Aakanksha Gautam

Senior Scrum Master/Senior Business Analyst

The Hartford

Hartford, CT

04.2014 - Current

Handling multiple teams (four teams) with SAFe, SCRUM, and Kanban processes across different geographical locations.
Successfully hosted many PI Planning sessions as a Senior Scrum Master, and solved many interdependencies among multiple teams.
Identifying, understanding, escalating, and mitigating various risks and challenges faced during the execution of the project.
Aligning all the teams to follow all the Agile Scrum principles and ensuring.
Consolidate all the team's metrics and capacity calculations, and report to leadership and clients.
Handle all the release planning, raise change requests, approvals, and take care of release-related activities on the production support days.
Collaborate with stakeholders and BI teams to refine product features, align them with business needs, and ensure the solution design meets both current and future requirements.
Coaching and empowering teams, protecting them from outside forces by being assertive and empathetic.
Performed audits of other teams to identify gaps and suggest improvements.
Have a good understanding of various estimation techniques, retro processes.
Building cross-functional teams and motivating team members to improve their competencies.
Introduce various team-building and icebreaker exercises to create bonding among the team members.
Identifying, understanding, escalating, and mitigating various risks and challenges faced during the execution of the project.
Agile Project Leadership: Led cross-functional teams in agile settings to deliver complex insurance transformation projects, employing rigorous requirement management and solution design, which accelerated project timelines by 15%, and enhanced stakeholder satisfaction.
Work with stakeholders (Product Owner, Client Partners), IT (cross-train teams, Solution Architect), and Procurement (multiple source teams) to provide expert-level industry knowledge as the Subject Matter Expert (SME) to build and enhance features of their data warehouse.
Facilitates team effectiveness by answering questions, providing clarifications, and assisting development team members with their understanding of the requests and the expected outcome.
Create and present solution design documents and an executive summary to leadership, other SMEs, and/or business analysts.
Partnered with stakeholders to define epics, user stories, and acceptance criteria, driving the Agile development process.
Led daily Scrums, Sprint Planning Meetings, and Sprint Reviews, maintaining a focus on achieving business goals.
dentified risks associated with sprint goals and worked with the team to mitigate them.
Organized meetings between stakeholders from different departments to discuss potential solutions or strategies.
Acted as a servant leader to the development team by removing impediments and resolving conflicts.
Maintained product backlogs, ensuring that items are well defined and prioritized based on business value.
Enforced scrum values such as transparency, respect, commitment, courage, focus, openness and inspection.
Facilitated sprint planning, daily stand-up meetings, reviews, retrospectives, demos and other Scrum-related meetings.
Assisted with developing and maintaining a product backlog according to business priorities.
Established clear communication channels between all stakeholders involved in the project lifecycle.
Evaluated existing processes and procedures within an organization to identify areas for improvement.
Identified and removed impediments to the team's progress through effective facilitation of problem solving sessions.
Collaborated with stakeholders from different departments to ensure successful delivery of projects.
Tracked and reported on project progress using burn down charts, velocity tracking and other metrics.
Created detailed reports outlining progress against key performance indicators set out at the beginning of each project phase.
Provided guidance to product owners on grooming user stories for development teams.
Maintained up-to-date records of work completed during each sprint cycle including documentation related to any changes made.
Developed strategies for continuous improvement of the software development process.
Provided risk mitigation strategies and quality assurance, ensuring the successful delivery of high-impact projects.
Act as the main point of contact and trusted advisor for business units, providing strategic consulting, and conducting business and systems analysis for key initiatives.
Ensure alignment and communication of IT priorities with business objectives, enabling the successful execution of strategic imperatives.
Map business processes and technologies, illustrating how work and data flow through the organization to optimize operations.
Lead information-gathering sessions to collect current and desired capabilities, outcomes, and value-realization metrics.
Facilitate the planning and execution of information services and initiatives, ensuring they align with business goals.
Collaborate cross-functionally to coordinate decision-making, manage interdependencies, and achieve desired outcomes.
Lead requirements definition, prioritization, project tracking, and status reporting across small to medium-sized projects.
Assess the relevance and alignment of requirements against business objectives, compliance standards, and technological priorities.
Partner with Product Management, Customer Service, Marketing, and Commercial functions to drive business success.
Thrive in a matrixed environment that prioritizes speed, agility, and efficiency.
Key Achievements: Successfully led the Commercial Lines Cloud Modernization project, resulting in a 10% increase in efficiency and cost savings.
Lead the design and implementation of cloud analytics solutions that drive business intelligence reporting, focusing on financial services.
Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure seamless integration of AI-driven insights into business processes.
Conduct impact analysis and provide feedback on process improvements, leading to increased efficiency and effectiveness.
Identify and map enterprise services to user interfaces, optimizing data flows, and enhancing user experience across digital channels.
Develop logical navigation flows, and support the design of chatbot interactions, improving customer satisfaction.
Create and maintain design documentation using Lucid, ensuring alignment with architectural standards.
Manage risks, dependencies, and issues in solution design, providing strategic recommendations for business and technology teams.
Recommended and implemented technical solutions for data management, BI, and analytics, aligning with business needs and industry trends.
Facilitated feature refinement sessions, clearly articulating business needs, and bridging gaps between business and IT teams.
Supported the adoption of new technologies, leading user onboarding and training initiatives to drive successful project outcomes.
Contributed to the enterprise-wide architecture strategy, focusing on data integration, governance, and reporting.
Strategic Business Analysis: Championed transformation initiatives at The Hartford, spearheading strategy development, including gap analysis and roadmap creation, resulting in streamlined processes and enhanced product assessments that aligned with organizational goals, contributing to a 10% increase in project efficiency.
Advanced Data Analysis & Reporting: Conducted comprehensive data analysis and crafted strategic reports for client partners at Pfizer, boosting decision-making efficiency by leveraging trend insights, which directly contributed to a 10% revenue increase from improved client service offerings.
Stakeholder Collaboration & Training: Served as the primary liaison between business and IT teams, enhancing communication and project clarity, which decreased implementation errors by 20% and improved training outcomes for end users, ensuring high adoption rates of new systems.
Innovative Solution Architecture: Developed and implemented solution architectures that supported business requirements while facilitating the seamless migration from legacy systems, achieving a reduction in operational costs by 12%, and improving system reliability and data accuracy.
Insurance Transformation leader with experience in leading complex and large-scale transformation initiatives, strategy, and technology consulting programs in the life, commercial lines, and group benefits domain.
Expertise spans strategy development, including current state assessment, gap analysis, future state roadmap development, product evaluation and assessment, solution architecture, requirement management, and solution design.
Utilizes knowledge of business objectives, products, workflow, and processes to assist team members in developing solutions that deliver value to the end user.
Interpret business needs, and identify solution recommendations for business problems.

Summary

Overview

Work History

Senior Scrum Master/Senior Business Analyst

Education

Bachelor of Engineering - Computer Science

Skills

Certification

Timeline

Senior Scrum Master/Senior Business Analyst

Bachelor of Engineering - Computer Science

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