Soudipta Kundu

+1-201-***-**** adhisu@r.postjobfree.com linkedin.com/in/soudipta/

PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY

Advanced Scrum Agile Certified accomplished leader with proven track record in managing technology related business operations for large scale distributed enterprise systems encompassing the areas of Technical Program Management, Release Management, Service Delivery Management, Product Management, Infrastructure/Configuration and Change Management, Project Management, DevOps, Continuous Integration and Delivery (CICD). Over 16 Years of progressive IT experience in managing Program Release Management for Legacy (on-prem) as well as Cloud (hybrid, multi-tenant) hosted applications and facilitating the Agile transformation from waterfall. Exceptional communicator, influencer, problem solver, culturally aware servant-leader with an ability to lead diverse cross-functional teams to deliver operational excellence on mission-critical programs. Thrives in fast paced, competitive, complex environment with evolving priorities.

Core Competencies and Achievements

Release Management Technical Program Management Agile Product Delivery Management DevOps and Cloud Transformation Cross Team Collaboration Business Process Improvement Client Relationship Critical Thinking

Delivery Excellence. Successfully led the end-to-end program release management process for several high-value, multi-year, cross-functional strategic initiatives of large-scale distributed enterprise systems such as re-launching the Kohl’s Mobile applications and Fannie Mae’s Single Security initiative of building a Common Securitization Platform etc. Leveraged deep technical expertise to deliver iterative, on-time product feature releases in lean agile environment ensuring customer satisfaction.

Winner of Multiple Awards

Award from Clinical Standards & Quality Centres for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in recognition of the contributions to the rapid development and release of a managed file transfer capability (within 72 hours after being notified of new requirements) to support Nursing Home COVID-19 reporting

Shared Success Award from Wells Fargo Advisors from spearheading critical Production Releases

Excellence First Award from Well Fargo Advisors for the implementation of high priority ARS Global Settlement projects during Wachovia-Wells Fargo merger

Excellence First Award from Wells Fargo Advisors for ensuring smooth releases for various Business Critical Applications during Wachovia and A.G. Edwards merger

Team Building and Leadership. Created offshore Release Management Centre of Excellence (COE) for Kohl’s and Wachovia Advisors and collaborated with engineering, product, design and leadership teams to develop release management policies, standards, guidelines and establish best practices according to business objectives. Built, mentored and managed the community of DevOps engineers and beta testers across multiple release channels.

Dynamic Communicator and Coordinator. Owned and ensured coherent, concise, consistent communication to executive leadership, business and stakeholders across the team related to release contents, health and quality. Collaborated with various teams across the organization to ensure Go To Market (GTM) readiness and coordinated the release scope, progress, milestones, deliverables, third-party dependencies and results of inflight initiatives.

Process Improvement. Partnered with engineering team to drive process improvement initiatives associated with Code quality management, Continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), Test strategy, AWS cost optimization etc. by leveraging automation. Implemented best practices to optimize efficiency and quality meeting the demands of rapid growth and operational complexity ensuring continuous value delivery. Collaborated with Executive Leadership, Product Management teams to manage the software development lifecycle process (including strategy definition, requirements, planning, milestones, metrics, scheduling, development, QA, release, support and sunset) and to drive decision making process using all phase gate reviews. Established release management process related to Governance, SLA, feature tracking, Go-Live, launch, post-release review etc. while enabling the development team an automated experience to deliver frequently at scale.

Accountability and Ownership. Owned end-to-end release management lifecycle from inception to ship, planning to completion through focus, transparency, communication, and visibility. Created comprehensive artefacts such as release checklists, roadmap, run-book, release implementation plan, retrospective, risk metrics, issue tracker.

Keen Attention to Detail, Risk Identification and Mitigation. Self-driven, customer-centric professional with proven abilities to drive projects/tasks to completion within budgets and schedules by operating effectively and autonomously across multiple teams in situations of extreme ambiguity, with only high-level direction. Identified and mitigated the impediments well in advance and worked collaboratively across functional teams to develop contingency plans and drive the issue resolution in a timely manner ensuring bug-free product/feature delivery.

Champion Facilitator and Collaborator. Proficient in planning and leading in-person as well as remote Scaled Agile (SAFe) PI Planning meetings with multiple global cross-functional teams. Supported preparation of Agile Release Train (ART) meetings related to PI Planning readiness by fostering a Continuous Exploration process through the synthesis of the Vision, Roadmap, and Backlogs in Pre and Post PI Planning meetings. Organized and facilitated all Scrum events and ceremonies including Daily Stand-Ups, Sprint Planning, Backlog Refinement, Retrospective, Sprint Review etc. Partnered at all levels of the organization to facilitate the joint program events, processes, scrum of scrums, product owner sync, ART sync and assisted the teams in delivering value by driving innovation and relentless improvement with cultural sensitivity and emotional intelligence.

Systems Utilization and Technology Skills - Proficient use of Enterprise Software, Microsoft Project, Service Now, JIRA, Confluence, BMC Remedy, MS Office 365 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), Visio, Rational Clear Case, Clear Quest, Xray, Rally, HP ALM, Atlassian Suits. Well versed with Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), Waterfall, Scrum, Kanban, Lean, LeSS, XP, ITIL/ITSM. Working knowledge of Cloud environments, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Nginx, Microservices, API, GIT, GitHub, Bitbucket, SubVersion (SVN), ANT, Maven, Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, Chef, Nexus IQ, Splunk, SonarQube, Cucumber, Selenium, Nessus, Burp Suite, SFDC, BDD, TDD, Slack, MS Teams.

Domain Expertise

Healthcare, Finance & Mortgage, Capital Markets, Identity & Asset Management, Mobile (iOS and Android), Retail, E-Commerce (B2B, E2E), Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS)

Professional Experience

Senior Program Release Manager, Scrum Master/RTE

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) through Ventera Corp, Reston VA, USA July 2018 - Present

This $45 Million US Federal Government development project of large-scale systems modernization and legacy (on-prem) transformation work is under the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

As Senior Program Release Manager established the Release Management process and delivery cadence throughout the program for all three scrum teams. Provided CMS quality related initiative and IT development program management support for managing legacy as well as cloud-hosted applications. Supported existing Enterprise Systems and Services (ESS) on-prem product and service releases and facilitated the transition to AWS Cloud by onboarding various DevOps and automation capabilities. Established the Scaled Agile (SAFe) Release Management cadence of releasing continuously and iteratively in smaller batches on a bi-weekly basis.

As Scrum Master/RTE, led the 508 Accessibility Testing Automation Scrum Team. Spearhead and facilitated all the Scaled Agile (SAFe) events and ceremonies from team as well as program level.

Senior DevOps Release Manager

Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), Reston VA, USA April 2016 - July 2018

Under FHFA's direction, the Common Securitization Platform (CSP) was a joint initiative of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to develop one common, flexible and operational mortgage-backed security (MBS) platform to support single-family.

As Senior Release Manager, worked closely with the DevOps team to help application teams to facilitate agile transformation and onboarded various DevOps capabilities to ensure smooth transition from waterfall to agile. As part of Enterprise Release Management Team, coordinated with other leads, PMs to facilitate the launch of Agile Release Train (ART) across Enterprise for the multi-year strategic initiative of integrating Securitization solutions with Common Securitization Solutions (CSS). Ensured the alignment of the Enterprise release calendar spanning multiple teams to facilitate high quality, continuous deployments. Participated in Change Advisory Board (CAB) meetings and facilitated the Release Readiness reviews, Milestone Reviews, and Business Go/No-Go reviews.

Release Manager

CVS Caremark, Florham Park, NJ, USA August 2015 – April 2016

Responsible for handling end to end release management process for Integrated Customer Experience (ICE), Med-D, Pharmacy Benefits Management (PBM), Specialty and physician Portal of CVS Caremark.

Managed the release processes for Enterprise Digital which includes scheduling, coordinating releases for multiple applications across various lines of businesses. Ensured the forward planning of the release windows and cycles across the Enterprise release management portfolio and communicated and coordinated between cross functional teams. Created and adhered to the IT Digital Enterprise Release Calendar and worked closely with the other IT release managers from different portfolios across IT and provided centralized view of all in flight releases.

Release Project Manager

KOHL’s Corp, Milpitas, CA, USA July 2014 – August 2015

Responsible for managing release management process for Kohls Mobile App (Android and iOS), Kohl’s Pay, Webstore, Storefront, OpenAPI, Kiosk applications of Kohl’s Corporation. The Kohl’s Mobile App was initially rolled out in 2011 but was again re-launched in November 2014 as an enhanced version. Users of Kohl’s mobile increased almost 800% within the first year itself since the release of the overhauled version as Kohl's added nearly 7 million app downloads.

Spearheaded the release management process of multi-year $1 billion strategic IT initiative of Kohl’s for re-launching the Kohl’s Mobile applications in iOS and Android which resulted in mobile traffic representing more than 50% of all digital traffic ensuring a smooth and seamless mobile experience for customers. Established efficient standardized, debugging process across all mobile applications (iOS and Android) for crash reporting allowing the engineering team to reliably find and resolve crashes before they can impact the end users. This also saved 30% of the time spent troubleshooting errors. Established the mobile Release Train and managed the different phases of app release such as code freeze, integration testing, beta upload, beta testing, stage rollout using feature flags allowing granular control over deployment process.

Production Support & Release Manager

Mitsubishi Motors (Europe), SH Born, The Netherlands December 2013 - July 2014

Coordinated and collaborated with operations teams to ensure continuous environment readiness, successful deployments, and high availability of dependent services across Development, Testing, Staging, and Production systems. Led the Offshore Production Support team of 20+ members and managed the support roster/schedule. Developed Project plan, Business Requirements Documents (BRDs) and established Release Management framework.

Project Release and QA Manager

The National Investors (TNI) – Abu Dhabi, UAE June 2013 – November 2013

The Keross suite of integrated solutions is a SaaS based Infrastructure Management product which puts powerful process automation and human expertise behind the business performance improvement for the customer. The innovative IKON Platform employs an Advanced IKON SaaS architecture to empower eBusiness insight and Management.

As Project Release and QA Manager led the Release and QA Team and managed overall QA and Release management process, established industry standard best practices for all changes to build holistic solutions that meets business objectives. Conducted regular project reviews, gathered feedback from all stakeholders, captured key decisions during project meetings and interfaced with executive leadership and key business stakeholders. Established baseline metrics, monitor key performance improvements (KPI) documentation and reporting on process improvement results.

Release and Configuration Manager

Medco Health Solutions (Express Scripts) through IBM - Franklin Lakes, NJ, USA March 2011 – June 2013

As Release & Configuration Manager responsible in development of deployable packages (Build) from code provided by Application Development Teams.

Responsible for preparing Release Plan, Release Strategy and related artifacts for various Application Releases and adhering to Release Management Process in the project according to the Waterfall model of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Defined and managed major milestones and key deliverables and coordinated the release schedule and cross team release dependencies. Acted as the point of escalation for risks, issues and obstacles raised by project teams and ensured action items are clearly defined, assigned to owners and driven to timely resolution. Collaborated across teams to ensure successful management of cross-functional dependencies.

EARLIER WORKING EXPERIENCE:

Lead Build and Deployment Engineer

Wachovia Securities (Wells Fargo Advisors) through Infosys - Charlotte, NC, USA Dec 2007 – Mar 2011

Production Support and Maintenance Engineer (EAGLE PACE and STAR)

Mellon Financial Corporation through Infosys - Pittsburgh, PA, USA Sept 2006 – Dec 2007

Production Support Engineer (Warehouse Management System WMS)

GAP Inc through Infosys - SFO, CA, USA Apr 2005 – Sep 2006

Software Engineer (Release of Finacle CRM 7.0)

UBS through Infosys - Zurich, Switzerland Aug 2004 – Apr 2005

Education and Professional Certification

Bachelor of Engineering (B.E) in Information Technology (I.T) - University of Calcutta, India (June 2000 – May 2004)

Customer-Centric IT Strategy - University of Virginia, Credential ID: 3UTE2RXV9NXR (March 2020)

Certified SAFe 5 Agilist (SA) - Scaled Agile Inc, Credential ID: 570*****-**** (July 2020 to July 2021)

Certified SAFe 5 Product Owner/Product Manager (POPM) - Scaled Agile Inc, Credential ID: 618*****-**** (June 2020 to June 2021)

Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner (A-CSPO) - Scrum Alliance, Credential ID: 1232967 (June 2020 to June 2022)

Certified Agile Leadership (CAL-1) - Scrum Alliance, Credential ID: 1210344 (April 2020)

Certified Agile Leadership Essential (CAL-E) - Scrum Alliance, Credential ID: 1268982 (April 2020 to September 2022)

Certified Agile Leadership for Teams (CAL-T) - Scrum Alliance, Credential ID: 1268983 (April 2020 to September 2022)

Certified Agile Leadership for Orgs (CAL-O) - Scrum Alliance, Credential ID: 1268984 (April 2020 to September 2022)

Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) - Scrum Alliance, Credential ID: 1207912 (March 2020 to June 2022)

Certified Scrum Master (CSM) - Scrum Alliance, Credential ID: 1160522 (December 2019 to December 2021)

Certified Scrum@Scale Practitioner - Scrum@Scale LLC, Credential ID: 4e6438f6-bd75-4068-b207-2197874fed90

ICAgile Certified Professional (ICP) - ICAgile, Credential ID: 123-14172-ddf9b9ef-5323-448d-8855-d9b33f4af80f

Jira Administration Part 1 - Atlassian, Credential ID: 6be4bab6-2187-3260-89b7-dab407ae2bf1 (June 2020)

Jira Administration Part 2 - Atlassian, Credential ID: dbfe7c64-7d5c-3665-9b2a-2400861688c4 (June 2020)

Jira and Confluence Together - Atlassian, Credential ID: 3bfba986-71c9-36c3-872b-654592e70bb1 (June 2020)

Pragmatic Management Certified PMC Level-1 Foundations - Pragmatic Institute (June 2020)

Contact this candidate