENT: Qualcomm Inc., San Diego, CA Dec 2008 - May 2010

Title (Role): I.T. Analyst (Onsite Quality Analyst / Coordinator) Group: Composite Application Services

Onsite Coordinator, for e2e test planning and execution on multiple (Java, SFDC, Drupal CMS based) Web / SaaS applications.

Responsible for requirements gap-analysis, for offshore QA teams and tracking defect backlog health.

Participated in extensive hands-on black-box, performance, smoke, functional, exploratory, ad-hoc etc. testing activities.

CLIENT: CVS Pharmacy Inc., Gurgaon, INDIA Oct 2007 - Nov 2008

Title (Role): Asst. Systems Engineer (Database Analyst) Team: Retail POS Data / Storage Platform

Supported (Oracle 9i / 10g) database deployments, backup, support, rollback efforts on Dev., QA and Staging boxes, for a home-grown POS application.

Accountable for delivery of daily DB schema and data-model update scripts to onshore teams, using tools like TOAD, Erwin etc.

QUARK SYSTEMS PVT. LTD., INDIA May 2005 - Aug 2007

Title (Role): Engineer II - R&D Support (Tech. Account Manager, Support SME) Team: Enterprise Support

Technical Account Manager and Jr. DBA for Tier-2 / Ties-3 support needs for multiple Quark global enterprise accounts.

Functional SME on multiple Quark enterprise products like Quark Publishing System, Digital Media Server, Quark DDS etc.

Supported Engineering / R&D teams, with complex customer environments (client-server based) lab setups.

Quark ‘QUDOS’ award, for excellence in work quality, customer focus and issue handling.

PROFESSIONAL SKILLS:

Methodologies

Agile, Waterfall, ATDD, FDD

Tools

Rally, JIRA, Box, Smartsheets, Confluence, Wiki, MS (Excel, OneNote, Visio), GitHub (exposure), Salesforce (user / tester), Quality Center, PerForce, Argo UML, TOAD, ERWin, EDraw ERD Modeler, Oracle 9i / 10g, SQL Developer, QlikView (training / exposure), Minitab (exposure), WebEx

Languages

SQL (Queries), Java / OOAD (concepts), HTML / CSS (exposure), XML (exposure)

Databases

Oracle (10g / 9i), MS SQL Server, ETL (concepts)

Operating Systems

Unix / Solaris / AIX (terminal user), Redhat Linux / Ubuntu (exposure), Macintosh OSX (user)

EDUCATION:

Masters of Information Systems Management, Carnegie Mellon University Class of 2011

Cumulative GPA: 3.45

Key Achievements:

oCarnegie Mellon University (MISM) Scholarship: Recipient of merit based student scholarship (2010, 2011).

oPearson Publishing Client Project: Statistical Data Analysis to comprehend / recommend, how factors like Cross-Price Elasticity, Spillover Sales, Interim Promotions etc. affect buyer behavior for digital (kindle) vs. physical (print) sales of titles, in various sales channels (2011).

o2nd Prize: comScore Innovation in Social Media Analytics Case Competition (2011).

oSemi Finalists: Yale School of Management Education Business Plan Competition (2010).

B. E. Computer Engineering, University of Mumbai Class of 2004

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