Scrum Master Project Management

Richa Ramrakhyani (CSM/SAFe POPM)

New Jersey, ***82

Email – ****************@*****.***

Cell – 609-***-****

www.linkedin.com/in/richaramrakhyani

PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY:

Accomplished and driven IT professional with Publishing/Media, Retail, Package/Freight Delivery, Telecom, Automobile, Bankcard Insurance, Non-profit, and Banking sectors hands-on experience

Successfully drives planning, architecture, deployment, and management of global IT projects while re-engineering business processes

Skilled in all aspects of the project lifecycle, from initial requirements gathering through implementation in an Agile and Waterfall workflow environment

Experienced in various software development methodologies including Agile, Scrum, Kanban and Waterfall leading full project life cycle and managing key business stakeholders

Certified scrum master capable of effectively collaborating, facilitating, leading, and coaching multiple scrum ceremonies and teams with proven ability to work with cross-functional and self-organizing teams by acting as a Servant Leader to agile teams and to the organization

Well versed with Scrum ceremonies and practices, removing impediments and self-management, while keeping teams focused on delivering success in rapidly evolving and dynamic environments

Proficient in Gap (AS-IS/TO-Be) Analysis in collaboration with project management team via prioritization of Product Backlogs and by negotiating on Minimum Value Product (MVP)

Expert in Requirements Elicitation techniques like Interviews, Brainstorming, Prototyping, Focus Groups, Use Case Design, Business Processes Flows, Multi Module System, Process Flows, Wireframes, Activity/Sequence Diagrams

Experienced working with business stakeholders at all levels of management to understand business needs, gather requirements (functional and technical) and convert those requirements into Project Charter, Business Requirements Document (BRD) Functional Requirement Specifications (FRS), and user stories

Strengths in Relationship Building, Team Management, Product Delivery, and Collaboration with Business Partners/Vendors eliciting high-level business needs, unparalleled communication, and persuasion skills

Act as change agent, coach, and trainer for development teams by introducing technical excellence practices driving continuous development and continuous improvement (CI/CD)

Excellent interpersonal and conflict resolution skills helpful in reconciliation between the End Users and the Development Team

Skillful in managing functional walkthroughs, User Acceptance Testing UAT sessions

Self-starter with strong communications skills, both written and verbal

PROFESSIONAL AREAS OF EXPERTISE:

Project Management Standards & Best Practices, Project Planning, Execution & Governance

SDLC, Agile & Waterfall Methodologies, Agile Coaching, SAFe Agile Framework, Agile Scrum Principles & Practices

Stakeholder, Communication, Risk & Change Management

Agile Ceremonies/Rituals Across Scrum Teams

Product Development & Delivery, Product Manager/Owner

Global Team Liaison & Support Systems

Business Analysis, Process Improvement, BRD & FRS Documentation

IT Infrastructure/Security, Identity & Access Management

Third Party Contractor, Contract & Vendor Management

Relationship Building, Team Management, Conflict Resolution and Facilitation

Data Warehousing, Data Architecture, Data Modeling, Data Mining, Data Processing, ETL Designs

Data Visualizations, BI Reporting & Analytics, Generative AI

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:

Sr. Product Manager/Product Owner

UnitedHealth Group (UHG)/Optum, Plymouth, MN Nov 2022 – Present

UHG/ Optum is a leading healthcare technology company focused on insights, innovation, and accelerating the transformation of healthcare

system through the power of its enterprise analytics platform. Their mission is to inspire a better healthcare system by delivering innovative solutions

to patients, hospitals, and insurance companies to improve clinical decision making, simplify financial processes, and enable better patient

experiences to improve lives and support healthier communities.

Responsibilities:

Understands customer needs and evaluates effective product solutions based on the tools UHG/Optum uses for Business Intelligence/Internal Analytics in different data delivery models

Plans, coordinates, and manages product development and enhancement projects across Master data management team initiatives

Develops the project plan, the product delivery plan, and the production deployment schedules based on the client priorities and business requirements

Ensures traceability between Business Requirements to Epics/Features to User Stories

Articulates the business user stories and document the product stakeholders in Wiki or Confluence

Partners with Scrum master’s in supporting SAFe Agile Scrum Framework through daily standups and ceremonies

Shares and decomposes Features into user stories for each Product Increment, sprint, etc.

Develops product models and plans to achieve corporate revenue growth

Develops a deep understanding of the customer and product needs

Works closely with Product Management to represent capabilities and features at a team and Program level

Accountable for the business requirements, the product backlog, and the prioritization of user stories with team members

Periodically re-prioritize the product backlog based on customer feedback, market changes and business priorities

Review of test cases against user stories acceptance criteria

Formally accepts the front-end user stories once all acceptance criteria are met and demonstrated

Updates clients about progress of the project status and any road blockers on regular cadence by coordinating product demos to customers

Maintains strong working relationships with customers and identify new opportunities of product growth

Reviews current technical development proposals and user cases for new and current products

Addresses customer and employee concerns promptly through weekly and one on one meetings

Provides strategic direction to Scrum team under area of responsibility on what priorities impact the revenue growth

Ensures that products meet quality standards and customer requirements across different areas that supports

Environment: SAFe Agile Framework, AHA, JIRA, Confluence, Wiki, Rally, Microsoft Office 2010 Suite (SharePoint, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), TIBCO Spotfire, Power BI, Tableau, Snowflake, AWS, GitHub, Talend

Project Manager/Scrum Master

California Times, El Segundo, CA Dec 2021 – Aug 2022

California Times is a news media group of iconic brands including Los Angeles Times, San Diego Union-Tribune, L.A. Times Studio, Stats Digital, Daily Pilot, Times Community New and more. The Los Angeles Times (abbreviated as LA Times) is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881 and is now based in the adjacent suburb of El Segundo. It has the fifth-largest circulation in the U.S. Leading initiatives like replacing current ITSM with Jira Service Management, creating HR Workday configurations for regulatory sick time off plans and creating complex data models

to service enterprise wise solutions.

Responsibilities:

Requirement gathering, scope planning, and organizing project management activities by collaborating with data architects/analysts/engineers/scientists, developers, business analysts, and to determine software's technical direction, system design, and implementation

Collaborated with senior executives, leaders, and product management from cross functional teams, third party vendor project resources and managed relationships with a wide range of business groups and departments architecture and teams in defining product strategy and vision

Developed and maintained project documentation throughout all stages of the lifecycle project planning, creating framework for WBS details, scheduling, tracking, status reporting and producing communication materials

Communicated both detailed and high-level progress to stakeholders at large including executives

Created and maintained documentation including steering committee decks, weekly status reports, sprint retrospective, executive summaries, and retrospectives

Conducted retrospectives, gathered feedback, and reported on project success criteria results and metrics

Led regular meetings with cross-functional stakeholders to help them achieve optimal solutions by strategic decision making

Owned end-to-end project management activities and take full ownership of project lifecycle

Delivered projects on time ensuring quality, compliance, legal and technical standard is met

Provided detailed weekly status report outlining project milestones, the overall health of the project, dependencies, risks, and issues

Business System Analyst/Scrum Master

DemandTec by Acoustic, Boston, MA Apr 2021 – Oct 2021

Autonomous Price Optimization (APO) – DemandTec, a strategic business unit of Acoustic, enable retailers and CPG partners to deliver optimal everyday pricing, promotions, and markdowns across all retail channels to thrive in today’s hyper-competitive retail landscape. Therefore, we are a single vendor that addresses lifecycle pricing solutions for retailers, providing the largest depth and breadth of proven lifecycle pricing solutions on the market. APO initiative is to replace current Price Management and Price Optimization solution with a streamlined Price solution, so that it is easy to use and much more intuitive.

Responsibilities:

Managed stand-ups, backlogs, sprint planning meetings, retrospectives, demos, storyboard, and story writing utilizing agile methodology

Collaborated with cross-functional stakeholder teams like Product Management, Professional Services, Data Science, Engineering and Testing to understand business needs and requirements

Facilitated process study with Professional Services teams to completely comprehend the workflow and identify gaps between current and intended solution

Communicated effectively with Product Management, Professional Services, Data Science and Engineering teams to deliver the projects requirements

Collaborated with developers and subject matter experts to establish the technical vision and analyze tradeoffs between usability and performance needs

Project managed requests for implementing innovative solutions, new feature requests to an existing product, bug fixes, operational reporting, and backlog requests to ensure agreed-upon timelines and milestones are met

Actively supported business and technology teams and develop detailed project plans for multiple work tracks, build a centralized tracker to log issues within the project and/or program, open items, and risks

Ensured all deadlines are met and all handoffs are successful as the project was moving through different SDLC phases

Collected and analyzed business requirements by coordinating interviews, requirement workshops, business, and workflow analysis

Prepared accurate and detailed requirement specification in terms of User Stories and Acceptance Criteria

Documented the acquired results of analysis and workflows as well as obtaining sign-off from the appropriate business units

Environment: Agile Methodology, JIRA, Confluence, Microsoft Office 2010 Suite (SharePoint, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Project), Salesforce

Business Analyst/Scrum Master/Agile Kanban Coach

UPS, Parsippany, NJ Oct 2019 – Dec 2020

Technology Enabled Network – Healthcare & Life Sciences Shipment - UPS Operations do not have an easy visibility of Healthcare & Life Sciences shipment attributes and product recovery needs within Package Level Detail (PLD) space. Differentiating our most complex Healthcare & Life Science shipments within the network is via a fragmented approach. This project aims to improve the response time on our most critical healthcare packages by enabling the capture of package category and handling instructions at the time of manifest and passing this information via PLD to Operations departments.

Responsibilities:

Conducted work sessions with the business stakeholders and sponsors to understand their requirements

Converted business needs/requirements into detailed specifications for the development teams

Responsible for progress reporting and steering committee updates on the program's short- and long-term needs

Timely impediments resolutions with multiple business and tech verticals

Arranging and leading end to end daily stand-up meetings, providing application suite demos, helping the teams in decision-making processes to ensure quick inspection and proper use of adaptation processes

Owned product backlogs creation for planning upcoming and ongoing sprint cycles

Functioned as a liaison for cross functional program and project teams

Agile Kanban Transformation – UPS Network Planning Tool (NPT) department is tracking a Balanced Scorecard (BSC) element to transform management of application projects and tasks from the traditional Waterfall methodology to Agile Scrum and Kanban methodologies. To support this BSC element, each application area within NPT has listed this transformation as one of their 2020 performance goal to achieve. The pursuit of Agile Scrum and Kanban transformation is to improve the organization’s ability to speed-to-market deployment of application changes to meet business needs.

Responsibilities:

Coached leaders and teams through the Agile Kanban transformations and providing necessary training and references to enable the ideal management and team structures

Facilitated Agile Kanban transition of UPS major legacy mainframe applications (20+ people) from Waterfall to Agile Kanban as a Coach, while also acting as the Scrum Master of two mixed on/offshore teams

Developed training materials and workshops, building knowledge and skills to facilitate the Agile transformation

Owned end-to-end project management activities and take full ownership of project lifecycle

Communicated both detailed and high-level progress to stakeholders at large including executives

Provided detailed weekly status report outlining project milestones, the overall health of the project, dependencies, risks, and issues

Worked on drafting Change Management and Communication Plan for end-users

Environment: Agile Methodology, Microsoft Team Foundation Server, and Office 2016 Suite, JAMA

MRC/PRR Migration to HEAT - This project is part of continuous development, support effort and is in alignment with companywide next generation reorganization/transformation of MRC/PRR Mainframe/Linux application migration to cloud-based HEAT platform.

Responsibilities:

Generated features/user stories with DoR (Definition of Ready) which were leveraged as part of the migration

Supported the product development process by facilitate project planning, scope and initiation analysis, conducting daily stand-up meetings/Scrum calls, sprint reviews, sprint retrospectives, sprint and release planning, demos and other activities as needed

Drove Scrum meetings/ceremonies, track and communicate sprints developments per release standards, maintain process documentation, ensure development teams are practicing the Agile principles and work with Agile team environment to create process flow diagrams

Supported Product Owners and assist with backlog maintenance, with internal and external communication, with improving transparency and radiating information, with prioritization and resolution of defects/bugs

Owned end-to-end project management activities and take full ownership of project lifecycle

Communicated both detailed and high-level progress to stakeholders at large including executives

Environment: Waterfall, Microsoft Office 2010 Suite (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Visio, SharePoint, and Team Foundation Concert), Mainframe/Linux, Google Cloud Platform

Project Manager/Scrum Master

Verizon, Piscataway, NJ Feb 2019 – Jul 2019

Digital Secure - This project aims to provide an end-to-end solution to protect customer data and privacy. Digital Secure is a mobile application that will provide critical protection to customers seeking to secure their data and preserve their privacy as they live a connected life.

Responsibilities:

Analyzed customer operations to understand requirements and determine opportunities to streamline processes

Conducted daily stand-up meetings with development and testing teams to estimate Level of Efforts for user stories and to track the progress of the progress of the project

Worked with the design team in developing screen (UI/UX) mockups and application workflows

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)

Worked with cross-functional teams on prioritizing user stories and participate in grooming sessions to update on user story estimation and on project status

Assisted project manager in tracking progress and supervised project team in accomplishing project goals

Owned end-to-end project management activities and take full ownership of project lifecycle

Communicated both detailed and high-level progress to stakeholders at large including executives

Environment: Agile/Scrum, Microsoft Office 2010Suite (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Visio), My Verizon Mobile Application, JIRA

Scrum Master/Project Manager

BMW of North America, Woodcliff Lake, NJ Jul 2018 – Jan 2019

Entry/Bank Audit MS Access Application Replacement - The project was to replace existing customs entry and bank audit MS Access Applications with a new Java/Cognos web-based application.

Responsibilities:

Conducted user interviews, requirement gathering sessions with Customs Compliance Managers and elicited existing and intended business requirements

Documented AS-IS and TO-BE business processes flows and furnished systems requirement document

Designed screen (UI/UX) mockups and process flows in collaboration with business users and various stakeholders

Facilitated Review and Approval of requirement artifacts and built Requirements Traceability Matrix to track system requirements against components developed and unit tested

Identified key reports by collaborating with power users and IT teams to understand business logic behind each report, and identified all end users

Assessed, communicated, and mitigated risk, utilizing contingency plans as necessary, and ensure the risks do not turn into issues

Communicated both detailed and high-level progress to stakeholders at large including executives

Created and maintained documentation including steering committee decks, weekly status reports, sprint retrospective, executive summaries, and retrospective

Environment: JAVA/J2EE Scripts, Rich Faces, Microsoft Office 2010Suite (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Visio, Access), Customs Application, Cognos

Project Manager/Sr. Business Systems Analyst

Allianz Worldwide Partners, Richmond, VA Dec 2016 – Jun 2018

Bankcard Claims Disbursement - The project was to implement additional electronic claims disbursement capabilities to Bankcard Customers (Claimants or Rental Agencies) via Debit Card and Direct Deposit (ACH), including Card Reader Technology for Debit Disbursements.

Responsibilities:

Managed requirements process for high-risk corporate projects, requirement sessions, elicitation of requirements, documentation of business and functional requirements, and facilitated review and approval of requirements

Developed and solicited approval of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) documentation, and acted as the subject matter expert for business partners on SDLC process

Reviewed requirements, specifications, test documentation, implementation, support, training, and maintenance plans to ensure they were in line with business objectives on projects

Identified opportunities for improvement in processes and procedures used by the Business Analyst team. Assist with defect resolution during the Quality Assurance (QA) & User Acceptance Testing (UAT) phase of assigned projects

Owned end-to-end project management activities and take full ownership of project lifecycle

Communicated both detailed and high-level progress to stakeholders at large including executives

Environment: PeopleSoft CRM, SAP Finance, ServiceNow, Oracle 11g, JAVA/J2EE Scripts, MS SQL Developer, MS Visio, Snagit, Crystal Reports, MS Project, Client Facing Websites

Project Manager/Sr. Business Analyst

Virginia Department of Social Services, Richmond, VA Feb 2014 – Oct 2016

Appeal Notation & Tracking System (ANTS) - The current appeals tracking system (AATS) lacks a tracking mechanism that prevents the Appeals and Fair Hearings Unit from being able to comply with federal timeliness and record-keeping guidelines. A new web system application was designed to be used by the Appeals Staff to streamline and automate all appeal processes.

Responsibilities:

Conducted interviews with hearing officers (HOs) and Program Support Technicians (PSTs) and gathered court business processes and court data from impacted areas to identify current resource contents, analyzed and documented High Level "As-Is" Process flows

Liaison for project with other corporate departments, including Executive, Legal and Information Security and Risk Management

Developed Use Case Specifications, User Interface (UI) diagrams, and elaborate Use Cases through design process

Conducted Requirements Review meetings with business users to identify missing or incomplete requirements and identified potential project risks

Conducted walkthroughs with the end users and stakeholders to gather the change requests to upgrade or change the specifications for the product

Collaborated closely with developers to translate any concerns/questions regarding project requirements, documented detailed analysis of such concerns and reported them in a timely fashion

Owned end-to-end project management activities and take full ownership of project lifecycle

Communicated both detailed and high-level progress to stakeholders at large including executives

Environment: Oracle 11g, JAVA/J2EE Scripts, MS SQL Server, MS Visio, SAMS (Security Identity Access Management System), IBM JAZZ Requirement Manager, IBM JAZZ Change Management, IBM JAZZ Quality Management, IBM JAZZ Design Manager, Cognos Reports

Project Manager/Business Analyst

Bank of America - Charlotte, NC Apr 2011 – Jan 2014

ProfitMAX - It is a proprietary system of Bank of America, which presents information on Customer profitability at various levels (Customer, Relationship, Officer, Accounting Unit (AU), Organizational Unit (OU), etc.) in total or by product. The project is enhancing and adding new features to ProfitMAX to cross sell its products and integrating ProfitMAX with an acquired mortgage application system.

Responsibilities:

Interacted with SMEs to understand and gather requirements based on Credit Risk, Liquidity Risk, Market Risk and Basel II for various reports including regulatory reporting and provided primary liaison between business/operations and development

Facilitated JAD sessions to elicit and identify business to credit risk calculation rules/requirements and documented them for both various business groups and application development team

Experience with developing screen (UI/UX) mockups and application workflows using MS Visio

Addressed all aspects of the loan life cycle, starting from identifying a prospective client to the loan closure

Prepared kicks off decks for project steering committee and project sponsors assessment and created RACI matrix for defining the role assignments to various work packages of WBS

Validated project timelines for each closure of work package assigned to project team and provided weekly project updates to project steering committee and keeping the project documents up to date for reflecting the work items postponed or spilled over to next project phase

Created and maintained data mappings & data dictionary and performed extensive data validations

Involved in developing and executing system and UAT test plans, test scenarios and test cases. Effectively interacted with developers and users for change requests, performed root cause analysis and impact analysis for issue resolutions/escalations

Owned end-to-end project management activities and take full ownership of project lifecycle

Environment: RUP, .NET, Window XP, Oracle 10g, Microsoft Office 2010 Suite (Word, PowerPoint, Access, Excel Macros and Pivot, Outlook, Project, Visio), FirstData for Payment Card Industry (PCI) Compliance

Project Manager/Business Analyst

American Express, AZ, Phoenix Feb 2009 – Feb 2011

AMmerc - The proprietary system was built to monitor the international credit card business and create a streamline access for merchants all over the world for the timely input of transactions based on time zones considering the increasing business volume of the credit card division. The common element in all these systems is the communications link between banks in which information regarding payments and customer accounts was transmitted from one bank to another with appropriate adjustment to customer account balances.

Responsibilities:

Lead regular meetings with cross-functional stakeholders to help them achieve optimal solutions by strategic decision making

Analyzed business specification documents related to different bank payment systems regarding message transformation from current to SWIFT formats for RTGS and SWIFT payments. Gained insights about various transaction file formats and systems used by merchants across the world

Maintained the Master Project Timelines sheet for each work package per project phase life cycle and updating it to reflect the change requests been raised from time to time

Designed and developed use case diagrams and mocked out various user interface diagrams and elements of the application (UI/UX)

Conducted weekly update sessions to provide status checks to project steering committees with involvement of different product teams and QA teams

Documentation of estimations provided by various product owners for a project plan and getting them reviewed/sign off at programmer engagement level. Coordinated with product owners and associated international staff to ascertain user stories, capabilities, and process improvements and monitored user queries about the international customers and responded with relevant information

Conducted highly interactive sprint sessions with project’s stakeholders such as users, QA analysts, and project management team, identifying and resolving issues

Facilitated UAT (User Acceptance Testing) with the stakeholders and the business users, and the errors discovered were fixed and verified via Regression Testing

Owned end-to-end project management activities and take full ownership of project lifecycle

Environment: .NET, MS Access, MS SQL Server, MS SharePoint, HP Quality Center, Quick Test Pro, MS Visio, Windows XP, HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)

technical skills

Requirements: UML, Enterprise Architect, IBM Rational Rose, Rational Requite

Pro/ (Dynamic Object-Oriented Requirements System) DOORS, IBM Rational JAZZ Requirement Manager, JIRA

Design: Snagit, MS Visio, IBM Rational JAZZ Design Manager, Business Process Modelling Notation (BPM using BPMN) and Unified Modeling Language (UML)

Methodologies: SDLC, Agile, SWOT, Cost/Benefit Analysis, RACI, Rational Unified Process (RUP), Waterfall, Scrum, Kanban

Project Monitoring: MS Office Suite, Clarity, Dashboard, Plain View, Share Point, MS Project, MS Office, MS SharePoint, MS Excel, MS Team Foundation Server, HP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), AHA, JIRA, Confluence, Rally

Defect Tracking: HP Quality Centre, Atlassian JIRA, Rational ClearQuest, IBM Rational JAZZ Quality Manager,

HP Quick Test Professional, Selenium, Zephyr

Other: Rational ClearCase, IBM Rational Application Developer (RAD), WebSphere Application Server (WAS), WebSphere Registry and Repository (WSRR), IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (WESB), People Admin (COTS), PeopleSoft, SAP, Confluence, Cognos, Google Big Query, Google Big Data Analytics, Microsoft Power BI, Microsoft Azure, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Workday, Snowflake, AWS, Talend, MSSQL

EDUCATION CERTIFICATIONS

(MS) Master of Science in Information Systems (Year 2013)

STRATFORD UNIVERSITY, RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, US

(BS) Bachelor of Science in Computer Science (Year 2008)

FERGUSSON COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF PUNE, MAHARASHTRA, INDIA

(SFC) Scrum Fundamental Certified – SCRUMstudy

(SMC) Scrum Master Certified – SCRUMstudy

(POPM) SAFe® 5.1 Product Owner Product Manager Certification – Scaled Agile Inc.

Certified Data Scientist - Data Science Master Program - ZaranTech

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