VANI ASHOK
Cypress,CA
Summary
PMP-certified Project Manager and Scrum Master with 15+ years of experience leading healthcare, banking, and enterprise software initiatives. Manages scope, schedule, risk, release readiness, and stakeholder communication while coordinating PI Planning, Scrum events, and compliance-focused delivery across cross-functional teams.
Overview
1
1
Certification
24
24
years of professional experience
Work History
Project Manager / Scrum Master
Elevance Health
Cerritos, CA
01.2024 - 12.2025
- Coordinated PI Planning for 8 delivery teams in Jira Align, mapping cross-team dependencies, balancing capacity, and sequencing high-priority features into a committed program roadmap.
- As Scrum Master, facilitated all Scrum events (Daily Stand-ups, Sprint Planning, Backlog Refinement, Sprint Reviews, Retrospectives), keeping teams aligned and focused on high-quality increments.
- Managed delivery of Care Management and Clinical Data Integration initiatives, owning scope, timelines, and release readiness while meeting healthcare governance, security, and compliance requirements.
- Partnered with Product Owners and cross-functional leaders to define project scope, business requirements, acceptance criteria, and priorities.
- Led end-to-end release cycles and critical deployment windows across cross-functional delivery teams.
- Executed risk and compliance governance using structured RAID tracking and mitigation plans, providing stakeholders with status updates via Confluence dashboards.
- Implemented WIP limits and a defect triage workflow on Jira Kanban boards, enhancing delivery cycle times and team predictability.
- Developed custom Jira metric dashboards, enabling leadership to monitor flow, throughput, and delivery health in real-time.
Project Manager
Bank of Hope
Gardena, CA
06.2021 - 12.2023
- Managed timelines, deliverables, and dependencies for 4 cross-functional development teams, keeping work aligned with enterprise goals and banking compliance standards.
- Served as the central point of contact between technical leads, business analysts, and business leadership, streamlining decisions and cross-departmental communication.
- Collaborated with 5 Product Owners to prioritize and refine backlogs, translating business requests into clear functional requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria.
- Facilitated daily stand-ups, sprint planning, and retrospectives, proactively removing roadblocks to keep delivery on track.
- Reported project health, milestones, and risks to senior management and key stakeholders using Jira and Confluence.
- Owned RAID logs (Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Dependencies), conducted root-cause analysis and developed mitigation plans to address schedule delays.
- Ensured release quality through preparation of test cases and UAT scripts, conducting smoke, functional, and regression testing across staging and production.
Agile Project Manager / Scrum Master
Elevance Health
Cerritos, CA
12.2019 - 06.2021
- Coordinated project activities and release schedules for engineering teams delivering enterprise-wide healthcare software updates.
- Produced weekly status reports for project steering committees and leadership, ensuring visibility into velocity, sprint and release burn down, and KPI performance.
- Managed integration dependencies with upstream and downstream teams to protect schedule integrity across the release lifecycle.
- Identified risks and impediments early, facilitated resolution, and escalated critical issues to program leadership.
- Enforced Agile governance and change control practices, including Definition of Ready (DoR), Definition of Done (DoD), and coding standards, to maintain project quality.
- Led Sprint Demos and PI System Showcases, presenting completed features to business stakeholders and confirming alignment with expected outcomes.
- Drove continuous improvement initiatives by gathering retrospective feedback and tracking action items, enabling teams to implement more effective delivery and testing practices.
Project Manager / Business Analyst
Microsoft India R&D Pvt. Ltd.
Hyderabad, India
01.2004 - 05.2007
- Facilitated end-to-end delivery of IT initiatives by drafting project plans, tracking milestones, managing change requests, and escalating blockers to leadership.
- Managed cross-departmental schedules, vendor interactions, meeting agendas, minutes, and action-item follow-up across engineering divisions.
- Developed communication plans and conducted monthly/quarterly governance reviews between internal teams and vendor departments.
- Analyzed cost center budgets and expenditures, creating budget-utilization and KPI presentations for executive reviews.
Business Analyst / Project Assistant
Apollo Healthcare
Hyderabad, India
07.2001 - 12.2003
- Led team of 5 in planning workloads and tracking performance, ensuring timely completion of BA and operational support tasks.
- Coordinated with external vendors and internal IT teams to define functional specifications and manage implementation schedules.
- Partnered with clinical teams to analyze healthcare assessment processes and enhance the online/offline health assessment tool used by medical specialists.
- Developed BRDs, workflow diagrams, and training materials to facilitate feature rollouts and enhance adoption of new tools.
Education
Bachelor of Commerce (B.Com) -
Andhra University
Visakhapatnam, IndiaSkills
- Scrum & Kanban Facilitation
- SAFe PI Planning
- Backlog Refinement
- UAT & Quality Assurance
- Release Management
- Project Planning & Scheduling
- Scope & Change Control
- Risk & RAID Management
- Budget Tracking & Reporting
- Agile Metrics & Dashboards
- Stakeholder Communication
- Servant Leadership & Coaching
- Servant Leadership & Coaching
Personal Information
Title: Project Manager | Scrum Master | PMP | SAFe
Certification
- PMP (Project Management Professional), Project Management Institute
- SAFe certified: versions 4.0, 5.1, and 6.0
- SAFe POPM (Product Owner / Product Manager)
Timeline
Project Manager / Scrum Master
Elevance Health
01.2024 - 12.2025
Project Manager
Bank of Hope
06.2021 - 12.2023
Agile Project Manager / Scrum Master
Elevance Health
12.2019 - 06.2021
Project Manager / Business Analyst
Microsoft India R&D Pvt. Ltd.
01.2004 - 05.2007
Business Analyst / Project Assistant
Apollo Healthcare
07.2001 - 12.2003
Bachelor of Commerce (B.Com) -
Andhra University