KASHISH NAIR
Agile Scrum Master
Glen Allen,VA
Summary
Innovative servant leader with overall 13+ years of IT experience and 5+ years in delivering high quality business solutions using agile scrum methodologies for end-to-end software development and delivery. An accomplished information services professional with extensive experience in bringing cutting-edge technology to corporate clients. Proven ability to manage end to end projects, conduct accurate needs analysis, solve problems, assess technical capabilities, conduct strategic planning, build, and motivate teams and effective client communication.
Overview
14
14
years of professional experience
9
9
Certification
Work History
Scrum Master
Cognizant Technology Solutions
Richmond, VA
2021.04 - 2024.01
- Collaborate, facilitate scrum events such as Sprint Planning, Daily Stand-Ups, Retrospectives and Reviews for multiple scrum teams responsible for building Retail Enterprise application with large datasets, leveraging the Power BI reporting platform to deliver reports with a wide variety of metric visualizations supporting thousands of users on different access levels via desktop or a mobile device and more
- Coordination with product owners and protect the team from distraction, over-commitment, manage backlog, prioritize resolution of defects/bugs and lease planning along with the reporting in scrum meetings of 15 to 20 Epics delivery each quarter
- Quarterly Budget Planning, Resource Management
- Conducted demos of completed work at the end of each sprint cycle.
- Kept up-to-date with industry trends in agile software development methods.
- Enforced scrum values such as transparency, respect, commitment, courage, focus, openness and inspection.
- Created dashboards and reports using various tools such as JIRA, Confluence to track project progress and milestones.
- Organized meetings between stakeholders from different departments to discuss potential solutions or strategies.
- Worked closely with senior management and other stakeholders during strategic planning sessions for upcoming releases.
- Participated in feature design discussions offering insights from an Agile perspective when necessary.
- Acted as a servant leader to the development team by removing impediments and resolving conflicts.
- Coached stakeholders on their roles in the Scrum process and how to best support the team's success.
- Maintained product backlogs, ensuring that items are well defined and prioritized based on business value.
- Monitored progress of sprints, providing visibility into project status for stakeholders.
- Assisted with release planning and coordinated efforts between multiple teams working on related projects.
- Provided guidance to Product Owners regarding Agile principles and best practices for managing product backlogs.
- Tracked metrics related to sprint performance and identified areas of improvement for future sprints.
- Collaborated with other Scrum Masters across teams to ensure consistency in processes and tools used.
- Supported the development team in understanding user stories, acceptance criteria and definition of done.
- Encouraged continuous process improvement initiatives through retrospectives.
- Developed training materials to educate stakeholders about agile methodologies.
- Identified risks associated with sprint goals and worked with the team to mitigate them.
- Handling JIRA Migration for scrum team, Quarterly Epic Estimation, Co-ordination with product owner to keep the product road map updated
- Confluence Space Creation for Scrum team with access management and handling different pages for onboarding new team members, knowledge base and more
- Service Request and Incident Management in ServiceNow for handling different Infrastructure
- Onboarding, Offboarding resources and Applications related requests or P1/P2/P3 Incidents reported by business
- Project Delivery for program level initiative of migrating the data ingested from multiple sources to single destination Snowflake
- Project Delivery of the initiative to bring the data into the central repository (Snowflake) for further reporting purposes using Azure Data Factory
- Budget Management upto $5M
- Being Awarded for Client, Star of the month.
Scrum Master
S&P Global Inc
Charlottesville, Virginia
2019.07 - 2021.02
- Collaborate, facilitate scrum ceremonies and coach two scrum teams responsible for building dozens of software products and automated tools at S&P Global revolving market data and logistics domain
- Coordination with product owners and protect the team from distraction, over-commitment, manage backlog, prioritize resolution of defects/bugs as evidenced by the on-time delivery of 8 major initiatives
- Striving to remove the team's impediments be it technical or behavioral by enacting change and continuous improvement, increasing the productivity of scrum teams by 16% and the quality of deliverables by 22% hence empowering teams to self-organize and grow cross-functionally
- Communicated with cross management, engineers, product managers and support specialists to meet the goal of addressing and resolving issues within 24 hours following to document the root cause analysis
- Track and communicated team velocity, agile metrics, and sprint, release progress by creating an efficient release plan to project management leadership
- Smoothing the entire process of release management by providing extensive support to the scrum teams by adhering to the release checklist, seeking approvals from release engineering team to build and deploy the Jenkins and support post release for any issues reported
- Provided the team mapping and sizing for the portfolio projects during the beginning of each release cycle
- Escalated risks on time by downgrading project health to red and found ways to mitigate the same to upgrade it back to green
- Created wiki knowledge base by documenting multiple processes for the scrum team on the market data project to help them dig into the issues as well as to onboard and fast track a new team member
- Co-ordinated with multiple data architects to maintain centralized data cataloging used within the entire org
- Organized design reviews in big data community platform for a logistic project to ensure consistent and high level of design and implementation
- Team appreciation by company's CEO for Natural Language Processing - "Textual Data Analytics" product on the show Mad Money by on Jim Cramer CNBC News's channel.
Scrum Master / Technical Lead
Bitscape Infotech Private Limited
Ahmedabad, Gujarat
2012.06 - 2018.08
- Responsible for designing, planning, tracking and day-to-day activities of multiple web development teams for various clients across the globe in industries such as cement, Pharma, Australian aviation, schools
- Indian government etc
- During its transition from waterfall to agile methodologies
- Evangelized the benefits of scrum to ensure its smooth adoption and successfully migrated multiple projects from Waterfall to Scrum within 6 months using Scrum and Kanban
- Coached the team to create clear and concise stories that meet the definition of done, improving quality
- Leading a team of scrum masters, helping them to create roadmaps and take ownership for delivery of business values to customers and stakeholders
- Took ownership, commitment to meet the deadlines with quality assured, leading to happy clients for over 6 years
- Enabled and empowered self-organizing team through more autonomy, team improvement backlogs, increased cadence, better progress reporting based on Agile metrics with story points claimed in range of 80 to 120%
- Assisted team with making appropriate commitments through story selection, sizing and task definition and participated in developing and maintaining team standards, tools and best practices reducing development time by 20%
- Provided the training on SharePoint technology in Sri Lanka to the fortune 500 client and cracked the deal of service contract for our company on its completion
- Conducted rigorous interviews to hire top talents for the organization
- Designed the curriculum and provided onboard training to all the new employees revolving around development practices and technology skills
- Managed the performance and career development of the team of engineers helping them grow to the next level hence leading to more business and profits to the organization
- Time sheets approvals of team members to bill the clients on time and money and fixed cost models
- Proactive support to all the tickets and issues of various clients in less than 24 hours across the globe as a part of managed service
- Honored as 'Out of the box thinker' and 'Bitscape Ambassador Gold Award'.
Software Engineer
Karan IT Systems
Ahmedabad, Gujarat
2009.06 - 2010.06
- Job responsibilities included development and enhancements to its commercial product (Express
- Kitchens), unit testing and deployment
- Worked on Web based applications using ASP.Net, C#
- Upgraded commercial product (Express Kitchens)
Associate System Engineer
International Business Machines, IBM
Pune, Maharashtra
2007.08 - 2008.03
- Completed a corporate training and job responsibilities included development and enhancements to product named Amex Card (American Express Card), unit testing and deployment using JAVA.
Software Developer Onsite
Kautilya Economical Services Private Limited, KESPL
Ahmedabad, Gujarat
2006.06 - 2007.05
- Client Support for Restaurant & Hotel Industry in VB.NET using crystal reports.
Education
Postgraduate - Computer Applications
University of North Gujarat
2007-06
Bachelors - computer applications
Gujarat University
2006-06
Skills
- Agile Framework
- Scaled Agile Framework
- Microsoft Project Online
- JIRA
- JQL
- Confluence
- Azure Services
- Microsoft Teams
- Office 365
- Scrum Framework
- Water-to-Agile Migration
- SharePoint
- Sprint Planning
- Resource Allocation
- Meeting Participation
- Project Management
- Meeting Facilitation
- Risk Identification
- Agile Best Practices
- Scrum Processes
- Software Development Lifecycle
- Effective Customer Communication
- Stakeholder Management
- Public Speaking
- Backlog Management
- Leading Scrum Meetings
- Customer Requirements Analysis
- Presentation Skills
- Requirements Gathering
- Workflow Analysis
Certification
* Certified Scrum Master, Scrum Alliance
* Certified SAFE 5, Release Train Engineer
* Certified SAFE 5, Scrum Master
* Agile with Atlassian JIRA
* Postgraduate Online Program in Agile, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA, 2021
Additional Information
- Honors & Awards - Gold, Sapphire & Silver Award in various companies
Timeline
Scrum Master
Cognizant Technology Solutions
2021.04 - 2024.01
Scrum Master
S&P Global Inc
2019.07 - 2021.02
Scrum Master / Technical Lead
Bitscape Infotech Private Limited
2012.06 - 2018.08
Software Engineer
Karan IT Systems
2009.06 - 2010.06
Associate System Engineer
International Business Machines, IBM
2007.08 - 2008.03
Software Developer Onsite
Kautilya Economical Services Private Limited, KESPL
2006.06 - 2007.05
Postgraduate - Computer Applications
University of North Gujarat
Bachelors - computer applications
Gujarat University