Scrum Manager

Souma Basu

Scrum Master Contact: 925-***-****

Tracy, California

Experienced agile practitioner, worked as servant leader for the team and

Coached team on adaption of agile principles.

Dynamic IT professional with experience of working in Agile projects at large Insurance corporations across USA. Experience in managing projects and programs with large number of resources geographically placed in varied locations. Lead business and technology transformation initiatives at Fortune 500 clients focusing on enabling and maximizing business outcomes.

Worked on multiple agile projects in Scrum and SAFe methodologies, at different clients. Worked closely with clients and stood up the lines from start. Coaching teams on scrum practices and ceremonies. Played the role of a Servant Master, drove team iteration execution, and communicates with management and stakeholders.

Has a steep learning curve, quickly gains knowledge of the client system landscape. Possesses excellent interpersonal, communication and negotiation skills with the ability to develop and maintain mutually beneficial internal and external relationships. Souma has managed large delivery teams and functional consultants spread across multiple geographies.

Consulting Scrum Product Management Insurance Business Analysis

SAFe Requirement Negotiation Requirement Management

Worked as Scrum Master for package solution Implementation – Worked with a team for 17-team members for Excess and Surplus lines of business at Nationwide with Guidewire Product following SAFe methodology.

Worked closely with Release Train Engineer – Implemented large projects with Agile philosophy, worked as product manager and system/solution architects for PI planning, Program Backlog creation, Agile Run Train planning, enabler and capability dependency mapping.

Solution Consulting – Worked as IT Consultant with leading Insurers in North America. Implemented Policy Administration System and Customer Communication Management System, and Enterprise Data Bus at leading insurers.

Domain Consulting – Worked as domain consultant in P&C Insurance domain for leading Insurers across USA. Enabled technology teams to configure out of box product to ensure maximum business value.

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

COGNIZANT TECHNOLOGY SOLUTION 2015 – Till Date

Consultant, Cognizant Consulting

Kaiser Permanente January 2020 – Till Date

Souma is currently working as Scrum Master for this project; it’s a business transformation project for migrating legacy standard management system to new application (ATLAS and Emerging Techhub). The project is part of 2022 business transformation initiative for enhancing the Technical Standard Management functionality for Kaiser Permanente at the enterprise level.

Working as a Scrum Master on IT Transformation of Technology Standard Management project

Major responsibilities include release planning, User story prioritization, coordinating with Application owners, Application Business Architects and Analyst to ensure no gaps in requirements.

Maintain RAID (Risk, Assumptions, Impediments, and Dependencies) log, Change Request tracking, managing multiple teams including vendors to ensure timely completion of tasks.

Present the status update to VP (Executive sponsor) and senior leaders on a weekly/monthly basis and ensure all impediments are resolved. Attend the bi-weekly Scrum-of-scrum meetings to follow-up on all pending impediments and risks.

Coordinate with multiple teams including third party vendors on integrations to bring respective leads to the table. Ensure all parties talk to each other and close open items at the earliest.

Review JIRA tool for product backlog, Sprint backlog, refine it with Product Owner based on the velocity of the team and ensuring dependencies are identified and available prior to sprint start.

Thorough review of the user stories for Demo, Approval and provide feedback to cover further gaps/expectations for next sprint cycle.

Nationwide Mutual Insurance March 2018 – Jan 2020

Souma worked as Scrum Master for this project, this is a managed capacity engagement, is for Guidewire InsuranceNow implementation project at Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company for Excess and Surplus lines of business. He is responsible for the requirement management. He works as Scrum Master for the Apollos lines, where his day-to-day responsibilities includes:

Facilitates Agile ceremonies at team level: daily stand-up, iteration planning, sprint review, and iteration retrospective

Coached team on agile principals and processes. Guides team in time estimating practices and facilitates team estimates. Implements and supports agile principles, rules and processes

Drives team iteration execution, communicates with management and stakeholders, protects the team from uncontrolled injection of work

Managed project conflicts, challenges and dynamic business requirements to keep operations running at a high performance

Worked as servant master to resolve people problems and project roadblocks, proactively identify and eliminate impediments and facilitate flow

Maintain team data in project execution tracking software like Jira & IBM RTC. Manage the VDU for the team to understand the burn-down.

Presents high-level project readouts for senior management, organized Gemba walk for senior management and leadership team.

Supports product owner(s) with intra-team dynamics with respect to priorities and scope.

Guidewire Software July 2017 – March 2018

(Team Size: 35 and 12M USD)

Worked in the Guidewire Professional Services team, representing Guidewire at their client sites. Playing a product consultant role for Guidewire InsuranceNow product working closely with Product Manager from the client side to perform requirement management for development team to configure and customize the core product. His regular day-to-day activities would include,

Requirement Planning, Feature and Epic identification, MVP detailing, Product Implementation roadmap creation

Requirement elicitation from the business teams, creating epics, requirement analysis and negotiations

Product management and maintaining communication with business, sales and delivery teams to ensure projects runs properly.

Working closely with product management to approve features and usability list for each feature, with end user discussions.

Creation and Grooming of EPIC Backlog, working closely with Solution Teams to create and maintain the Epic backlog with Epics implemented

Identifying stakeholder needs, negotiate priorities between differing stakeholder factions, and then collaborate with developers to ensure that the requirements are implemented effectively

Collaborating with geographically distributed teams, to ensure that Guidewire solution configured in optimized way.

Policy Administration System Modernization at AAA April 2015 – June 2017

(Team Size: 18 and 8M USD)

Worked as product owner in Business Architectural team for various initiatives with Policy Administration System Analysis and System Design team. Taking overall initiative and ownership of products across states and modules, entire lifecycle of the product development and enhancement, based on business requirements. His daily activities include,

Worked as Product Owner for 10 states for Policy Administration System implement for personal insurance (Home Owner and Auto lines of business). Exigen (EIS) was implemented as PAS at AAA.

Evaluated Business requirement changes, aligning business architectural changes to tactical and strategic enterprise goals. Provide traceability through the organization and are mapped to metrics that provide ongoing governance.

Business requirement eliciting and analysing from Subject Matter Experts, using various techniques like white-boarding, brainstorming, Joint Application Development Sessions, Group Discussion and Work flow diagram, using tools like MS Visio, UML, Rational composer and MS Office.

Managing delivery teams across location, Phoenix (AZ, USA), Chennai and Kolkata India.

INFOSYS LTD. 2011 – 2015

SENIOR ASSOCIATE CONSULTANT

Enterprise Data Services Design and Implementation at Allstate Nov. 2014 – April 2015

Worked as Agile Business Analyst working closely with Product Owner for the Enterprise Data Service Design and Implementation project. His regular day-to-day activities included,

Creation and Grooming of Product Backlog, working closely with scrum team to create and maintain the product backlog with Epics and User stories.

Prioritizing business requirements in the Product Backlog and estimating efforts for the user stories and sprint planning

Identifying stakeholder needs, negotiate priorities between differing stakeholder factions, and then collaborate with developers to ensure that the requirements are implemented effectively.

Document Composition Delivery Centre at Allstate Nov 2012 – Nov 2014

Lead team of business analyst, working from offshore and managing a team of 6 BAs for the DCDC project. His domain knowledge and system acumen helped him manage requirements for this large system transformation initiative. His major responsibilities included,

Requirement elicitation and analysis for applications and creating business requirements documents, which included Tibco rules and Exstream requirements.

Performing system impact analysis for change in business requirements. Performing As-Is and To-Be analysis of the business systems

Acting as liaison between onsite and offshore teams and also between business and development teams and resolving queries from the development team

Data Management System for MassMutual May 2011 – Oct 2012

Souma worked as business analyst for the data management project at MassMutual from offshore. He was responsible for the alignment for the offshore deliverable to business requirement. His day to day activities included,

Conducting requirement elaboration sessions with business stakeholders over call. Identifying business process impact of the proposed enhancements.

Performed data impact analysis on legacy systems and created functional requirement documents for projects based on business requirements'.

QUALIFICATIONS

Bachelor of Technology, India

Masters of Business Administration, India

Associate in General Insurance (AINS)

Certified Scrum Master, Scrum Alliance, San Jose, USA

SAFe 4.6 Advanced Scrum Master (SASM), Scaled Agile

SAFe® 4 Certified Agilist, Scaled Agile

SAFe Product Owner/Product Manager, Scaled Agile

Contact this candidate