Aakash Gupta (CSP-SM,PSM I,PMI-ACP,CDA,TKP,SA,SSM,IC-ATF)
Sr. Scrum/Kanban Master at Fannie Mae
Sr. Scrum Master, Agile Coach, Technical Project/Program Manager
20+ years professional industry experience working for major financial services clients in India, United States and Canada.

• Expert knowledge of portfolio program/project/release implementation, change management procedures, methodologies, Agile frameworks (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe) and concepts
• 8+ years of experience in managing various size (large, mid, small) projects and releases, product cycles, coaching and mentoring in Agile processes, planning, estimation, self-organization, collaboration, iterative development
• Help the teams in Agile transformation and adopting best practices, conduct Agility Health Radar (AHR) assessments and prepare actionable growth plan to enable continuous improvement
• Liaison with sponsor, stakeholders and end users on a regular basis to understand outcome/goals aligning them with technology solutions to deliver business value (process improvements, cost/time savings)
• Collaborate with Product Owner to maintain prioritized backlog of features/user stories/technical debt, release roadmap
• Work with Development and Testing teams to ensure quality of deliverables with minimal defects utilizing DevOps, automated CI/CD and testing strategies 
• Facilitate ceremonies including daily standup, grooming/backlog refinement session, user demos, retrospective, PI planning sessions with program teams, participate in Scrum of Scrums
• Utilize tools (JIRA, Leankit, Confluence, SharePoint) ensuring timely and efficient project delivery by creating, maintaining and refining agile project plans with key milestones, tracking schedule and changing scope, generating Agile metrics
• Co-ordination with external teams for dependencies, change impact assessment, integration testing efforts
• Identify and mitigate impediments/blockers as well as resolve conflicts, protect the teams from external interruptions, maintain and update the issue and risk log
• Handle all aspects of SDLC program/project/release activities and obtain approvals from governance entities
• Manage program/project budget/forecast, produce executive level status dashboards and communicate with leadership
• Proactively contribute to the Agile Community of Practice and Chapters, foster knowledge sharing and self-development
• Motivate and energize the teams through events, celebrate milestones, evaluate performance and recognize contribution
• Promote a positive team culture building trust, transparency and accountability, encourage innovation within the teams
Fannie Mae
https://www.linkedin.com/company/fannie-mae-corporation_19722
• Support application development teams in a fast-paced environment, help build high performing teams deliver high business value product increment
• Project co-ordination with upstream and downstream systems for change impact assessment and interface integration testing
• Serve as servant leader to ensure clear communication and organization, collaborate with Product Owner to maintain backlog and release plan, facilitate core scrum ceremonies (pre-planning, grooming, demo, retrospective)
• Register releases with Dev CoE, obtain required approvals from stakeholders and governance entities as applicable, work with team to create/update documentation and all other aspects of SDLC
• Represent team in Scrum of Scrums for SI program, track and produce key metrics (burndown, burnup, velocity) 
• Motivate and energize the team through events, happy hours, celebrate milestones, evaluate performance and provide recognition
• Identify areas of improvement and prepare actionable growth plan for team to become more efficient and agile, promote a positive culture and collaboration
• Submit requisitions for hardware/software procurement as needed, assess compliance of development process and ensure prioritization of technical debt/MUL items
• Tools - Project Web App (PWA), JIRA, Confluence, MS Office, EPPM, Tableau, SharePoint
• Technologies - Java, TIBCO, Salesforce, Oracle, Autosys, iCART, Jenkins, Selenium, Cucumber
Herndon, Virginia
https://media-exp1.licdn.com/dms/image/C4E0BAQGv9l-bg4B0ow/company-logo_100_100/0/1589308102775?e=1655942400&v=beta&t=Uuorbs_8xFgKeuea_Cvq5wNVu5i_S6NOsuPVxw0d8pc
Sr. Scrum/Kanban Master
Franklin Templeton Investments, Canada
https://www.linkedin.com/company/franklin-templeton
•	Effectively managed several projects following both Waterfall and Agile Scrum methodologies for US and Canada business units. 
•	Regularly interacted with business partners in Global Web Digital Marketing, Product Portfolio, Sales, Investor Dealer Services to assess and implement efficiencies.
•	Led Continuous Improvement quality drives that resulted in reducing customer complaints by 40%. Successful deployment of projects resulted in significant increase in ROI and help business reduce operational costs. Website restructuring initiative realized the productivity gains of Client Services/Operations teams.
•	Engage with business sponsor in product vision and strategy, obtain project funding and track budget. Review SOW agreements with legal for vendor contracts.
•	Work with the Product Owner/Business Analyst to provide input in creating, prioritizing and continuous refinement of the product backlog, establishing the release feature set and delivery schedule.
•	Keeping the project plan up-to-date with user story tasks, team owners, dates and status. Maintain project documents in SharePoint repository for collaboration and audit.
•	Facilitate daily stand ups with the distributed team and external vendor(s). Conduct monthly sprint and quarterly release planning sessions, sprint review to demonstrate the product increment with stakeholders and retrospectives to improve team performance with every sprint release.
•	Prepare weekly and monthly executive reporting dashboards with status, burndown and velocity metrics.
•	Co-ordinate daily automated builds for Integration, System and UAT testing, review testing deliverables, analyze defects raised with development team.
•	Conduct risk and issue management to remove blocks in team’s progress, maintain and update the log.
•	Document project implementation plan and checklist to support the project team with production release activities.
•	Update the project details in NGTE/PeopleSoft application and execute the closeout tasks.
Toronto, Canada Area
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Technical Project Manager/Scrum Master
Florida State Dept of Financial Services, USA (Client)
Worked on Agent Application Licensing and Continual Education applications.

AALF (https://aalf.fldfs.com) is an online application system for the Bureau of Licensing. Florida resident and non-resident Insurance Agents, Agencies and Adjusters can apply for a new license as an individual, for a firm or branch. This system streamlines the entire application process and greatly reduces the processing time.
•	Acted as a liaison between the business users and application development team.
•	Discussed new requirements with end users and propose new solutions/enhancements to address the user needs.
•	Conducted JAD sessions and develop functional, high-level technical design and test plan documents.
•	Controlled and update schedule requirements based upon approved changes.
•	Managed project changes through a documented and well-defined change-control process.
•	Provided guidance and mentoring to the project team (onsite/offshore) throughout the application development lifecycle.

FCDICE (https://floridastatefirecollege.org) system is a web-based application used by Florida firefighters to search for available training, inquire about their continuing education status and check on their continuing education certificate/license renewal requirements.
•	Played the role of onsite coordinator for the offshore development team. Key responsibilities included allocation of duties, resource management and facilitating onshore and offshore communication. 
•	Designed and documented the functional specifications.
•	Defined process and workflows to interact with an external application (Regulatory Licensing System).
•	Created test data, ran SQL queries and background jobs as part of testing using TOAD.
•	Use TestTrack to log defects and to manage requirements along with Traceability Matrix.
•	Demonstrated the application to end-users and documented lessons learnt.
Tallahassee, Florida Area
Technical Business Analyst
StateFarm Insurance, USA (Client)
WCMS is a distributed web application that is used as a content replication tool for StateFarm’s Auto and Property (individual and commercial product lines) internet and intranet web sites. This is a complex tool that runs on approximately 500 Win2K servers across different web-farms in load-balanced Intranet and DMZ environments.
•	Analyzed, defined and documented requirement specifications based on interaction with business sponsors.
•	Facilitated joint planning meetings between business and technical teams to drive consensus on requirements. 
•	Reviewed and analyzed Requirements and Technical design documents.
•	Created use cases and workflow diagrams for input to high-level technical design.
•	Conducted System and Performance testing of WCMS in different web farms.
•	Developed process workflows (building SMS issuances, opening change records and work orders, version control) for deploying WCMS into test and production environments.
Bloomington/Normal, Illinois Area
Sr. Software Specialist
GE Financial Assurance, USA (Client)
GEFA-ESG provides life and health insurance to the customers through various applications. ISSPROD holds the case and coverage-related data for all product lines. CALLIGO generates the insurance policies for issue to the customers. CASETRAK keeps track of the status of the case. MDIS handles the disability claims while MECA handles the medical and dental claims. GUSS is the underwriter application to determine the risk and premium rates. The project involved several major enhancements to all of the above applications over the specified duration.
•	Facilitated JAD sessions to document business requirements, analyzed the existing system and prepared software requirements specifications based on existing and new functionalities.
•	Presented end-state solution options and recommendations to business and technology stakeholders based on efficiency ease of use and reliability.
•	Communicated with end users to help resolve technical queries of development team at onsite and offshore.
•	Prepared UAT plans, coordinated with QA to prepare test cases and defined acceptance criteria.

CALLIGO Document Management System focused on migrating certificate production from an older client-server based application to Calligo, an enhanced web-based Intranet system. The functions included data extracts, document assembly and generation, batch reports and online viewing and customizing of completed documents.
•	Designed user interfaces for the web-based Certificate Management System (to move/hold the generated documents) and Certificate Viewer System (to view/print the certificates).
•	Queried and populated the database with test data and performed functional and system testing.
•	Conducted training sessions with different end user groups.
•	Prepared project timeline, schedule, and status reports.
Hartford, Connecticut Area
Sr. Software Engineer
Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.)
Electronics and Comp. Science
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University of Mumbai
https://www.linkedin.com/school/university-of-mumbai/
ICAgile
ICP-ATF
Scaled Agile, Inc.
54336182-8888
SAFe Scrum Master
Scaled Agile, Inc.
00153177-1320
SAFe Agilist
Scrum.org
www.scrum.org
PSM I
http://www.scrum.org/user/335105
DAC
41072679
Certified Disciplined Agilist (CDA)
PMI
2044155
PMI-ACP
Scrum Alliance
scrumalliance.org
000322387
Certified ScrumMaster (CSM)
http://scrumalliance.org/community/profile/agupta142
Scrum Alliance
bcert.me
322387
Certified Scrum Professional (CSP)-SM
http://bcert.me/snhkpfdht
Scrum Alliance
bcert.me
922106
Advanced CSM
http://bcert.me/sighcjdi
Lean Kanban
Team Kanban Practitioner (TKP)
Christopher Ainsworth
      
          



            
              
        
              
  

    
        Over the course of our time together Aakash and I worked very closely on a number of initiatives ranging from agile product enhancement backlogs to a multi-year strategic system overhaul using the traditional waterfall methodology. During this time I witnessed him build strong relationships with business partners across Franklin Templeton in Marketing, Sales, Client Service, Business Development and Shared Services. Also, I can attest to his ability to communicate successfully with individuals at all levels, from Analyst to Executive. As a member of the business team, I often consulted Aakash on strategic issues and valued his insight. Douglas Campbell, CISSP
      
          



            
              
        
              
  

    
        Aakash was great to work with.  He was a resourceful and determined developer.  We missed his creativity and diligence when he took the opportunity in Florida, but we understand why he took it.