Project Management Technology Enablement

Amalgamating Delivery Assurance, Program and project management experience with over 18 years of professional learning in Software Testing toward commitment-driven deliveries. Collaborated across active roles viz., Delivery Management, Digital Transformation, Pre-Sales, Client Partner, Quality Audits, QA Consulting, Process and Technology Enablement and Improvements, Vendor and Client Relations. Built highly competitive and productive agile teams with a focus on customer-centricity, continuous learning and technology enablement.

Core Competencies

Proficient in Functional Test, Integration Testing, Automation, API testing and DB Testing

Domain & COTS

12+ years of P&C and Life insurance domain and COTS products viz., Insurance (Guidewire, Duckcreek, TAP, Insbridge, Biztalk), Credit Cards, Banking, & Health Care

Ways of Working - Agile (Safe, Kanban & Scrum), Waterfall, Hybrid and V-Model

Proficient in working in Test Driven Development (TDD) and Behavior Driven Development (BDD)

Project Management

Delivery Enrichment Agile Transformation Quality Audits QA Consulting Resource Mgmt. Conflict Mgmt. Escalation Mgmt. Defect Mgmt. Risks Stakeholder and Vendor Management Planning & Strategy Capacity Planning Technology Enablement Campaign Management Metrics & Reporting

QA Consulting

Delivery Assurance/ Audits for 40+ Accounts Assess Project performance, Improve Technology and process maturity Strategize and transform delivery Orchestrated talent alignment and skill retention strategy

Competency Building

Capability- Build, Maintain & Globalize Competency enrich and enable Monitor Net add, Revenue & Growth

Pre Sales

Collaborate RFI/RFP & Renewals by giving solutions, Estimating, resource loading, reviewing and Signoff client presentations SOW review

Technology & Process enablement

Value adds CICD implementation Shift left – Automation Focus, API Testing, Early Performance Project tracking through right Tools Invoking improvised thinking among the peers

Technical Skills

Database - Oracle11g/10g, DB2,SQL,Teradata,SQL Server

Test Management Tools - ALM, Blueprint, Version One, Azure DevOps (ADO), JIRA, Team Track

Data Migration Testing Tool - Informatica Power Center / Workflow Manager / Monitor & SSIS

Data Base Tool – MySQL, Toad, SQL Developer

Languages - SQL,JAVA, VBScript, VBA

Automation Tools - SOAPUI, POSTMAN, Selenium

Technology Enablement:

Coordinated with the DevOps team to enable CICD pipeline for the automated execution of Test scripts

Shift left teams towards Automation first approach leveraging automation tool stack - Selenium

Shift left Performance testing to mitigate performance bottlenecks early in the lifecycle and achieve improved efficiency and faster time to market

Implemented Project tracking through Automated Dashboards leveraging Test Mgmt. tools JIRA,ADO & ALM

Governance:

Transparent & periodic communication on the program health through WSR and MSR to the senior leadership

Orchestrated talent & skill retention strategy by up-skilling & cross-skilling, resulting in 30% increase in productivity and client satisfaction

Estimate the future projections, plan and align talents accordingly

Active participation in the monthly Governance and Executive Sponsor Meets

Resource Utilization, Band Optimizations and revenue analysis - Monthly, Quarterly and Annual

Professional Experience

Pune Maharashtra

Jan 2006 – Dec 2010

Software Associate

Capita, SBI General

Pune Maharashtra

Jan 2011 – Sep 2012

Senior Test Project Lead

JPMC, NBS

Hyderabad United Kingdom (UK)

Oct 2012 – Oct 2020

Manager COE Lead

CNA, WTW, DLG, RSA & Zurich-UK

Hyderabad United States (USA)

Oct 2020 – Till Date

Senior Manager

Hiscox, Society Insurance, Munich Re

Qualitat Systems

IBM India

Developed expertise in Functional Testing and DB Testing.

Customized applications to align with specific project requirements.

Crafted test scenarios and test cases based on Functional and UI documents.

Rigorously tested application behavior using a diverse range of input data, including normal and erroneous inputs.

Ensured test results were in compliance with project requirements.

Validated and verified resulting data and tracked bug fixes.

Maintained effective interactions with clients, fostering strong client relationships.

Created and disseminated detailed Status Reports to stakeholders.

Proficiently handled Core Banking and Mortgage applications.

Conducted comprehensive Black box testing for application evaluation.

Executed end-to-end testing procedures for integration functionalities.

Demonstrated expertise in crafting and executing test cases using the QC tool.

Managed the responsibility of identifying and logging defects via QC.

Successfully aligned test cases with project requirements.

Collaborated closely with developers to discuss UI changes and enhancements.

Fostered effective communication with onsite counterparts.

Utilized MS SQL 2008 to run data queries for validation.

Regularly provided detailed status reports to Off-shore and On-shore teams.

Expertly managed case tracking and defect management within QC.

Facilitated productive status calls with the onsite team and clients, delivering comprehensive work updates.

Capgemini India & UK

ValueMomentum India & USA

Led the Center of Excellence (CoE) in the domain.

Demonstrated significant experience in establishing Testing Centers of Excellence (TCoE) in both the UK and India.

Served as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) in the Insurance and Reinsurance domains.

Played a pivotal role in facilitating phased Agile Adoption.

Led the transition from a Waterfall delivery model to Agile Methodologies for project delivery.

Spearheaded project estimation, test strategy development, and planning.

Contributed to Pre-Sales efforts by creating solutions, approaches, Estimations and strategies for client proposals.

Effectively managed resource allocation and work prioritization.

Conducted internal quality audits for projects.

Delivered project-level reporting at the Business Unit level.

Initiated learning practices and conducted training and engagement activities.

Took charge of resource planning, financial forecasting, and resource training and development.

Directed test management activities, including Test Strategy, Test Planning, Test Execution, and Defect Management.

Published customized Daily Status Reports (DSRs) and Weekly Status Reports (WSRs) for various client stakeholders.

Maintained the Capacity Plan and consistently updated project stakeholders on resource efforts.

Developed plans for all process areas in accordance with the Testing Project Plan.

Project Planning: Involved in comprehensive project plans that encompass project objectives, scope, deliverables, and timelines. This involves creating a work breakdown structure, identifying project dependencies

Team Leadership: I excel in building and leading project teams, effectively assigning tasks, setting clear expectations, and offering guidance and support. My leadership ensures effective communication, collaboration, and motivation, resulting in a cohesive and high-performing team.

Stakeholder Engagement: Engaged with diverse stakeholders, including clients, executives, team members, and vendors. My role includes identifying and managing stakeholder expectations, and ensuring their requirements are considered throughout the project lifecycle.

Risk Management: Identifying, assessing, and mitigating project risks and issues. This involves developing risk mitigation strategies, creating contingency plans, and proactively addressing any obstacles or challenges that may arise.

Budget and Resource Control: Established and oversaw the project budget, carefully monitoring expenses, controlling costs, and optimizing resource allocation. I ensure that project resources, including personnel, equipment, and materials, are utilized effectively.

Project Monitoring and Control: Closely monitored project progress against the plan, track key performance indicators (KPIs), and implement appropriate control measures to ensure project success. I conduct regular status meetings, review project documentation, and make necessary plan adjustments.

Quality Assurance: Sustain the project's quality standards by conducting thorough quality reviews, and inspections, and implementing quality assurance processes throughout the project lifecycle.

Reporting and Documentation: Prepare clear and concise status reports, progress updates, and project documentation to communicate project status, risks, and issues to stakeholders. Transparency and informed decision-making are key priorities.

Continuous Improvement: Actively foster a culture of continuous improvement within the project team. This includes identifying lessons learned, capturing best practices, and implementing process improvements to enhance project efficiency and effectiveness.

Customer Satisfaction: Prioritize customer satisfaction by consistently delivering projects that meet or exceed client expectations. I engage with clients, gather feedback, and promptly address any concerns or issues to maintain positive client relationships.

Certifications

PMI – PMP (Project Management Professional) – September 2024 valid through August 2027

SAFe 5.0 – Scaled Agile – August 2022

EM (Engagement Manager) Foundation (Capgemini Internal Certificate)

AINS 21 – Property & Casualty Insurance Principles – July 2018

ISTQB Foundation

Education

Bachelor of Computer Application - MCRPV University June 1998 - August 2001

Project Summary – Value Momentum India and USA

Project Name: GW Cloud Upgrade

Client Name: Capital Insurance Group

Duration: Oct 2023 to till date

Role: Program Manager

Roles and Responsibilities:

Reviewed the Cost plan and Service Agreement/SOW to mark “In Scope” and “Out of Scope” items

Transitioned the clients from the existing T&M and Fixed Bid approaches to UOW (Unit of Work) model

Strategized and implemented Delivery and knowledge transition from incumbents thereby increasing CSAT by 25% and ensuring knowledge retention within the scrum team

Collaborated with Clients, Vendors and internal Practices to assess the “As Is”, proposed solution and Road Map, enabled Best Practices and transformed to the “To Be”

Ensured release deployments to SIT and other QA environments on time, post reviewing release notes

Monitored Scrum of Scrums, Retrospectives and Production defect triage meetings, thereby limiting production defect leakage to 1%

Sought feedback, and enabled continuous improvements through Technology, Process and people enablement

Ensured adequate talent alignment through proper resource forecasting & demand management strategies

Fostered periodic monitoring, assessment, and gap analysis to ensure the right process & technology enablement

Resolved escalations by continuous monitoring, arranging war room sessions and communication

Transformed teams towards Agile ways of working and ensured the team followed the rituals

Monitor the frequency of spikes, spillovers & resource utilization and device remediation plan

Managing the day-to-day activities of the program with GW / Capital Insurance / ValueMomentum

Worked directly at Client location to ensure the best deliverables possible

Responsible for all deliverables like Test Strategy document, detailed Test Plan, daily summary reports and Test Summary reports

Lead the defect triage meeting. Reviewing and assigning defects in JIRA

Project the everyday’ s/Weekly status, highlight risk and mitigation plan

Participate in governance meeting to project QA highlights

Conduct retrospection meeting with offshore to go over lessons learnt and submit test summary report

Supervised, mentored and supported Dev/QA teams

Project Name: Release 2

Client Name: Hiscox

Duration: Oct 2020 to Sep 2023

Role: Delivery Manager

Roles and Responsibilities:

Served as first point of contact to Product Management, Project Development Leads and Quality Assurance Manager to create QA milestones.

Review and obtain a detailed understanding of the project scope, requirements, product model and design in order to utilize the appropriate test method to test against them

Created process flow guidelines, procedures and test plan and case templates.

Brainstorm with BAs to understand business scope, architecture and the integrations

Capacity Planning, Risk assessments

Peer review test cases /scenarios based on functional requirements and design documents created by offshore

Participating in the sprint planning, retrospection meetings etc.

Led QA Team, used SCRUM methodology to manage full cycle of testing across projects.

Lead the defect triage meeting

Reviewing, logging and assigning defects in JIRA

Project the everyday’ s/Weekly status, highlight risk and mitigation plan

Participate in governance meeting to project QA highlights

Publish root cause analysis report with bi-monthly

Conduct retrospection meeting with offshore to go over lessons learnt and submit test summary report

Supervised, mentored and supported QA teams

Coordinated & facilitated Customer Journeys and Use Case diagnostic workshops with customers to ensure timely deliverables across each phase

Ensured release deployments to SIT and other QA environments on time, post reviewing release notes

Transformed teams towards Agile ways of working and ensured the team followed the rituals

Monitor the frequency of spikes, spillovers & resource utilization and device remediation plan

Liaise with Development team and clients to understand the release pipeline and align testing activities

Mentored the team, resolved technical conflicts and met aspirations, thereby increasing resource retention by 20%

Inculcated and encouraged innovative thinking in the team thereby increasing productivity by 30%

Demand fulfillment, Resource optimization, Revenue & Net Add analysis

Collaborated in RFI/RFP by reviewing solutions, Estimating and resource loading

Reviewed SOW, onboarded resources and aligned the Project team

Performed periodic assessments, published Progress reports along with the As-Is and proposed To-Be

Project Summary – Capgemini India and UK

Project Name: Policy & Billing Implementation

Client Name: Royal Sun Alliance (RSA – United Kingdom)

Duration: Aug 2018 to Oct 2020

Role: Project Manager

Roles and Responsibilities:

Duckcreek Products Implementation and manage Functional & Automation Testing workstream.

Develop Release Test plan/strategy by taking the inputs from BA’s, PM’s, QA Manager and Scrum Masters.

Creation of Test plan, Test Schedule, Test Strategy and Test Cases. Maintaining these artifacts in the Test Management Tool Azure Devops.

Obtain client signoff for test requirements and testing deliverables.

Involve in Sprint planning along with discovery and delivery teams with all the finalized user stories for each sprint

Developed Metrics, risks and dependencies to track testing activities of the team.

Laying out the frameworks for logging, automation and release management.

Facilitating Triage calls for smooth resolution of the issues/defects.

Facilitating in developing the Process level artifacts (Test Execution Summary Report, Metrics etc.,) for improvements for every release and thus improving the productivity.

Responsible for end-to-end project engagements from initiation phase to test closure.

Responsible for SIT and UAT for very challenging applications in Insurance projects.

Ensure tests are executed as per the quality framework and process and under the agreed governance structure with stakeholders in the test strategy and test plan.

Responsible for test co-ordination, control/monitoring and delivery of the engaged project.

Responsible for producing the final test reports, test metrics plus other required documentation like test closure reports etc.

Analyze and propose changes involving test management, process and standards to maximize efficiency.

Implement best practices to ensure quality project deliverable

Project Name: GW Policy Transformation

Client Name: Direct Line Group (DLG – United Kingdom)

Duration: Feb 2017 to Aug 2018

Role: Test Manager

Roles and Responsibilities:

Document test results and perform defect management activities with defect logging.

Conduct defect triages and work with development team until defects closure

Responsible for reporting overall program and project level testing status, defect and test execution report to the client.

Produce daily status reports and dashboards to the stake holders highlighting the impediments with mitigation plan.

Configuration management tools, for maintaining the project related documents and their versioning system.

Test management of the overall delivery from Quality Assurance standpoint.

Anticipate and escalate risks and issues to the customer promptly along with remedial contingencies wherever possible.

Forecast resource and technology needs to suit the needs of the project(s) and get resource(s) on boarded.

Arranging functional training for the team. Managing testing resources and assigning them project related task and activities.

Identify and optimizing various testing techniques for the needs of the clients.

Setting up various test procedures/standards according to the testing demands.

Apply domain expertise and innovate ideas to design solutions, evaluate multiple options to meet client’s business requirements.

Implementing Capgemini best practices and processes in the project.

Has worked in all stages of testing like requirement analysis, test plan, test case creation, test execution, bug logging and tracking, reporting.

Identified several complex scenarios and thereby implemented automated smoke packs and regression packs which was very well appreciated by onshore management.

Identification of time travel scenarios and testing them has really helped to find out issues in real time situations.

Project Name: Multiple LOB’s Implementation / Upgrade of GW Policy Center/ Domain COE Lead

Client Name: Continental North America (CNA - USA)

Duration: Oct 2012 to Jan 2017

Role: Domain Lead / Test Manager / Test Lead

Roles and Responsibilities:

Led the Center of Excellence (CoE) in the domain.

Demonstrated significant experience in establishing Testing Centers of Excellence (TCoE) in both the UK and India.

Served as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) in the Insurance and Reinsurance domains.

Played a pivotal role in facilitating phased Agile Adoption.

Led the transition from a Waterfall delivery model to Agile Methodologies for project delivery.

Spearheaded project estimation, test strategy development, and planning.

Contributed to Pre-Sales efforts by creating solutions, approaches, Estimations and strategies for client proposals.

Effectively managed resource allocation and work prioritization.

Conducted internal quality audits for projects.

Delivered project-level reporting at the Business Unit level.

Initiated learning practices and conducted training and engagement activities.

Took charge of resource planning, financial forecasting, and resource training and development.

Directed test management activities, including Test Strategy, Test Planning, Test Execution, and Defect Management.

Published customized Daily Status Reports (DSRs) and Weekly Status Reports (WSRs) for various client stakeholders.

Maintained the Capacity Plan and consistently updated project stakeholders on resource efforts.

Developed plans for all process areas in accordance with the Testing Project Plan.

Project Summary – IBM India

Project Name: KSD

Client Name: Nationwide Building Society (NBS) UK

Duration: July 2011 to Sep 2012

Role: Test Specialist

Roles and Responsibilities:

Involved in Black box testing of the application

End to end testing of the integration features of the application

Knowledge in writing & executing the test cases using QC tool

Responsible for raising the defects using QC

Mapping test cases with requirements.

Communicate with the onsite counterpart.

Run Queries in MS SQL 2008

Daily Status reporting to Off-shore and On-shore team.

Tracking the cases and raising defects in QC

Handling status calls with onsite team & clients, giving detailed report of work

Project Summary – Accenture India

Project Name: AMS Next Generation

Client Name: Zurich Financial (USA)

Duration: Jan 2010 to June 2011

Role: Test Engineer

Roles and Responsibilities:

Ensure test results met with the requirements

Writing Test scenarios and test cases as per Functional & UI documents

Verify and validate the resulted data and bug fixes

Testing the behavior of the application using a wide range of normal and erroneous input data

Generate defect report using Excel sheet

Onsite Interaction

Interacting with the developers for assisting them in identification, resolving bugs

Status Reports

Project Summary – Qualitat Systems India

Project Name: Report Engine

Client Name: Product

Duration: Jan 2007 to Dec 2010

Role: Software Associate

Roles and Responsibilities:

Writing Test scenarios and test cases as per Functional & UI documents

Testing the behavior of the application using a wide range of normal and erroneous input data

Ensure test results met with the requirements

Verify and validate the resulted data and bug fixes

Generate defect report using Excel sheet

Involved in discussions with developers for UI changes

Kshitiz Saxena

Plainsboro New Jersey – USA

Email – ***************@*****.*** Mobile +1-212-***-****

LinkedIn – www.linkedin.com/in/kshitiz-saxena-955b3335

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