Agile Delivery & Technical Project Manager

RISHI RAJ

TECHNICAL PROJECT MANAGER • AGILE DELIVERY LEAD • SCRUM MASTER • AGILE COACH

Kokapet, Hyderabad, India +91-829******* ***********@*****.*** linkedin.com/in/rishi-raj-3207ab51 Professional Summary

Experienced Project and Agile Delivery Leader with 15+ years of IT experience leading end-to-end software delivery across Banking, Financial Services and Digital Gaming domains from initiation and planning through execution, monitoring, deployment, and post-implementation review. Proven expertise in end-to-end project delivery, Agile execution, stakeholder management, governance, risk mitigation, and cross-functional team leadership. Experienced in scaling delivery using Scrum, Kanban, and Lean practices to improve predictability, cycle time, and business outcomes. Passionate about AI-enabled delivery, leveraging automation, predictive insights, and data-driven decision-making to accelerate value delivery and drive continuous improvement.

Core Competencies

Project Planning and Execution • Resource & Capacity Planning • Release Planning & Management • Agile Delivery Leadership

• Delivery Health Reporting • AI-Augmented Delivery • Scrum, Kanban & LeSS Frameworks • Agile Coaching & Mentoring • Program-Level Agile Delivery • Agile Metrics & KPI Dashboards • Backlog Management & Prioritization • Stakeholder & Executive Reporting • Risk & Dependency Management • Cross-Functional Team Leadership • Cloud Fundamentals (Azure, AWS) • Conceptual Knowledge of SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) — self-studied, not yet applied on a live SAFe program Delivery Excellence Highlights

• Managed delivery of multiple concurrent projects across Banking and Digital Gaming domains.

• Governed project risks, issues, assumptions, and dependencies through structured RAID management.

• Coordinated business, product, engineering, QA, and operations teams throughout the project lifecycle.

• Managed scope, timelines, resource allocation, and release planning for strategic initiatives.

• Improved cycle time by 25% through flow-based delivery practices.

• Achieved 98% delivery predictability through capacity forecasting and proactive risk management.

• Reduced planning effort by 30% using AI-assisted backlog refinement and reporting automation.

• Coached 12+ Agile leaders including Scrum Masters and Product Owners.

• Built executive dashboards tracking delivery health, dependencies, risks and flow efficiency.

• Led cross-pod dependency management and value delivery alignment supporting strategic product releases. Professional Experience

Agile Delivery Lead — Entain India Apr 2025 – Present

• Led delivery performance across multiple pods within the pillar, providing leadership visibility into delivery health, flow metrics, dependencies, risks and capacity through Jira and Confluence dashboards.

• Introduced flow-based delivery practices and Kanban metrics including cycle time, lead time, throughput and WIP ageing, resulting in a 25% reduction in feature delivery cycle time.

• Owned delivery governance for multiple strategic initiatives, ensuring milestones, dependencies, risks, and resource allocations remained aligned with business objectives.

• Maintained RAID logs and facilitated risk mitigation planning with Product, Engineering, and Leadership stakeholders.

• Produced executive status reports and delivery dashboards to support leadership decision-making and portfolio prioritization.

• Facilitated cross-pod planning and dependency management sessions, improving alignment across Product, Engineering and Delivery teams and reducing dependency-driven delays.

• Established pod-level delivery health reviews and board walks to identify ageing work, bottlenecks and systemic impediments, improving delivery predictability to 98%.

• Championed AI-assisted delivery practices using Atlassian Intelligence for story creation, backlog refinement and reporting automation, reducing planning effort by 30%.

• Applied predictive capacity-forecasting models to flag at-risk sprints early, lifting on-time delivery to 98% and reducing late- stage scope surprises for stakeholders.

• Coached Scrum Masters, Product Owners and delivery teams on flow thinking, dependency management, data-driven decision making and continuous improvement practices. Senior Scrum Master — Wells Fargo Feb 2023 – Apr 2025

• Managed project plans, dependencies, and delivery milestones across multiple banking initiatives.

• Facilitated Agile ceremonies and coaching for 6+ Scrum teams in a regulated banking environment, raising Agile maturity scores from 3.0 to 4.5/5 within 18 months.

• Built a line-of-business Agile performance tracking framework, cutting executive reporting effort by ~40% and enabling proactive escalation of at-risk financial-product deliverables.

• Protected team focus from scope creep and external disruptions, maintaining steady sprint velocity on high-priority financial products used by over 1M retail customers.

• Ran quarterly retrospectives and Agile health checks that resolved systemic bottlenecks, improving team throughput by 15% and shortening average story cycle time.

• Worked closely with leadership to communicate delivery health, risks, dependencies and capacity constraints for regulatory and business initiatives.

• Facilitated root cause analysis and systems-thinking workshops to address recurring impediments and improve organizational delivery effectiveness.

Senior Scrum Master — Wipro May 2021 – Feb 2023

• Built a culture of accountability across 3 distributed Agile teams, improving sprint predictability by 20% and reducing client escalations tied to missed commitments.

• Designed and delivered Agile training for 150+ team members and newly onboarded Product Owners across geographies, accelerating new-hire ramp-up time.

• Implemented retrospective-driven workflow changes that streamlined handoffs, cutting blocked-story rate by 18% and reducing cross-team dependency delays.

• Led Agile transformation initiatives across distributed teams using Lean and Kanban principles to improve workflow efficiency and delivery predictability.

Application Developer Agile Practitioner — JP Morgan Chase Jan 2016 – May 2021

• Delivered enterprise-grade application features across multiple Agile sprints, contributing to a 30% reduction in technical debt on a core banking platform.

• Architected scalable API integrations for high-traffic financial applications, reducing system latency by 20% and improving transaction reliability.

• Partnered closely with Product Owners to refine user stories, reducing mid-sprint scope changes by 25%. Business Technology Analyst — Deloitte Nov 2013 – Dec 2015

• Built KPI reporting dashboards and executive scorecards using SQL and BI tools, enabling data-driven decisions across multiple business units.

• Integrated technology solutions with business workflows, reducing manual reporting time by 30% and freeing analyst hours for higher-value work.

Senior Software Engineer — iGate Global Solutions Jun 2010 – Oct 2013

• Led legacy-to-modern architecture migration projects, reducing system downtime by 40% and improving deployment reliability for client-facing systems.

• Mentored junior engineers on Agile-aligned engineering and code-quality practices, raising team delivery benchmarks ahead of two major audits.

Certifications

• Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO)

• Certified Scrum Master (CSM)

• ICAgile Certified Professional – Agile Coaching (ICP-ACC)

• OKR Foundation – OKR Institute

• AI for Scrum Masters – Scrum Alliance

• AI-JCA (AI - Jira, Confluence, Azure DevOps) – Agile Bodhi

• Rovo Fundamentals – Atlassian

Technical Skills

Agile Tools: Jira, Confluence, Miro, Azure DevOps

Methodologies: Scrum, Kanban, LeSS, Waterfall, OKRs, SAFe (theoretical knowledge) Data & BI Tools: SQL, Informatica, Pentaho, Crystal Reports, Power BI Cloud Platforms: Microsoft Azure (AZ-900 certified), AWS (Cloud Practitioner certified) Soft Skills: Executive Stakeholder Management, Servant Leadership, Facilitation, Change Management AI & Automation: Atlassian Intelligence, AI-Assisted Backlog Refinement, Predictive Delivery Analytics, Workflow Automation, AI Reporting

Education

Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) — Vinayaka Missions University, 2005–2009 (81.13%)

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