Rajalakshmi Murugan
Cary,North Carolina
Summary
An IT professional with 12+years expansive career which has evolved over the years with continuous learning, improvement and having successfully managed a solid mix of technical and management roles through the length and breadth of my career. Certified Scrum Master with experience in Agile Scrum, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and certified Product Owner. As a Scrum Master have 8 years of experience and with SAFe 3+ years as Scrum Master and working with multiple IT teams (distributed and collocated) in Scrum, Telecom and Security domains. Successfully contributed and led many Employee Resource groups throughout the years with Software engineer background.
Overview
15
15
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Advisor ,Technical Program Management
RSA Security
10.2020 - 05.2023
- Extensive experience in organizing Scrum Ceremonies (PI Planning, Retrospectives, Daily stand - ups Review, Backlog refinement, SoS, User Stories and Estimation, velocity, Retrospective formats, dependency track handling bugs, etc
- Alignment of teams to the Program Increment (PI) objectives and delivery of value
- Guidance for the team relating to utilization of Agile practices and how to best ensure successful self-organization
- Leads and coaches Scaled Agile ceremonies such as Program Increment Planning and Scrum of Scrums
- Support of and collaboration with the ART Scrum Masters, Project Mangers, and Product Owner with respect to grooming and maintaining the product work backlog
- Work with the PO in preparing and refining the backlog for PI and Iteration Planning
- Provides visibility into delivery targets, commitments, progress, and any relevant team data necessary to provide maximum team transparency
- Partner with and coach Product Owners to achieve maximum project return on investment and meet PI Objectives and Milestones
- Hands on experience to facilitate Release Planning Events, Scrum of Scrums, System Demos, Team status reports and gather and maintain team metrics
- Proficient with Agile techniques User Stories, FDD, TDD, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, Continuous Testing
- Protect development team from outside distractions, impediments or team conflicts and maintain focus on product backlog and project timeline
- Diligent project management skills offering a proven record of success leading all phases of diverse technology projects, telecom, and security domains experience
- Strong leader with ability to act as a liaison between business, architects, and development core teams
- Maintains and communicates metrics related to team performance
- Collaborates cross functionally with engineering employees and other engineering groups, voluntarily shares information, fosters teamwork and collaboration
- Develops solutions to difficult problems, which may require ingenuity and creativity, communicates progress toward project/program goals; influences future product/program direction
- Interfaces with senior management to report on project and program milestones and to present project needs and technical knowledge
- Assist in overall program/project planning and ensure cross-team dependencies are well-understood and modeled in project plans and timelines
- Assisting team with making appropriate commitments through story selection, sizing and task definition and participated proactively in developing and maintaining team standards
- Coached and trained teams on Agile techniques and Agile / Scrum Values and Utilized pair programming approach to ensure high quality code
- Helping the Scrum Team understand the need for clear and concise Product Backlog items
- Outside Project:
- Alongside project work, was also actively involved in employee resource groups like
- Women Initiative network (WIN)and fun committee on organizational level
- Part of WIN, from the inception and its various growth have contributed highly
- Organized many org level tech talks, mental health, yoga/fitness sessions, seasonal specific events, leading the weekly meet ups with the core team
- Moderating and sharing the MoM with Action Items of the team, coordinate with different streams like Mentorship, Tech Talk, Toast Master
- Facilitate the core team to work with the presenters, speakers, doctors, instructors for the WIN sessions/Talk session
- Have been awarded in organizational level for the contributions and leading the Women Initiative Network (WIN)
- Part of Fun Committee lead many fun events, sports events, outdoor events, team outing in organizational level and coordinated well across BU's and projects
- Actively take part of the weekly meet ups on the upcoming calendar events planned and coordinate with HR department, Leadership team BU level core committee members
Agile Expert (Technical Manager )
MINDTREE LIMITED
09.2016 - 12.2016
- Collaboration with other Scrum masters during scrum of scrums to share better practices, dependencies, risk, and their resolutions and discuss issues, which may be of help to other Scrum teams as well
- Coach, Mentor and train Junior Scrum Master or Scrum Master aspirant in Scrum Practices and framework
- Work collaboratively with PO to develop the Delivery Roadmap and Product Release strategy and continually re-plan throughout the project as needed
- Working with the Product owner, Technical Lead / Architect and BA to create prioritized backlogs, Epics and User stories
- Helped team to solve problems rather than provide solutions
- Coach PO’s and the external stake holders accordingly to ensure they are in line with Agile and Scrum Framework to enable to them to work with the team as Peers
- Monitor, track, and report velocity, burn up and burn-downs via tools and by physically maintaining it on the scrum board
- Provides metrics and status to senior management and accurately represent status of the Scrum Team
- Facilitates of Scrum events - Sprint Planning, Release Planning, Daily Scrum, Stakeholder Demos and Sprint Retrospectives
- Help and steer the project teams to meet daily and sprint goals, including assisting the team in removing or escalating blockers as needed
- Team education, upskilling and Team Knowledge sharing sessions
- Work with teams to continuously improve by increasing the test coverage using Automation
- Organize and facilitate Customer showcases/ demos at the end of every sprint – Collect all the respective feedback, convert any relevant feedback to User stories or epics to be executed as part of the future backlog.
Senior Scrum Master
Wipro Technologies
10.2014 - 08.2016
- Maintain a strong and groomed backlog of stories for the team to see work with
- Make sure the team is always up to date with the latest on the project and are always shown the BIG picture
- Moved teams from Waterfall to Scrum
- Training and coaching Scrum Teams on Agile ways of working
- Member of Agile training group to deliver focused training to Scrum teams
- Moved team’s focus from delivering user stories to delivering business outcomes
- Worked on process and productivity improvement of Scrum teams
- Assessment of Agile Maturity and iteratively work towards higher levels of maturity
- Organizing and facilitation of Scrum events (Backlog Refinement, Planning, Review, Retrospective and Daily scrum) and impediments removal for scrum teams
- Providing information radiators to all levels of Management to give insights to projects using dashboards and Scrum metrics
- Support and coaching to Product Owner to maintain Product Backlog, roll out Product vision/roadmap and gather customer feedback to improve user experience
- Facilitation of Scrum of Scrums
- Member of Scum Community of Practice in organization to drive Agile transformation across programs and evolve as ONE team.
Scrum Master
Wipro Technologies
10.2011 - 10.2014
- Cisco )
- Worked with scrum teams in Telecom domain
- Training and coaching Scrum Teams on Agile ways of working
- Facilitation of Scrum events (Backlog Refinement, Planning, Review, Retrospective and Daily scrum) and impediments removal for scrum teams
- Support and coaching to Product Owner to maintain Product Backlog and prioritization
- Ensure availability and visibility of team metrics - Burndown charts, Velocity and Defects
- Identify, escalate, and track risks, work on Risk Mitigation plan with management
- Representation in Scrum of Scrums
- Managing team’s workflows with other teams in Continuous Integration and deployment environment
- Work with teams to continuously improve Quality to meet high standards and Meet Definition of Done
- Responsible for internal and external communications from the team
- Initiate and contribute to account level Agile initiatives with fellow Scrum Masters
- Managing overall performance of the team by helping the management to understand technical improvement areas of scrum team
- Organize and facilitate Customer showcases/ demos at the end of every sprint – Collect all the respective feedback, convert any relevant feedback to User stories or epics to be executed as part of the future backlog
- Help and steer the project teams to meet daily and sprint goals, including assisting the team in removing or escalating Obstacle /blockers as needed
Software Engineer
Wipro Technologies
12.2011 - 04.2014
- Working on customer issues and escalation for the product ICM [Intelligent contact Manager]
- Resolving various customer escalations with different components like Router, Gate way,Pheripheral Gateways,Distributors,Logger
- Fixing Web applications defect and enhancement for WebView, Web Setup, Agent Re-skill
- Developed BUG Scrum Tool along with team members
- Involved in Defect and enhancement fixes which includes PowerBuilder and PowerGen Tool
- Handled all Web View defects, enhancements and customer issues single handedly and became SME, SPOC for Web View
- Auditing the entire Partner projects of Wipro for Cisco client as a Cisco InfoSec Auditor
- Attending the Partner forum meetings which happens with multiple Cisco partners.
Tech Lead
Wipro Technologies
12.2010 - 10.2011
- Act as a lead to the Customer engineering team on UCCE Product and facilitate team to deliver products on time
- Act as mentor to Customer Engineering team on various components which involved in
- Involved in TAC/Customer review meetings on customer escalations and CAP issues
- Involved in regular meetings with Management and appraisals feedback on the team
- Meeting with Directors on the Customer Engineering team development and improvement
- Involved in TAC/Engineer collaboration and status meetings
- Involved in complex components like TRW enhancement and fixed multiple issues
- Handling any customer escalations, enhancements request for TRW [Translation Route Wizard] and became SPOC, SME for TRW
Project Engineer
Wipro Technologies
04.2008 - 11.2008
- Nortel Systems)
- Taking the initial project training /KT from the same team [TM – Telephony Manager,BCC – Basic client configuration]
- Various testing like Regression testing, Fit for testing ,Product testing
- Fixing the BCC,TM related defects
- Helping, coaching new joinees to the team on the Product TM,BCC
- FUN team activities and organizing events in the Account level
- Was also awarded FIMC[Feather in my cap] award for fixing the complex AUTH code configuration enhancement and became SME and SPOC in AUTH area of work.
Education
Bachelor of Computer Science -
Bharathidasan University
Master of Software and Science - undefined
Birla Institute of Technology
Skills
- Agile Tools : JIRA, Rally, Confluence
- Agile Frameworks : Scrum
- Operating Systems :
- MS-DOS, Windows XP/Vista, Windows 8
- Languages : Power Builder,C,C,JAVA
- Databases : dBase III, MS Access
- RDBMS : SYBASE – 105/125, SQL Server 2005,SQL Server 2008
- Others : Bug Scrum Tool – Workbench
- Utilities : MS-Office, Rational ClearCase, GIT
- Tools : GAMES, Rally, JIRA
Certification
Certified Scrum Master (CSM) by Scrum Alliance. License number: ID# 000315512
Certified Scrum Master (CSM) by Scrum Inc : ID#SM-9806955
Certified Product Owner(CSPO) by Scrum Inc : ID#PO-6785293
Timeline
Advisor ,Technical Program Management
RSA Security
10.2020 - 05.2023
Agile Expert (Technical Manager )
MINDTREE LIMITED
09.2016 - 12.2016
Senior Scrum Master
Wipro Technologies
10.2014 - 08.2016
Software Engineer
Wipro Technologies
12.2011 - 04.2014
Scrum Master
Wipro Technologies
10.2011 - 10.2014
Tech Lead
Wipro Technologies
12.2010 - 10.2011
Project Engineer
Wipro Technologies
04.2008 - 11.2008
Bachelor of Computer Science -
Bharathidasan University
Master of Software and Science - undefined
Birla Institute of Technology