VEENA PAI

Email:adblc9@r.postjobfree.com

Contact: +1-862-***-****

LinkedIn :https://www.linkedin.com/in/veena-pai-56983146/ SUMMARY

Seasoned IT Management Professional with 14 plus years spanning program, project, and PMO, product and team management in in Banking & Financial Service, Retail Banking, Wealth Management & Travel-Hospitability domain & Heathcare Domain.

Areas of Expertise:Strategic Planning and Execution, User Experience Improvements, Product Development and Launch, Collaboration and Cross-Functional Matrix Management & Devops Release Management.

Expert at driving the adoption and enforcement of Agile rules, removing impediments and fostering self-management. Part of Scrum Leaders in aligning Portfolio Level Epics and Release backlogs and Sprint backlogs and collaborating to achieve delivery excellence.

Accomplished servant-leader -Certified Scrum Master (CSM®) capable of delivering large-scale software development projects on time and on budget by effectively collaborating, facilitating, leading and coaching multiple Scrum teams.

A Certified Project Manager (PMP) with Excellent knowledge & working experience in Waterfall SDLC, Agile/Scrum frameworks, Test Driven Development [TDD], and End user training and presentation.

Proficient in conducting JAD Sessions with Stakeholders, End Users, Subject Matter Experts (SME), Software Developers & QA Teams for Requirement gathering and elicitations.

Embraces the Agile Mindset, advocates and champions it across the IT organization by supporting the adoption of agile various frameworks (i.e. SCRUM, SCRUM-BAN, Kanban). Experience working as a service delivery Manager for Kanban projects

Partner with Technology Business Management, Solutions Delivery, Quality Assurance, Resource Managers and associate vendors and cross-enterprise release participants to compile, confirm and track release contributor milestones.

Capable of bringing overwhelming enthusiasm and awareness to projects, applying expert judgment to the removal of impediments, keeping teams focused and delivering success in rapidly evolving and dynamic environments.

Consistently recognized with outstanding feedback in annual performance appraisals. Recently earned the organization's highest ranking, a rating reserved for the top 5% of all employees. Responsible for 360 degrees’ reviews of 15 member teams both reporting horizontally and vertically.

Participated in training and management meetings to ensure corporate standards were met by all employees. Annual Appraisal reviews include working with employees on career development, setting educational goals, compensation planning, creating performance improvement plans, and holding monthly one on one meetings with each employee.

Co-facilitated annual succession planning assignments to revitalize review sessions with the management.

Working as an IT management consultant from 2011 (9 plus years). Prior experience from 2005 -2010 (5 years) is in various roles like business analysis, technical lead, software developer. Certifications: PMP,CSM, ITIL, MCPD, OCA, Safe Agilest 4.5, AWS cloud Practitioner. Personal Skills: Agility, Reliable, Driven, Focused, Multi-Tasking Technical Skillset:

● SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework); DevOps practices (builds, continuous integration and deployment, test automation, etc.)

● Experience with SNOW- SERVICE NOW workflow projects, RPA – UI Path and AWS web projects.

● Familiarity and experience of Front End User Experience and development technologies such as HTML/HTML5, CSS/CSS3 and JavaScript & Python.

● Experience, familiarity and/or understanding desktop application and server development with C#/.NET

● RDBMS/DBMS: MS-SQL Server, Oracle, PL/SQL

● Version Control: Visual SourceSafe (VSS), SVN, GIT.

● IDE & BI Tools: SQL Server BI Development Studio, MS Visual Studio, TOAD for Oracle & Crystal report- basic.

● Expertise in the application of the tools and techniques of the project management discipline. (MS Project, VISIO, & Excel).

● Well versed in IBM Datastage 7.x, 8.x, 9.x proficiently working with integrating ETL with existing applications.

● Project & Source Code Management: Atlassian Jira & Atlassian FishEye, Rally/ Agile central, TCS Jile EXPERIENCE

Blink Health – New York

(Through Tavant- Blink Health)

11/19- present

Senior Agile PM & Business Analyst

● Manage and appropriately escalates: delivery impediments, risks, issues, and changes associated with the product development initiatives

● Liaising between developers and project stakeholders;fostering quality communication between engineering disciplines

● Analysis, planning, developing requirements documents, building functional models, developing procedures, developing functional architectures, and other related management and technical duties

● Assign and monitor the work of technical personnel, ensuring that project steps are in alignment with business objectives, on-time and within budget.

● Defines & Maintain project scope, deliverables, roles and responsibilities, program estimates, timelines, project plans, status reports in collaboration with stakeholders and business partners.

● Establish plans, and executes major milestone reviews and decision gates to complete the program and project life cycle.

● Exercise broadly delegated authority for planning, directing, coordinating, administering, and executing many routine and complex projects/programs.

● Identify, clarify and communicate project vision, goals and objectives and how these tie into, support or impedes organizational strategic objectives .

● Create a method of change management including ownership of a documentation, communication plans, process training, etc.

● Gathering and updating project materials, completing budgeting, forecasting, project documentation, business flows, and lessons learned documents

● Scheduling and allocating work, providing advice and guidance, and resolving problems to meet technical performance and financial objectives

● Coordinate all Scrum Ceremonies including Sprint Planning, Daily Standups, Sprint retrospectives, Sprint Demos, Story Grooming, and Release Planning

● Coaching and mentoring other ScrumMasters on our program team. Partnering to ensure that our ways of working are consistent across teams

● Assist in defining and deploying new product development processes and in facilitating the continuous improvement of existing processes

● Experience in Pharma/Healthcare Commercial Domain Understanding of key entities like prescribers, patients, Healthcare organizations.

● Understanding of Pharmacy working with independent pharmacies, chains as well as associations( eg PSAO)

● End to End understanding of Claim authorizations( Candle, Focus Scripts,Switch ),c reversals, denials and approval and its user action flows from the pharmacies- store/digital platforms. & Revenue sharing strategies for Pharmacies- central pay/non central pay.

● Experience working with core technology teams with CI- CD pipeline and automatic build integrations like Jenkins, AWS Redshift, Looker Reports, Data visualization Products - Power BI,Tableau- basics & SQL queries to extract and analyze data

● Understanding of APIs, JSON and web applications as from web development background.

● Deep understanding in a cloud (AWS) or web-based infrastructure technical environment & AWS Platform- S3,VPC, Cloudwatch & AWS analytical services (e. g., Redshift, Data Pipeline, EMR, Machine Learning, Kinesis)

NYK Line – Secaucus, NJ

(Through TCS)

06/17-10/19

Agile Project & Scrum master & Business Analyst

This assignment required handing multiple projects with different roles. So depending on which Project I an working on I keep changing my hats to suit the role that am assigned.

● Business Systems – ONE Program: Japanese shippers K Line, MOL, and NYK to merge as ONE with the majority of applications being transitioned with agility

● Work closely with senior management to develop and refine recommended solutions to address issues and capture opportunities

● Partner with stakeholders to create and launch tactical implementation plans

● Takes ownership for identifying dependencies, following up and resolving open questions and issues, and organizing and driving contributors to resolution

● Able to articulate overall technology solution, components, flow and the Work Stream areas of responsibility and delivery

● Identifies work planning gaps, open questions, risks, issues and drives definition and ownership for actions

● Advise on the development of a communications strategy and communications matrix for transactions.

● Develop and execute post-signing and post close integration kick-off meetings.

● Lead the development of detailed integration plans and milestones for development and maintenance of applications using SNOW- Service Now, UIPath ( RPA) and AWS web projects for NYK .

● Making sure that work items flow through the Kanban System

● Facilitate continuous improvement initiatives and process reviews

● Facilitate Kanban meetings or the 7 Kanban cadences if the team adheres to it

● Ensure that processes are working towards delivering customer satisfaction

● Lead synergy identification and tracking activities, facilitate working sessions to identify and quantify cost and savings opportunities.

● Prepare for regular integration execution update meetings (e.g., M&A Steering Committee).

● Identify and lead acquisition integration process improvement opportunities.

● Facilitate scrum ceremonies (grooming, sprint planning, retrospectives, daily stand-ups, etc.)

● Measure project performance using appropriate tools and techniques

● Create and maintain project collaboration spaces and repositories (Jira/Confluence)

● Supporting and educating the Product Owner, especially on grooming and maintaining the product backlog.

● Assessing the Maturity of the team and organization and coaching the team to higher levels of maturity, at a pace that is sustainable and comfortable for the team and organization.

● Assisting with internal and external communication, improving transparency, and radiating information. TATA Americas – Mumbai, India/Edison, NJ

(Through TCS) 10/15-12/16

Agile Coach & Project Manager

● Corporate Sales Enablement - Reimagine and Smart Sales Program – is a program to help the sales users and marketing teams achieve their targets with the help of innovative apps/products. The key stakeholders were VP Sales and Marketing and Country Heads across the globe.

● Successfully migrated more than 25 projects from Waterfall to Scrum within 6 months.

● Knowledge of other approaches in the Agile space: Kanban, Lean, etc.

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

● Taught the team to create clear and concise epics/stories

● Instructed and modeled core Agile principles of collaboration, prioritization, team accountability and visibility; ensured consistent application of scrum methodologies across the enterprise

● Worked with the engineering managers to identify cross-team dependencies and manage inter-team tasks

● Evangelized the benefits of Scrum to ensure its smooth adoption

● Assisted team with making appropriate commitments through story selection, sizing and task definition and participated proactively in developing and maintaining team standards, tools and best practices reducing development time by 35%.

● Define the product roadmap based on the strategy and vision; manage prioritization and trade-offs among customer experience, site performance and operational support load

● Facilitate incremental delivery and educate the team and stakeholders on the value of metrics by analyzing backlog tracking, burndown metrics, velocity, and task definition.

● Served as customer liaison, ensuring all customer issues were quickly resolved to increase customer satisfaction.

● Radiated information and ensured the team's progress and successes are highly visible to all stakeholders, including the team itself.

● Supported the Product Owners sitting offshore. Assisted the Product Owner with various activities including communicating updates and impediments as well as assisting with backlog and release plan maintenance.

● Facilitated creativity and empowerment for the Cross functional development team.

● Improved the team's engineering practices and tools as required. Fully facilitated productivity, and make sure teams have the tools and know-how they need

HDFC Bank – Mumbai, India

(Through TCS) 05/15-10/15

Product /Project Manager

Risk Intelligence and Control unit (RICS)- HDFC Bank central system for its Risk Intelligence and Control unit

(RIC) and automate the various processes followed by the RIC unit. New application is expected to support Pre-Disbursement activities on loans / vendors, Post-Disbursement activities on loans / vendors and other activities related to audit, compliance and legal complaints from RIC perspective.

● Work with Technology, Operations and other Stakeholders to determine process improvements opportunities, Requirement Elicitation and Management. Map current business processes and effectively analyze these processes to re- engineer and improve them.

● To represent their respective operational areas in scoping, executing, validating, testing and signing off the implementation of the modules

● Conducting Demos and walkthroughs with Product Owners during the sprint to get early feedback & seek acceptance.

Avis Budget – Zipcar – Parsippany, NJ/Mumbai, India

(Through TCS) 05/14-05/15

Project Manager & Scrum Master

● Internalization - Zipcar merger with Avis Group triggered business expansions across various othe5 15 countries like China, Turkey, France, etc. Localization of the existing reservation websites and payment systems in open systems technology was the main business requirement.

● Acted as the Execution lead closely partnering with the Product Management, Development, Software Quality Assurance and other functions to deliver high quality software releases

● Establish release cadence and lead, drive and execute release level ceremonies (e.g. Release Planning and kick-offs, Release monitoring through scrum of scrums, Release delivery and closure, Release retrospective, etc.)

● Supported product owners with requirements gathering, feature and story grooming

● Improved backlog management and release planning rigor; develop realistic and achievable release plans

● Directly lead one team as its scrum master driving the Scrum of Scrums and Retro of Retros meetings.

● Served as the primary escalation focal point for impediment removal for the Scrum Masters and scrum teams.

● To make sure that work items flow & facilitate change and continuous improvement activities

● Tracked and reported quality metrics including: burndown, velocity, ROI, etc. on business and technology changes

● Manage and continually enhance the SDLC process, including change management

● Owned the project management tool set (e.g. JIRA, Confluence, etc.)- requirements of the project in JIRA/Fisheye/Requirement Traceability Matrix

● Knowledge and/or experience with widely successful Agile techniques: User Stories, ATDD, TDD, Continuous Integration, Continuous Testing, Pairing, Automated Testing, Agile Games Bank of America – Pennington, NJ( 1 year Onsite), Mumbai,India(2 years) 03/11-04/14

(Through TCS)

Manager/Scrum Master

● Investment Proposal (I-Prop): A Wealth management advisory tool hosted on wealth management trading platform( with single sign on) enables Financial advisors(FA) to propose specific investments across a variety of products that are aligned with asset allocation recommendations that FA develop with clients and prospects for their portfolios. Investment Proposal supports efforts in the third step of the Wealth

● Management Process – Implement Solutions. - Data flows in to this application through different vendors

(Thompson- Reuters, Blackrock, Lipper, Merrill Managed Products) coming in at different timings.

● Enact change and continuous improvement increasing the productivity of Scrum teams by 25% and the quality of deliverables.

● Empowered teams to self-organize and grow cross-functionality

● Protect team from over-commitment, manage backlog, prioritize resolution of defects/bugs as evidenced by the on-time delivery of major initiatives

● Met goal of addressing and resolving issues within 24 hours

● Regularly checking the Kanban board and making sure that no work item has been blocked for too long

● Manage the lifecycle of code development, from ideation to sprints to deployment

● Coordinate and manage code releases and shared APIs with other IT groups

● Communicate with other management, engineers, product managers and support.

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

● To interface with 3rdparty suppliers, involving agreement, planning, timelines and quality of deliverables.

● Adhere to relevant escalation processes to escalate resource issues, delayed project Phases, missed deadlines and other planning issues

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

● Co-ordination with Offshore team to ensure that the daily production issues/Qc’s mapped in HP Quality center is resolved before the SLA deadlines.

● Working with Product owner On Artifacts Such as Product Backlog, Spring Backlog, Sprint Burndown, and Release Burndown.

● Facilitating Scrum of Scrum for offshore Scrum teams in US states and India. Merrill Lynch Mumbai, India (Through TCS) 11/08-02/11 Project Lead

● Asset Transfer System (ATS) ONLINE: helped in serving the clients of Merrill to transfer the assets in and out of Merrill which is monitored by the FA or CA and deliver a robust technology platform to extend capabilities, accelerate time to market and improve efficiencies. ATS Online is a single entry point system for all the assets moving in and out of Merrill Lynch. It is used to track entire process of transfer; to deliver, receive or reclaim assets; quick search through quick discovery modules; allows administrators to modify application specific data using Admin module of the application.

● Involved in coding (writing the business logic and handling middle tier) using C#. Net, XML Web services

& JavaScript & HTML-CSS changes

● Used ASP.NET AJAX as well as classic AJAX to implement the rich client functionality, thereby achieving performance enhanced application and Client side validation is done using JavaScript /J-Query.

● Implementation of code to take XML /dataset using XSLT/XPATH/XSLFO and format into a well design PDF using Active PDF and Ecrion Report Designer.

● Development of Business Objects/Routines and Data access objects in C# (ADO.NET)

● Create new stored procedures and modify existing stored procedures to support changes to application features.

● Developed classes for authentication and input validation and Creating and using Typed Datasets. McKinsey, Mumbai,India (Through TCS) 04/08-11/08

Senior Developer

● P360 "benchmarking-to-implementation" Tool helps enhance the operational performance of companies that operate in a global delivery environment in IT/BPO/R&D. lt identifies apparent or concealed performance gaps, to discover the root causes and outline potential ways to strengthen operating practice. The methodology's foundation is a proprietary database that has information from over 40 companies, -100 projects, and -250 processes.

● Use of PIA Interop assemblies to make a POC framework for Excel and PowerPoint automation.

● Creation of Custom components for data access & heavy use of XML, JavaScript.

● Developed screens using .NET Controls (User Controls/Custom Controls & TSQL. GE- Mumbai,India (Through TCS) 06/06-04/08

Developer

● HealthCare Financial Services deals with leasing money to big hospitals in U.S. for their day to day operations as well as to financially support them. The application maintains the lease documents in the system for the loans provided to the hospitals.

● Coding (writing the business logic and handling middle tier) using C#. Net, XML Web service. Bug fixes and enhancements (and medium sized development) for different application.

● Outage management calls & coordinating with support groups like ESS & TSO to resolve the outage.

● Performance Testing and Enhancements of application design & code to improve performance. ICICI Group-3i-Infotech Limited 06/05-06/06

Business Analyst

● Persuade visual designers by understanding usability and design principles

● Creation of Staffware Workflows using TIBCO i-Process Workflow engine.

● Conducted Post Production Knowledge Transition Sessions to Support and other cross functional teams.

● Developing and prepared documentation of system design specifications, functional requirements, and business rules including Screen Specs, security roles, critical data elements and database stored procedures responsible for data loads

EDUCATION

Pune University, India

2003 - 2005

MCM Masters in Computer Management

GOA University, India

2000 - 2003

BCS Bachelors in Computer Science

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