Project Management Program Manager

Sridar Pootheri, PhD, PMP, PMI-ACP, CSM

Cupertino CA 95014 Phone: 510-***-**** ********@*****.*** https://www.linkedin.com/in/sridar-pootheri/ US Citizen Remote / Hybrid Focus

Senior Agile Program Manager

Leverage my project management strengths of building high performance Agile teams to deliver optimal value and delight the customers in a fast-paced cross functional environment. Profile

Emotionally-intelligent, Innovation-tapping, Principle-centered, passionate professional who constantly improves and increases knowledge in business, technology, and human relations. Pragmatic risk manager with a positive outlook, persistent drive towards problem solving and with burning desire to always do the right-thing. Creative, innovative, solutions-orientated technology manager with advanced degree accomplishments. Demonstrated in providing value- based business alignment and transformation through effective project management processes and change management. Ability to make/facilitate decisions in the context of uncertainty and ambiguity. Demonstrated excellence in servant leadership, team building, communication, organizational, research, analysis, issues management and problem simplifying skills. Enjoys driving operational success of projects through cheerful teamwork and collaboration.

“Concept Guy” with proven expertise improving business processes and breaking things down to simplify, resolve and reduce wastes.

Good balance between Traditional (Waterfall) and Adaptive (Scrum/Agile) Project Management Best Practices.

Adept at building effective relationships across disciplines and at all levels in an organization.

Proven ability to influence others and move towards a common goal.

Demonstrated effective influence management, strong Problem Solving, Decision-Making, Leadership, Organizational, Diplomatic, Conflict-Resolution, Negotiation, Goal-setting and Prioritization skills.

Effective Road-mapping, Financial Forecasting, Resource Planning and Resource Management leading to high performance in Teams.

Committed to apply Agile best practices and fostering a culture of learning and continuous improvement towards value creation, elimination of wastes in software development, producing innovative products, etc.,

Proficient in Needs/Requirement Analysis, Change Management and Event Planning /Execution.

Software/Solution Life Cycle Management from Design & Development. Ability to define, design, develop, debug, deploy, document and manage highly complex, abstract and large scale software systems.

Excellent oral and written communication, Listening, Reporting, Documentation, SOW / Proposal Writing.

Technical Skill Set

PM Methodologies: Agile, Scrum, Lean, Kanban, eXtreme, Scaled Agile SAFe, Kaizen, Waterfall.

PM Tech Skills: Process Development, Leadership Alignment, Compliance adherence, Proactive Risk Mgmt, Scheduling, Budgeting and Forecasting, Excellent summarizing and writing; Planning, Tracking, Monitoring and Reporting.

PM Soft Skills Coaching and Servant Leadership; Collaboration and Team Energizing.

PM Tools: Jira, Rally, Smartsheet, Monday, Asana, Trello, Adobe Workfront, Tableau, Power BI, MS SharePoint, MS Project, MS Visio, MS Office.

Development: C/C++, Java, Python, .NET, Cloud Infra AWS, SaaS, Distributed Computing. Immediate Values offered

- Program Accountability

- Conflict Resolution

- Agile Transformation

- Concept Alignment & Value

Clarification

- PMO Set up, Reporting,

Process & Performance

improvements

- Production Support Mgmt

- Scope & Change Mgmt

- Release Mgmt

- Resource / Product Roadmap

- Budget Mgmt

- Customer Relationship Mgmt

- Scaling Agile

- Elimination of wastes

- Controlling WIP

- Sysmtems Thinking

- Continuous Integration

Strategy

- Effective Retrospectives

- Continuous Improvment

Cycles

- Team Energizing & Building

Sridar Pootheri, PMP, PMI-ACP, CSM

Page 2 of 8

Degrees & Certifications

• PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) Certification. License #: 1597698

• Agile Management - Principles and Practices, University of California Berkeley Extension.

• Agile Management for Project Managers, University of California Berkeley Extension.

• Certified ScrumMaster from Scrum Alliance. To verify, visit this page or my profile page.

• Project Management Professional (PMP) Certification. License #: 198618

• Project Management Certification, University of California Berkeley Extension. Earned a Distinction.

• Software Project Management Certification, University of Cal Berkeley Extension.

• Ph.D. in Mathematics, University of Georgia. [See Dissertation : Contains results of massive computations produced using High Performance C++ programs implementing efficient algorithms.]

• M.S. in Computer Science, University of Georgia.[See Thesis : Contains results of massive computations produced using High Performance C++ programs implementing efficient algorithms.]

• B.Sc. in Mathematics, Vivekananda College, University of Madras. Experiences & Achievements

Adobe, San Jose, CA Sept 2022 – Sept 2023

Sr. Program Manager (Consultant)

Lead Work Streams of Order to Billing (O2B) Value Stream in compliance with Dynamics Transformation Program (DTP) PMO Processes and took O2B to deliver a major foundational release in July 2023. DTP foundational release, is a significant re-tooling initiative to modernize Adobe’s internal tools and processes to enable automated provisioning of product contracts/licenses starting from opportunities across every phase of product order, including Billing, Accounting and Revenue recognition.

Identified, tracked, and managed to resolution - program inter-Dependencies, risks/issues, milestones, critical-path items, change requests, key design decisions and program artifacts delivery/testing, across various program tracks and ensured constant PMO compliance, successful implementation, and timely delivery.

Prepared and maintained program dashboards, bugs dashboards, checkpoint artifacts for alignments with Leadership committees, along with all program level communications and weekly status reports on progress within scrum teams.

Accountable for MVP deliverables. Tracked development and testing progress in Jira for weekly executive status reports.

Tracked Milestones, facilitated signoffs and maintained O2B schedules in Workfront.

Compiled, tracked, and sent out daily email reports for six months on the execution of QA Functional Testing and E2E System Integration Testing of multiple code drops of three critical inter-dependent core Value Streams with over ten development teams. This executive visibility gave support and sense of urgency for test execution across the organization, for triaged issues, bug resolution action items, pending bug lists by severity and test scenarios status. Supported daily status meetings to Leadership for escalations and speedy resolutions. Maintained Jira bugs dashboards.

BlueStacks, Campbell, CA Feb 2018 – June 2022

Sr. Program Manager (Consultant)

Lead multiple security and compute performance releases for BlueStacks, a mid-size company that develops Android games emulators for Mac/PC (BlueStacks 5) and Hybrid Cloud (BlueStacks X).

Worked as an Agile Coach and lead release of multiple versions of the emulators from ground up and later improving: features, security and performance. This led to significant increase in user adoption of our emulator.

Coached the teams to be self-managed by developing strong sense of ownership, empowering members, maintaining a culture of collaboration, and establishing effective Team working agreements.

Facilitated Strategic analysis and planning with key stakeholders to lay out Annual Program Roadmaps.

Created and managed schedules, milestones, Cost Plans, Forecasts and Risks based on the Roadmaps.

Worked with Product Owners on developing and periodic grooming of User Stories based Program Roadmap to meet Business Requirements. Led the delivery of a total of 835 User Stories. Sridar Pootheri, PMP, PMI-ACP, CSM

Page 3 of 8

Established team ceremonies, standups, demos, retrospects, planning and backlog reviews, and Engineering

/Acceptance review.

Enabled teams to adopt CI/CD process with automated testing and cultivated DevOps culture.

Analyzed production incident metrics, identified key issues, SLAs, implemented process improvements in the defect life cycle, enabling incident reduction by 40+% in 2 quarters and reduced SLAs for incident resolution and defect fixes.

Mentored Scrum Teams, performed Scrum ceremonies and reported on Sprint/Team progress metrics to Executive Teams, as per the established reporting protocols.

Lead periodic Senior Management project status meetings to ensure that all key stakeholders are kept fully informed about program risks and team progress. Maintained commitments and predictability of deliveries. Dimension Data, Redwood City, CA June 2014 – Dec 2017 Sr. Program Manager (Consultant)

Dimension Data is a Johannesburg, Africa based Gold Partner of Cisco that focuses on IT Services & IT Consulting.

Built and managed four scrum teams that developed Smart Net, a SaaS offering for Cisco Partners who manage their customers’ networks, which provides Installed Base Management, Product Alerts, Network Capability Assessments, Disaster Recovery and Security Reports using Virtual Collectors.

Led Smart Net scrum teams in releasing several versions of Smart Net that resulted in growing customer base from 2,000 to 3,500 and increased feature adoption with better user experience.

Collaborated with other Coaches in transforming Smart Net Program into using SAFe based Agile Methodology and coached the teams.

Collaborated with Smart Net stakeholders (Product Management & Marketing, Program Management, Support, Operations, Documentation) on Product Strategy, Road Map Planning and Release Management.

Facilitated Release Planning and Scrum of Scrums and created Program Status / Metrics Dashboards.

Coached Scrum Teams in adopting Scrum, Rally, SAFe and XP practices such as, Pair Programming, Test Driven Development (TDD), Continuous Integration.

Groomed & prioritized the backlog and provided technical guidance on implementation with CI/CD & DevOps;

Acted as Scrum Master for the teams initially and collaborated with stakeholders on product strategy, requirements, architecture, release planning and delivery tracking. Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA Feb 2014 – April 2014 Scrum Program Manager (Intel Contract Employee)

Scrum Office, Imaging and Camera Technology Group. Process improvement consultant for Program Governance for 25+ Global teams with 300+ members. Evaluated and improved process flows in Visio, Excel/Jama Dashboards, Resource Allocations, Scope Review Process, Status Reports Analytics, Commitment/Progress tracking, QA Validation Metrics, User Guides / Training Materials, etc., of the PMO. Cisco, San Jose, CA July 2012 – Dec 2013

Agile Program Manager (Consultant), Cisco Services Technology Group Unleashed team innovation, leading two large software development programs and a few short-term initiatives.

(1) Lead full life cycle of Appliance Life Cycle Management Program, which is a SaaS.

Managed 7 monthly iterations working with on-site and off-shore resources and delivered 2 major releases and 3 minor releases, continuously innovating and leveraging ideas for customer benefits.

Coordinated the integration of this core service with 5 other complex Smart services software, by driving cross- group communication and cooperation, using strong communication and organizational skills.

Established optimum operational efficiency by closely managing the workload and flow of the teams, driving efficient meetings and planning, identifying and clearing impediments and dependencies, tracking and reporting on progress and performance.

Established and managed Obstacle Board. Adopted many team specific Agile best practices and lead the team on a continuous improvement path of becoming a self-managed, effective, development unit with a sustainable cadence.

Lead the team in effectively addressing Customer Found Defects from the field. Sridar Pootheri, PMP, PMI-ACP, CSM

Page 4 of 8

(2) Kicked off a new program called Smart Metering on “Infrastructure as a Service”, from concept level and drove it through execution phase.

Facilitated the definition of program goals, scope, schedules, milestones, and deliverables in support of larger initiatives.

Drove planning, infrastructure procurement, resourcing and dependency alignment, collaborating with business stakeholders across the board.

Assembled and lead the on-shore and off-shore teams for two iterations.

Coached the teams in Agile best practices, establishing strong relationships. Customized Rally for team’s specific needs, decomposed PRD into User Stories and established traceability. PayPal, San Jose, CA Feb 2012 – May 2012

Agile Coach / Scrum Master (Consultant), Shared Environments, Quality Infrastructure Instilled agile thinking to a Project team that was charged with rolling out a new infrastructure for a testing team that develops tools for a mission critical Mobile software development for Paypal. The infrastructure envisioned to iteratively roll out by this project was with innovative configurations, straight forward and out of the ordinary deployment process and super simplified maintenance approaches, which are expected to create a paradigm shift in the organization. The cross functional project team was dispersed across multiple time zones and was made up of senior level architects, Database admins, System admins, and hardware and software engineers.

Established a self-managed, continuous improvement path of agile excellence for the team to iteratively adopt Agile best practices and improved value generation, predictability, and cadence.

Inspired, Coached and Transformed the Team to adopt Agile best practices, including the effective use of Jira, evolutionary architecture, release/iteration planning, periodical backlog grooming, developing sensible User Stories, decomposing them into sub-tasks, sizing and tracking progress on stories/sub-tasks, using Kanban Boards, time- boxed decisions, eliminating rework, constant delivery of value to users/customer, etc.,

Facilitated across the organization discussions, gaining cooperation resource commitments, buy-ins for innovative design and difficult architectural decisions.

McAfee, Santa Clara, CA July 2011 – Dec 2011

Program/Project Manager (Consultant), McAfee.com Program Accountable for stakeholder relationships and health of McAfee.com Portal – with estimated average monthly site traffic of 2+ Millions. Responsible for program financial planning, monthly forecasting, detailed actual cost reporting, Managed multiple project tracks and drove Production issues of McAfee.com to resolution, utilizing (a) IT operations teams distributed in USA, (b) Off-shore Development and Testing teams in Bangalore, India.

Partnered with business stakeholders and drove the definition of business requirements for reporting, dashboards, analytics and ad-hoc reporting. Developed and rolled out processes for Production Change Requests, Production Defects Management and Weekly status reporting of program to Business partners. Followed the established change request process and managed full Life-cycle of 12 plan resets – Prioritizations, Requirements, Estimations, Plannings, Approvals, Developments, Testing, Deployments and post-deployment supports.

Managed and drove mission critical efforts such as – Integration of Business Intelligence, Production upgrade of Google Search Appliance from 6.0 to 6.12 version, UAT Environment Re-introduction, QA Environment Refreshing, Teamsite patch update and Omniture reporting enhancements along with defect fixes.

Developed and rolled out processes for Monthly Maintenance Release Train process, utilizing Agile Software Development Methodologies. Oversaw the build outs of various relevant networking and software development environments such as Dev, QA, UAT and Staging.

Scholastics Corporation, Sausalito, CA Dec 2010 – Mar 2011 Agile Project Manager, Middle School Math Reasoning Inventory, Math Solutions Consulted and Mentored team members on Agile software development principles and best practices to recover a troubled project that had spent 50% of project budget on year-long inception and elaboration phases. The project was funded by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Its objective is to develop a web based math testing tool and make it available to middle school teachers and students for almost no cost to them. Sridar Pootheri, PMP, PMI-ACP, CSM

Page 5 of 8

Identified the right type of Agile processes and tools for the team and ran the project for a few iterations/sprints showing how things have to be done.

Identified and eliminated waste by defining / revamping / implementing process improvements in the areas of project delivery and resource management.

Introduced and drove the adoption of Lean Software Development practices and Agile best practices such as User Story Driven Development, Sprint/Time-boxed/Short iteration development, Continuous Integration and automated testing, evolutionary of Architecture and Design over many iterations.

Lead weekly project status meetings to identify and act on escalations, issues, risks, or concerns. Facilitated daily standup meetings, sprint planning, release planning, and sprint retrospectives. Designed processes for visibility of team status and issues to senior management. Prioritized and scheduled the execution of all 4 core features and sizable project deliverables.

Promoted a collaborative team environment that fosters creativity and innovation. Proactively identified and coordinated dependencies with external teams. Anticipated and aggressively removed obstacles that slow down / prevent team from delivering on iteration objectives. Championed continuous improvement, constant learning and helped team to increase productivity. Developed talents such that the team achieve their full potential. All of these doubled the iteration velocity and stabilized to optimal level. Xinify Technologies Inc, San Ramon, CA Jan 2010 – Dec 2010 Product Manager

Responsible for all phases of new product development – Market Research, interacted with Marketing teams to develop Marketing Requirements Document, Development of New product technical specifications for Engineering, managed the R&D of the product, development of engineering prototypes and manufacturing prototypes. The product is a software defined antenna for the SCADA market. Supervised project operations by developing procedures, planning and directing execution of the technical, programming, maintenance and administrative support effort and monitoring and reporting progress. Managed and controlled financial and administrative aspects of the task/project with respect to contract and task requirements. Proactively, identified Project risks, developed risk mitigation strategies, and tracked risk progress. Kaiser Permanente, Oakland, CA Aug 2008 – Dec 2009 Lead Project Manager, National Agreement Implementation, Business Infrastructure BIO Managed three IT projects of size $2M each and delivered them on-time and within budget to the satisfaction of business partners. One of the projects involved Business Intelligence, Reporting, data analysis – data identification, cleaning, transforming, loading and integration. Another project involved development of web portal for the use of Unit Based Teams formed in the medical clinics. Another project was managed fully in Agile Methodology.

Worked in PMO – Oversee a team of 8 FTE project managers. Significantly contributed to the adoption of Clarity PPM by formulating and executing (a) reports that are effective for Sr. Management visibility of program issues/progress and (b) value adding features for the PPM users of various organizations/divisions across Kaiser IT. Contributed to multi-year budgeting and planning. Was responsible for developing weekly project status reports, pulling from various systems, for all projects across the program and conducting weekly Program Alignment meetings to validate the details, before executives get a chance to see them on their own. Facilitated Program-wide, weekly issues & risks meeting with business stakeholders to maintain Program-wide issues and risks register. All of these were particularly helpful, when the program was in a budget crisis and we have been instructed to keep all our projects with in 5% of variance.

Project Key Learning Review – Championed the need of it, developed a process, conducted pilot reviews for completing projects adopting the process, worked with executives on fine tuning the process and rolled it out for adoption.

Lead the department on implementing compliance with Kaiser Business Records Retention policy. Analyzed the compliance needs, negotiated with stakeholders, developed Business process for implementation of continued compliance and implemented the process.

Developed and implemented departmental document archival strategy, so that all documents developed by anyone in the department would be archived in a central place and will be available to everyone in the department. Sridar Pootheri, PMP, PMI-ACP, CSM

Page 6 of 8

Developed consultants on-boarding and off-boarding process steps. On-boarding process helped consultants to become productive in a week. Off-boarding process instantly saved at least $5000 per consultant on software licensing.

Kaiser Permanente, Oakland, CA Jan 2008 – Aug 2008 Project Manager (Consultant), National Agreement Implementation, Business Infrastructure BIO

Lead Program Quality Management – Reviewed and coached Business Analysts on clarity and consistency improvements for critical documents such as Concept Document, Business Requirements Document, Logical Solution Design Document. This improved communication and better estimations of development efforts. In one case, the development team quoted 1/4th of the originally estimated hours, after Sridar’s intervention in improving the documents.

Lead the departmental end-to-end adoption of Quality tools – HP Quality Center, Borland CaliberRM, Borland StarTeam and Borland StarShare. Set up projects and user accounts for everyone in the department per individual/project needs. Provisioned and managed user access for everyone in the department and partners. Liaisoned with maintenance staff and trouble-shooted issues raised by all users. Developed Job Aids, Training materials and trained all users for effective use of the softwares. VISA Inc., San Mateo, CA May 2007 – Sep 2007

Project Manager (Consultant), Open Systems PMO, Inovant Managed a full life-cycle of Secured Data Warehousing Project for 2007, in compliance with Visa’s Project Management Methodology (PMM). This is a multi-year Information Security, Research & Development Project (Budget :- $3.5M) Governed by Visa’s Technology Oversight Committee. Project involved development of 5 short-term solutions including a Proof-of-Concept introducing new Software for Visa, to remediate few Security deficiencies of Visa’s Critical Business Intelligence, Data Processing Production Environment; and development of Threat Modeling and Conceptual Architecture for two core Data Processing Production Environments.

Developed Requirements & RFPs, put for competitive bidding, reviewed, and selected SoWs, brought in consultants from Price Waterhouse Coopers and Ab Initio Services, and managed their work to completion to meet the Project objectives.

Propagated the results and findings of consultants and facilitated key Stakeholder buy-ins for the introduction of new software to Visa Production Environment. Drove the project to meet its objectives by building relationships across disciplines, by Cross Functional Team Facilitation.

Developed a SoW for $2,231K and received approval for FY 2008 funding for the Project, following through Visa’s entire Project funding approval processes.

Effectively negotiated with 3rd party vendors and saved over $200K out of project budget, switching from fixed- price to time-and-material bid and completed without compromising any project time or quality of the deliverables.

In short, the second year of the project was performed in 5 months, rather than 12 months, bringing it up to speed from the requirements gathered in the first year and also securing funding for the third year. Managed Visainfo Canada Portal Project, in compliance with Visa’s PMM Methodology and delivered to Customer Satisfaction. This is a high visibility Software Development Project, with tight resource and budget constraints. Prepared and delivered presentations on scope, defects, features, issues, progress, and results of projects to division leadership and senior management to facilitate plan resets, requirements and customer negotiation. The solution involved IBM’s Web Content Management API and Web Sphere.

Managed three plan resets and delivered the project on-time meeting all customer requirements. Completed a full life-cycle of a GMBS Billing Project which involved development of 2 Standard Interface Files. Wells Fargo, San Francisco, CA Dec 2006 – Apr 2007 Technical Project Manager (Consultant), Wholesale Credit Workflow Systems

Managed full Project Software Life-Cycle Management of a portfolio of Credit Risk Rating web-based Software Development Projects in compliance with Enterprise Project Management Methodology of Wells Fargo. Produced Sridar Pootheri, PMP, PMI-ACP, CSM

Page 7 of 8

multiple software releases and facilitated customer acceptance of the solutions, working with teams spread over multiple time-zones.

Adopted Agile/Scrum principles and practices to drive Projects to success.

Fully responsible for Project Accounting, Forecasting and Budget management. Primarily responsible for delivering the projects on time, within budget and meeting the strategic business and technical requirements. Identified and scheduled project deliverables, milestones and tasks. AT & T Services, San Ramon, CA May 2006 – Dec 2006 Project/Program Manager (Consultant), Light Speed Project, Middleware Integration Services

Drove the Release Management – owned a complex release process in support of multiple software releases, for a Portfolio of 15 IT Projects. Activities include weekly build/sync scheduling and coordination; commit review responsibility, test initiation and result tracking, etc., Was driving the planning and management of day-to-day Release activities, including risk identification and mitigation. Hosted periodic Release Operations meetings, published minutes, and managed action items. Directed release operations staff in lower level release activities. Drove and owned the successful completion of commits and milestone reviews.

Supported and owned a portfolio of 10 related Java Middleware Components – each of which was involved in multiple Projects enabling the core billing operations and Business Intelligence of the company. Coordinated cross- functional component technical teams driving through the estimations, development, testing, deployment to various environments and release processes, by keeping track of Project status and issues.

Created structured processes and facilitated the integration and interoperability of middleware components belonging to two companies AT&T and Cingular, in their efforts to close their company merger process. NBC-Universal, Universal City, CA Jan 2006 – Apr 2006 Project Manager (Consultant), Corporate IT Systems PMO

Assisted in establishing Processes, Procedures and Templates in setting up a Project Mgmt Office for Corporate IT Systems Dept, in compliance with the process guidelines set by General Electric, their parent company. Developed multi-media Training material for Microsoft Project and delivered it to project managers.

Developed a manual process for Project Issues Reporting/Management and implemented it in MS Excel for a sizable ($40M), high-visibility Project. Diligently followed the process and updated it for weekly Status reporting to the Governance Committee. Enabled rolling out of automated reporting.

Collected Resource Requirements for a Portfolio of 80 off-shore Projects for the year 2006, performed Resource Leveling, Project Prioritization and developed a Resource Plan Roadmap for Executive decisions. Greater Bay Bancorp, Palo Alto, CA May 2005 – Oct 2005 Sr. Technical Project Manager (Consultant)

Managed the on-time release of 2005 year’s Enterprise wide Disaster Recovery Exercise (Enterprise Wide IT Infrastructure) Project. Established scope and roadmap of Disaster Recovery efforts for next 5 years.

Defined the technical goals, identified system dependencies, negotiated priorities, gained cooperation of a challenged cross functional team, tracked progress in meetings, managed risks, escalated issues appropriately and met the critical success factors to meet the compliance expectations.

Managed infrastructure and license procurements updated and maintained Project documents and other critical technical artifacts that were compliance requirements.

Led diverse, cross-functional teams in the fulfillment of corporate productivity, quality and compliance objectives. Active Tools Inc., Emeryville, CA Nov 2001 – Mar 2005 Project Manager

Helped to find the right balance between iterative (Agile / Scrum) development and traditional software project management processes that were appropriate to the company’s culture and to the types of projects being executed.

Although started as a technical lead, in just two months earned the trust of the Teams (20 members) and became a Single point of contact, in terms of customer relations, for a major product line of the company – development of iBasel Financial Risk Management Software. Responsible for scope, budget and time of 5 product releases, end to Sridar Pootheri, PMP, PMI-ACP

Contact this candidate