Payal Grover

adv8sz@r.postjobfree.com

860-***-****

Professional with 7+ years of experience in Insurance and Healthcare domains.

Strong knowledge of System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and Project Life cycle. Experience in different development methodologies like waterfall model, Agile SCRUM and Waterfall-SCRUM hybrid.

Facilitated Scrum ceremonies like Sprint Planning, Daily Stand-ups, Sprint Reviews, Sprint Retrospective and Backlog Refinement.

Collaborate with project stakeholders to negotiate scope boundaries, approaches to mitigate risk, priorities of specification elements, and adjustments as indicated to alleviate conflicting requirements.

Worked closely with product owners in Backlog grooming. Coordinating & collaborating with other scrum teams to help identify dependencies

Managed multiple off-shore and on-shore teams.

Expertise in conducting Rapid Application Development (RAD, Joint Requirement Planning (JRP) and Joint Application Development JAD sessions, interviews, workshops and requirement gathering sessions with business users, stakeholders and development team.

Facilitated Sprint Planning helped the team commit to a sprint goal with and break all stories into tasks. Used Estimation techniques like T-shirt sizing and relative mass evaluation.

Protected the team from over-commitment and prioritized resolution of defects/bugs. Met goal of addressing and resolving issues.

Worked on decomposing EPICs into smaller user stories for effective utilization by Considering and identifying SMART tasks with the help of the team.

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

Working knowledge of other Agile concepts such as continuous development and deployment, Test Driven development (TDD), Behavior Driven Development (BDD) etc.

Assisted maintaining product backlog, sprint backlog, writing PBI’s, sizing user stories, estimating the user stories. Managed open issues, removed impediments, worked with cross functional teams to improve software quality & test coverage on JIRA.

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

Tracked and managed team capacity and velocity.

Experience working as a Scrum Master for 2 Agile Scrum Teams using the Enterprise Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) model.

Expertise in using the Atlas Sian Products- Especially Jira and Confluence, Rally, MS Project, MS office suite.

Expertise in Client Relationship Handling, Project and Release Management, Configuration and Change Management, Defect Tracking and Control.

Proficient in a broad range of technologies including business process tools such as MS Project, MS Excel, MS Access, MS PowerPoint, MS Visio and Rational Suite.

Excellence in designing and executing Test Strategy, Test Plan, Test Scenarios, and Test Cases based on the requirements for the applications.

Performed Integration, Regression, Sanity, Functional Unit and System Testing, Load Testing, Stress Testing and Performance Testing.

Work Experience

TIAA CREF April 2021 - Present

Scrum Master

Worked as Scrum master for 2 scrum teams for multiple releases by efficiently collaborating with the Release Train Engineer (RTE) for the successful implementation of the Project.

Identified and mapped stakeholders to RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed) matrix to ensure smoother change process and to clarify roles and responsibilities in the cross-functional project environment.

Interacted with Business Analysts, Product Owner, Development team and other stakeholders to define the scope and set the expectations. Facilitated and time- boxed Scrum ceremonies such as Sprint planning, daily scrum, Sprint review, Sprint retrospective and backlog refinement meeting.

Assisted the Product owner in decomposing the Epics into User Stories and maintain the Product Backlog by managing the product backlog with DEEP, INVEST and DIVE Criteria.

Assisted the product owner in prioritizing the PBI using prioritization techniques like MOSCOW and 100-point method and Estimation Techniques such as Planning Poker, T-shirt Sizing, and Relative Mass valuation.

Worked with the product owner and development team in deciding and negotiating the definition of done and acceptance criteria for Potentially Shippable Product Increment (PSPI).

Ensured coordination between product owners, analysts, developers and QA. Created and routinely updated Sprint Burn-down Chart, Sprint Burn-up Chart, and Task Board to track team’s progress toward goals.

Worked with RTE in the Scrum-Of-Scrum meetings and made all necessary logistics & team performance metrics available for the PI Planning Meeting (Program Increment).

Removed team level impediments and escalated complex organizational and infrastructure impediments which blocked the team’s progress and focused on early resolution of conflicts to keep the team’s velocity and progress on track and made sure ART cross team dependencies/conflicts are resolved

Tracked stories using JIRA software and maintained the entire project related documents and decisions in Confluence and collaborated with the Traders and the technical team. Created widgets on dashboard to help the scrum team view progress.

Reported sprint progress, metrics like Burn down, Burn up, and velocity to the upper management and the team.

Conducted Retrospective Techniques such as ORID, Happiness Histogram, and Star Fish etc. every sprint to improve the upcoming sprints and the overall team's productivity.

Organized Scrum Workshops to educate the team about Scrum concepts. Also, conducted User Story Writing Workshops for the stakeholders to train them in story writing.

Effectively handled the Requirement Churn during the sprint cycle and added the PBI to the next sprint.

Improved the Team's efficiency through retrospective feedback by conducting Happy Histogram, Silent Writing Technique and made sure that the necessary improvements are made for further sprints.

Effectively removed impediments and monitoring defect logs, which in turn assist in velocity calculation for superior planning of upcoming sprints.

Knowledge and experience with Agile techniques - Automated Testing, User Stories, TDD, Continuous Integration, Testing, Pairing, Agile Games

Used MS Office extensively (Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, Outlook, Project) for calculations, graphs, analysis, presentation and documentation throughout the project.

Developed timelines for project delivery, and managed projects and resources to successful completion.

Worked on continous improvement of products based on feedback.

Maintained technical documentation throuhout the product lifecycle.

Leveraged resources and organized KT to ensure teams are cross functional.

Coach team and stakeholder on lean/Agile Practices.

Proficient in JIRA, Confluence, Rally, ALM, MS Teams, MS Office (Word,PowerPoint,Excel). Town of South Windsor Feb 2019 – April 2021

Program Coordinator / IT Specialist

Prepared, organized and stored information in digital form.

Created and maintained a system for backing up data and program files.

Ensured integrity of the network by continually updating network system security to provide for latest protection against viruses and other types of network vulnerabilities.

Manage the school’s hardware and software.

Assist faculty and staff with professional technology-based computer hardware and software inquiries.

Responsible for managing budget and events

Handle scheduling, record keeping and reporting.

Develop and run educational programs.

Coordinate and supervise the installation, maintenance, and support of existing and new servers, systems and networks.

Maintained t an inventory of equipment, computers, software licenses, and others.

Conducted training for staff and new hires.

Coordinating all administrative processes.

Accenture March 2017 – Dec 2018

Scrum Master

Interacted with Business Analysts, Product Owner, Development team and other stakeholders to define the scope and set the expectations.

Educated and reinforced both offshore and onshore teams in Agile and Scrum methodology. Facilitated cross-team coordination and collaboration

Worked closely with the management and product development team to effectively plan the delivery of software solutions to the clients.

Experience maintaining Scrum Artifacts like Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog and maintained reports like Burn down chart and Burnup chart.

Helped the team understand SMART tasks and helped them in task breakdown for user-stories in sprints.

Participated in the SAFe PI Planning and managed dependencies with other teams.

Attended and actively participated in Scrum of Scrum meetings.

Facilitated and time-boxed Scrum ceremonies such as Sprint planning, daily scrum, Sprint review, Sprint retrospective and backlog refinement meeting.

Educated and reinforced both offshore and onshore teams in Agile and Scrum methodology. Facilitated cross-team coordination and collaboration.

Facilitated Agile ceremonies with teams and stakeholders.

Maintained features and user stories in Jira.

Generated resources and burn down chart reports in Jira.

Defined project scope and schedule.

Provided visibility on progress, metrics and removed impediments.

Worked with Product owners and delivery team to align the work based on WSJS.

Ensured project adheres to framework and all documentation is maintained.

Worked with stakeholders and prioritize the task.

Involved in different phases of Project Life Cycle.

Analyzed the Business and System Requirements and developed the test plans and test cases accordingly.

Remove impediments and coordinated cross team dependencies.

Provided administrative support as needed.

Mir Mitchell and Company Feb 2016 – March 2017

Program Manager/QA Analyst

Facilitated and time-boxed Scrum ceremonies such as Sprint planning, daily scrum, Sprint review, Sprint retrospective and backlog refinement meeting.

Collaborated with members of the Product, Business and Engineering Teams to develop the Product Backlog.

Helped the Product owner in decomposing the EPICS into user stories and maintain the product Backlog.

Facilitated the Planning sessions and helped the team not to over commit. Improved team velocity by incorporating capacity planning into sprint planning sessions.

Monitored SAFe-based Agile team and worked closely with Release Train Engineer through Program Increments.

Coached the team in agile principles and methodologies.

Created order of activities plan for go live with various teams.

Responsible for understanding the application functionality, SRD’s and participating in the document inspection meetings

Analysis of user Requirements and specifications.

Created the checklists (Test Scenarios) according to the application, executed and compared the actual Vs expected results, logged the test results

Conducted Integration Testing and System Testing to check the overall performance of the application.

Designed and developed both manual and automated test scripts.

Performed Positive and Negative testing to check if the application is working as designed and as expected.

Involved in the Regression testing of the application when code changes were done to the application and new build is ready.

Execution of the test scripts and logging the tracked defects in bug tracking system.

Identified potential project risks and helped developed a mitigation plan to resolve potential issues.

SDLC Methodologies Waterfall, Agile-Scrum, SAFe, Kanban Requirement Management

Tools

JIRA, Rally, MS Project, Ms Word, Excel, Access, Ms PowerPoint, Ms SharePoint, Confluence Site, JIRA Align, CA PPM

Languages SQL

Education

PSM Certified

SAFe5 Certified

Task top Certified

Bachelor in Science

Advance Computer Diploma.

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