Scrum Master Project Management

Rajani Gadam LinkedIn

******.***@*****.*** +1-469-***-****

SUMMARY

Dedicated Certified SAFe Scrum Master and Pega Developer with a proven track record of over 10 years in Agile methodologies and cross-functional team leadership. A change enabler and agile transformation leader, skilled in empowering Scrum teams and driving organizational agility. Expert in Agile frameworks including Scrum, Kanban, and Lean principles. Adept at conflict resolution and impediment removal, fostering a culture of collaboration, innovation, and self-organization. Strong advocate for continuous learning, ensuring strict adherence to the empirical process pillars of transparency, inspection, and adaptation.

SKILLS

Servant Leadership

Incident Management

Metrics and Data Analysis

Project Management

Coaching and Mentoring

Conflict Resolution

Safe Agile Framework (SAFe)

CI/CD Improvement

DevOps Culture

Technical Knowledge

Stakeholder Management

Empathy and Emotional Intelligence

CORE COMPETENCIES

Methodologies: Waterfall, Agile, Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, ScrumBan, LeSS, Scrum@Scale

Applications: PEGA BPM, SalesForce.com (SFDC), SAP, Fiori, Track Wise

Change Management Tools: Rally, JIRA, JIRA Align, ServiceNow, Trello, ADO, VersionOne

Business Modeling Tools: Confluence, SharePoint, Rational Rose, Microsoft Visio

RDBMS & Project Management: Oracle, MySQL, Microsoft Project, Rally, ALM

Cloud: Azure, AWS, GCP, EC2, Jenkin’s, GitHub, Bitbucket, Maven, CI/CD

User Interface design Tools: MS Visio, Balsamiq, Figma, InVision, Lucid chart

Requirements Management Tools: Jira, HP ALM, Confluence, SharePoint

CORE COMPETENCIES

Facilitated Successful Agile Transformations: Led a cross-functional team through a seamless transition from traditional project management to Agile methodologies, resulting in improved collaboration, faster delivery, and a 20% reduction in project lead times.

Enhanced Team Productivity: Implemented Agile best practices, resulting in a 15% increase in team velocity over three consecutive sprints, leading to consistently on-time project deliveries.

Resolved Critical Impediments: Skillfully resolved a major bottleneck that had been halting progress for several sprints, ensuring the timely completion of a critical project milestone, and preventing a potential project delay.

Promoted Continuous Improvement: Introduced and facilitated retrospective meetings, resulting in the implementation of over 30 process improvements, leading to a 25% reduction in defects and an enhanced focus on delivering value.

Boosted Stakeholder Satisfaction: Collaborated closely with product owners and stakeholders to prioritize and deliver high-value features, resulting in a 15% increase in Net Promoter Score (NPS) over two quarters

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Verizon – Dallas, TX May ’23 - Present

Scrum Master/Coach

Responsibilities:

Helped the Scrum Team to focus on creating high-value Increments that met the Definition of Done

Identified opportunities to improve team-level Agile performance, focused teams on customer value, quality, and continuous improvement activities. Removed team-level impediments and resolved conflicts.

Participated and lead customer-facing communication, reporting on sprint progress, burn down, velocity, and story points.

Lead and build relationships to encourage collaboration, transparency, and innovation across a highly cross-functional Agile software development team supporting CI/CD.

Increased the overall Agile maturity for teams and supported higher complexity work towards successful outcomes.

Encouraged and promoted a culture of continuous improvement by facilitating retrospectives and providing feedback to teams and individuals.

Supported E-bridge team to manage & remove dependencies and optimize the flow.

Collaborated with other Agile Coaches to ensure consistency and alignment of agile practices across teams and departments.

Worked with management and team to clarify needs and planned delivery of major product changes, future versions, and new products.

Coach, mentor, and facilitate the team members’ adoption of an Agile mindset, including ownership, self-management and empowerment.

Manage and facilitate the scrum team's daily work including execution of Sprint Ceremonies (e.g., Sprint Planning, Daily Stand-up, Sprint Review and Retrospective)

Capturing and tracking sprint metrics (e.g., team velocity), and being accountable for the continuous improvement of the scrum team

Create a collaborative environment which allows the team and stakeholders to interact closely.

Identifying and removing impediments to allow the team to focus on development.

Act as a Coach/Mentor to other teams and more junior Scrum Masters in the same portfolio.

Help craft and maintain portfolio level reporting, leading a collaboration of other Scrum master’s and Project Managers.

Ensures that the project follows standardization according to the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) definitions and other standards.

Effectively managing interactions with stakeholders at all levels, from Service Desk agents to Senior Management executives.

Providing incident executive summaries to leadership team, conducting Major Incident Reviews, and document conclusions.

Proactively identifying problem causes and have taken ownership of root cause analysis and resolution.

Hands on experience in Ageing analysis, Problem Management.

Refined stakeholder process and toolset requirements and support our toolset developers to improve.

Driving a positive behavior and collaboration culture within teams, by training, inspiring and motivating our stakeholders

Environment: JIRA, Confluence, Java Full Stack, Web Service, Microservice, GitHub, Jenkin’s

Valaris, Houston, TX Jun ’20 – Apr ‘23

Scrum Master/Coach

Responsibilities:

Working closely with the teams through agile events coaching on performing the activities, playing the roles and generating artifacts based on SAFe and Agile best practices

Coached the teams to be self-organizing and ensured the adherence of all the Scrum concepts and processes

Successfully migrated projects from Waterfall to Agile-Scrum and ensure team adopt agile way of working

Supported projects by implementing Agile Life Cycle Management Tool – “JIRA” to manage backlog and helped to generate and analyze business metrics to be reported

Organized and facilitated Sprint planning, daily stand-ups, reviews, retrospectives, sprint/release planning, demos and other Scrum-related meetings

Track and communicate team velocity and sprint/release progress with, and to all affected teams and management

Frequent, proactive collaboration with executive leadership to provide project milestone status, risk analysis and mitigation, new discoveries that may impact strategic direction

Involved in brainstorming sessions, analyzing the business processes, requirement gathering, Mapping the As-Is process and designing To-Be Processes

Analyzed the Product Backlog along with PO, performed ambiguity reviews and communicated the inconsistencies to the Configuration Team

Work closely with other scrum teams to facilitate planning and execution of programs

Ensured that the User Stories meet the INVEST principal (Independent, Negotiable, valuable, Estimable, Small, Testable)

Created and maintained Sprint Burn-down Chart, Sprint Burn-up Chart and Product Burn-Down Chart to keep the track of the team's progress and the team's velocity for better estimation of the sprint life cycle

Communicated the status of the Product Backlog Item to product Owner and external stakeholders on a regular basis

Effectively involved in conducting Planning poker technique for estimating the User stories

Helped the Product Owner to prioritize the Product backlog items (PBI's) for developing Sprint tasks by taking suggestions from the cross-functional development team using Kano model

Constantly connected with other scrum masters to share and learn experience to improve the velocity of team

Helped the team stay focused by removing impediments, protecting them from distractions and keeping team meetings lean and efficient

Had regular meetings with offshore team to understand progress, challenges and remove blockers for the team. Provide guidance and direction to offshore and onsite team

Created and maintained information tools: sprint board, burn-down charts, burn-up charts, progress dashboards, etc.

Used JIRA for drafting the User Stories and managing the requirements and defects track

Estimating backlog using T-shirt mechanism.

Implementing Acceptance test based driven development (ATDD) development.

Coordinating with TDM, BA for further backlog updates for different scrums.

Discussion with all the stakeholders on architecture and Product backlog

Environment: MS Office, JIRA, Team Foundation Server (TFS), Salesforce.com (SFDC), .Net, SoapUI, TeamSite (CMS), Web Services, Doors, and MS Project

Church Mutual - Wisconsin Apr ’19 – May ‘20

Scrum Master

Responsibilities:

Responsible for the role of Project Manager and Scrum master for the Scrum teams in the project

Lead Sprint planning, Sprint Reviews and Scrum of Scrums (SoS) for all the teams in the domain

Coached the teams to be self-organizing and ensured the adherence of all the Scrum concepts and processes

Developed automated metrics for Agile/Scrum for Executive Leadership team

Agile Coaching - Release & Iteration Planning and Tracking. Conducted training on scrum, facilitated the daily standup, sprint review and sprint retrospective meeting.

Implement Scaled Agile principles (SAFe) for integration projects with dependencies.

Elicited requirements with business owner and converted business requirement into Use Cases.

Conducted JAD sessions, interviews, and surveys to collect the requirements

Scrum Master for developing a web-based application to enable internal and external clients to configure, input, process, and generate tax forms from one central place.

Scrum Master for Organization Chart team, to generate charts depicting the organization structure of clients, showing the relationship among Partnerships, Partners, Investments, and Investors at National and International level.

In addition to typical Scrum ceremonies, responsible for: Roadmap planning, Release planning, Product Backlog Refinement, Team Building and Resource planning.

Kept Product Owners and the Stakeholders updated on status of the project.

Look out for improvement opportunities to increase team velocity.

Served as Agile Coach, Scrum Trainer and initially as Scrum Master to facilitate organizational transformation and the adoption of Agile principles that improved software quality, productivity and predictability of release schedules; contributed to the successful release.

Maintained process documentation and ensured the development teams are practicing the core agile principles of collaboration, prioritization, team accountability, and visibility.

Assisted Product Owner as needed with backlog maintenance, internal and external communication, improving transparency, and disseminating information

Environment: SCRUM - Agile methodologies, Waterfall, User Experience Design (UXD), Personas, MS Office (Excel, Visio, Project), TeamCenter PLM, HP ALM

Rowan Companies – Houston, TX Jun ‘17 – Mar ‘19

Pega Developer

Responsibilities:

Application Development.

Communicating with clients for requirement clarification.

Attending daily stand up meetings

Resolving issues/defects raised by the testing team.

Participate in Sprint Planning.

Production Support.

Environments: Pega PRPC 7.3x, Tomcat, Oracle DB, SQL Server, JIRA

Edulinked – Hyderabad, IN Aug ‘14 – May ‘17

Pega Developer

Responsibilities:

Requirement gathering and analysis

Conducted Joint Application Development (JAD) sessions with business users and subject

matter experts

Created use cases for the requirement using Actors.

Architecting business solution.

Preparation and maintenance of requirement documents, BRDs, Use Cases and Business

Scenarios

Maintaining use cases through SharePoint

Created wireframes for the business to visualize user interface.

Conducted requirements walk-through sessions with IT and QA teams for requirements

sign-off.

Conducted review sessions with all the stake holders and Business owner to ensure BRD is

approved and signed off.

CR Management – CRs to address the pain areas

Review of test scenarios and test cases

Evaluating QA defects.

Managing User acceptance testing.

EDUCATION:

Master’s in information technology, University of Madras, India

Bachelor of Computer Applications from Jawaharlal Nehru Technical University, India.

CERTIFICATIONS:

SAFe Scrum Master (SSM) – 6.0

Pega Certified Senior System Architect (CSSA)

Pega Certified System Architect (CSA)

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