Scrum Master Project Manager

Preethi Ravichandran

Contact: 201-***-****

E-Mail: **********@*****.***

Location: Raleigh NC

PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY:

•Collaborative Agile Release Train Engineer and Scrum Master with 9 years of experience in implementing Agile Frameworks like Scrum, SAFe, LEAN, Kanban methodology practices.

•Managed multiple Scrum Teams at a time and ensuring that team's success and progress are highly visible to Product Owner and Stakeholders.

•Mentored teams through a complete transitioning from SDLC to Agile Scrum. Helped define processes and tools best suited. Focused on customer needs through adherence to Agile Scrum best practices.

•Working closely with Product Owners on creating and grooming the product backlog.

•Understanding, identifying, resolving and removing impediments and bottlenecks.

•Working with Product Manager and Release Train Conductor/Engineer on release planning and schedule.

•Facilitation of Sprint and Release Planning, Daily Stand up, Sprint Review, Demo and Retrospective.

•Worked closely with Product Manager to support strategic planning, goal setting, and accountability, enhance decision-making, and improve customer service.

•Well-demonstrated ability to develop and implement highly successful short and long term strategic plans, routinely completing projects on time & within the budget.

•Excel in liaising between business and technical areas to achieve on-time, on-budget and on-spec project completions. Able to merge customer and user needs with business requirements and logistical considerations to meet project deliverables.

•Exceptional focus, follow through and co-ordination skills. Proven ability to develop and manage project schedule.

•Good knowledge in Quality and Risk management with experience in the tools and techniques used for them. Expertise in providing problem resolution.

•Managed changing stakeholder’s requirements across various modules effectively.

ACADEMIC QUALIFICATIONS:

MBA, in Operations and Business Management from Rutgers Business School, NJ

Bachelor’s Degree in Commerce from Stella Maris College, Chennai India

SAFe 4.0 –Release Train Engineer

Certified Scrum Master (Scrum Alliance)

Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM) from Project Management Institute

SAFe Agilist 4.0 - Scaled Agile Framework

PMI ACP – Agile certified practitioner from Project Management Institute

CSP – Certified Scrum master Professional

TECHNICAL SKILLS:

Scrum Tools

CA Agile Central (formerly Rally), Azure DevOps, JIRA

Project Management Tools

CA Clarity, MS Project

Applications

MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint, MS Outlook, SharePoint, VISIO

EXPERIENCE

Role: Release Train Engineer

Associate Manager, Prudential Financial, NJ

Mar 2020 to July 2024

Presented information professionally to large audiences and executives

Facilitated program events, including PI Planning, ART Retrospectives, Scrum of Scrums

Acted as a liaison for the Release Management functions

Facilitated processes and program execution, escalates impediments, manages risk, captures recurring metrics, drives program-level continuous improvement

Established the annual calendars for sprints and PIs

Ensured agile practices are current, coached and practiced across the ART

Ensured Client Reviews/Demos are being held during solution construction

Contributed to Value Stream Status report by PI/Release for Executive Management and Release Management

Coordinated cross ART dependencies

Reviewed policy creation, policy requirements, and use cases to determine the relevant data requirements for executing the use cases.

Involved in defect steering group meetings to carefully assess the impact of critical and high priority defects.

Acted as Scrum Master for Product teams with a focus on guiding the teams towards improving the way they work.

Assisted team to remove impediments by having an understanding the control and release processes

Assisted with prioritization and resolution of software defects

Coached Product Owners in creation and maintenance of Product Backlog, team members on Agile principles and providing general guidance on the methodology

Organized and facilitated project planning, daily stand-up meetings, reviews, retrospectives, sprint, release planning, demos, and other Scrum-related meetings

Tracked and effectively communicated team velocity and sprint/release progress to all affected teams and management

Closely partnered with the Product Manager & IT Delivery Owner to guide the agile release train

Successfully hosted their first PI Planning and continued to host more

Helped the train streamline their integration testing planning and implementation

Facilitate alignment dependencies between the program team and third parties, release managers, or between the team and other Scrum Teams

Actively contributing to the company’s Agile Community through participation in the internal Agile Community of Practice and Scrum Master Forums

Accomplishments

Significantly advanced the maturity of this program, leading to: Acceptance level increased by 40%, Duplication of work reduced by 90%, Response time got reduced from 36 to 12 hrs, Resource Utilization up by 10%, 100% quality at time of deployment with 55% of defects identified, fixed, retested and closed in less than 24 hours.

Maintained metrics that provide visibility to stakeholders on program-level plans, progress and quality;

Achieved 100% of the planned features complete in just first program increment. Some teams on the trains have achieved more 105% of the Business Value.

Role: Scrum Master

Associate, Prudential Financial, NJ

Jan 2016 to Mar 2020

SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) Agilest, applies in-depth knowledge of SAFe in PI Planning and PI Demos at the project level and actively participates in the agile activities like Sprint Planning, Sprint Demos, Inspect and Adapt, Retrospect’s etc.

Helped the team embrace best agile practices across teams.

Worked with stake holders and product owners to prioritize the requirements for sprint.

Facilitated addition or removal of stories based on burn-down charts with in the current sprint as agreed with Product Owner.

Motivated the team to come up with quality shippable product and meet the product goals.

Managed offshore teams in different geographical places and completed International migration projects.

Ensured task completion to specification, on time.

Representing the team to report overall project status and upcoming risks and suggest solutions about it.

Provided visibility to team impediments/risks and helps eliminate them.

As Scrum Master proactively identified and removed blockers, facilitate frequent retrospectives, sharing metrics to identify and implement improvements.

Facilitated daily stand-ups, Sprint Look Ahead, Sprint Planning, and Sprint Retrospectives. Tracked and managed Product backlogs, burn down, burn up metrics, velocity, and Task/ story breakdown.

Enabled improvement in team delivery commitments and capacity planning for sprints by identifying & tracking hidden tasks that increased customer satisfaction.

Facilitated Release Planning, Sprint Planning, Backlog Grooming, and Retrospective meetings

Facilitated Agile adoption Retrospective for the organization with the leadership and guided teams with outcome resulting in enhanced performance.

Removed obstacle for the team by escalating an issue to leadership resulting in early delivery of customer issue solution. Customer provided positive feedback.

Improved team velocity by incorporating capacity planning into sprint planning sessions.

Implemented Issues Tracking in Version One to effectively track impediments against user stories.

Removed team impediments on a daily basis to allow the team to deliver the sprint goals and deliverables.

Collaborated with members of the Product, Business and Engineering Teams to develop and maintain Product Backlogs

Coached and mentored agile team members and provides constructive performance feedback.

Encouraged the team for self-organization to boost the efficiency and coordination.

Review and update metrics reporting processes and templates for defects and test cases

Applies in-depth knowledge of client’s applications to analyse and implement changes, predicting and evaluating basic risks and reducing negative effects from these changes.

Perform business and technical requirement elicitation using different elicitation techniques (brain storming, document analysis, interface analysis, etc.), processing the data and converting it to information that can be consumed by the end user.

Role: Scrum Master

Iflowsoft LLC

Jul 2014 to Dec 2015

• As a part of the Agile Transformation Team, worked with various teams that were transforming from Waterfall methodology to Agile.

• Trained the product owners on their daily roles and responsibilities, scrum practices and trained them to use CA Agile Central tool. Also, trained and helped them write User Stories.

• Ensured the development teams are practicing core agile principles

• Successfully trained 3 Project Managers to perform Scrum Master Role effectively as a part of the Journeyman program.

Facilitated PI Planning, Sprint Planning, Product Backlog grooming and Retrospective meetings

Removed team impediments on a daily basis to allow the team to deliver sprint goals and deliverables

Mentor the team toward the self-organized state

Facilitate alignment dependencies between the program team and third parties, release managers, or between the team and other Scrum Teams

Participated in scrum of scrums and shared the dependencies, best practices and lessons learned

Coordinated with the product team and PMO on matters on sprint team risk or roadblocks and offer mitigation plan to address those issues

Performed Project Manager duties as the Project Manager’s back-up

Role: Project Manager in Treasury

World Bank, Chennai India

May 2012 to June 2014

• Facilitated the daily scrum meetings, sprint planning, sprint review, and sprint retrospective.

• Established effective communication for the program with consistency across development and business management. Presentations, recommendations and updates provided regularly to the Director office.

• Provide visibility to team impediments/risks and helps eliminate them

• Coached and mentored agile team members and provided constructive performance feedback

• Trained and coached a development team of 6-8 and management team of 12 to utilize Agile Methodology with Scrum

• Encouraged the team for self-organization to boost the efficiency and coordination

• Working with stakeholders / product owners to prioritize the requirements for sprint.

• Encouraged the team to come up with reusable elements and use the best practices.

• Helped the product owners to come up with set of stories for better understanding for estimate and development.

• Motivated the team to come up with quality shippable product and meet the product goals.

• Tracked and reported status and other metrics against goals on an ongoing basis

Role: Project Manager Assistant

Goldman Sachs, Bangalore India

May 2010 – May 2012

Worked with project team to implement Automating Synthetic Futures Product.

Developed strategy for upgrade of Synthetic futures and expanding use of existing accounting systems to account the new product throughout entire Investment lifecycle.

Facilitated discussion and conflict resolution

Provided direction to project activities to ensure successful implementation and support

Promoted continuous improvement and help teams to increase productivity

Assisted and supporting the project manager in daily duties

Ensured relevant management information is captured and analyzed

Acted as administrative support to senior project managers

Involved in coordinating projects from inception to completion

Responsible for handling project finances

Identify, analyze, prioritize, mitigate and communicate project risk

Communicate with project manager to report on project status

Leading and organizing the team

Keeping close contact with key project members and decision makers

Involved in interpreting performance data and translate this into practical improvements

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