Venkatraman Lakshminarayanan
Senior Program Manager
Accelya
location_on United Arab Emirates
Member since 10 years
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Venkatraman Lakshminarayanan
Specialises In (based on submitted proposals)
Venkat has 17 years of IT experience with rich exposure in Program and Project Management using Agile Scrum, XP, Kanban & Traditional methodologies. As an Agile coach and practitioner, Venkat has led process formulation and adoption across large enterprise teams in his last 2 assignments. He has been an Agile Practitioner for the last 11+ years across various product development and product engineering roles.
Venkat is now an Associate Director with Cognizant. He currently manages the onsite delivery for a large Airline partner based out of UAE in their Agile & Digital Transformation. Prior to Cognizant, he was playing the role of Specialist - Portfolio Management at Sidra Medical & Research Center, a super-speciality hospital under construction in Doha, Qatar. In the role, reporting into the Manager-Portfolios, he was responsible for setting up the Portfolio Management processes as part of IT PMO. The challenging part was to bring in Agile also into the foray as the organization is moving through heavy change management in multiple areas other than IT.
During 2011-14, he was the head of the Program Management Office (Technology PMO) at InMobi. As a manager of a Portfolio, he was responsible for managing 100+ concurrent releases across 15 component scrum teams.
He has a good blend of agile exposure across product engineering, web development, enterprise application and platforms through his current and prior roles at AOL India and MindTree Ltd., Venkat is a SAFe Agilist, COBIT5 Foundation Certified IT Governance Professional, PMI-RMP (Risk Management), PMI-ACP (Agile Certified Practitioner), Project Management Professional (PMP), Certified Scrum Master (CSM) & Certified Scrum Practitioner (CSP) and MCPM (Master Certificate in Project Management) from SP Jain, Mumbai. Venkat holds a Bachelor in Engineering (B.E), Masters from BITS, Pilani (MS) and an Executive General Management from IIM, Bangalore. Venkat is in the process of certifying CGEIT (Enterprise IT).
A continuous leaner and conference enthusiast, he also presented a paper on “Portfolio Management through Agile” at the PMI National Conference in Chennai in 2012. He was also the panelist at Sasken’s Project Management Day speaking on Agile and a power panel speaker at PMI Chennai’s Tamilnadu Conference 2013 about Agile PM delivering true value. He has also presented on Governance using Agile in the CII Project Managment Conference. Venkat was recently an invited speaker at Intel's Agile & Lean Summit. He also was the core team member of Agile India 2014 and presented on Scaling Agile at the conference on 26-Feb-14. He also was a speaker at the Agile India 2016 conference held at Bangalore, India.
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Let it go or Lose it !
20 Mins
Experience Report
Intermediate
The role of Leadership in organisation's Agile transformation is a critical piece. Yet many organisations struggle to find the right balance between top-down vs. grass-root transformation. I would like to share an experience where we were able to achieve fairly good grass-root movement, but had serious challenges building the agile mindset at the leadership level. While the leadership was trying to help with the best of their intentions, certain actions, behaviours and patterns did affect the spirit of agility. If you are keen to hear about typical leadership anti-patterns during agile transformation and some pointers on how to avoid them, this session is for you.
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Scaling from Project > Program > Portfolio - The Agile Transformation and Journey
45 Mins
Case Study
Intermediate
The case in point is a journey of Agile transformation when the organization was looking to manage releases through shorter iteration cycles. As the journey began, the organization had to leapfrog into 3x growth in terms of both people and business needs due to a round of substantial investor funding.
The agile transformation started with just 6 teams in the organization and due to the nature of the team structure, the 3-member PMO team did not have the luxury for pilot projects and had to simultaniously roll out at one go across the 6+ component teams.
In a span of 6 months, the number of teams grew to 12+ and the number of releases more than doubled. Also, 80% of the releases cut across more than 3 teams and the challenge was to keep the process pretty lean. PMO team worked closely with key stakeholders from Product, Engineering, Architecture and Operations to forumate and roll-out a simple 3 step process that aided the teams to deliver releases better than before. Here is when the organization leaped from project to portfolio of releases cutting across 10+ themes.
Similar to what is quoted in the "Scaled Agile Framework" which the PMO tripped on much later in the process, there were organization wide prioritization done based on the product strategy, infrastructure and technology needs which eventually got translated into multiple programs within the organization, cutting across various teams. A concept of 3-in-a-box (PM, Architect and Engineering Owner) was formulated to bring in the required vigor in to the planning and execution process.The 3 in the box was further extended to Dev +QA + Ops who worked as a team to deliver the various stories across the contributing stacks.
The challenges across value-driven prioritization from 100+ releases across the portfolio, release planning with engineering and product, the execution framework and scalability in engineering infrastructure commensurate with the agile processes, working with operations teams and all the way till adoption was seamlessly scaled using the initial framework that was set for just 15 releases.
The presentation details how agile helped and is helping the product and technology teams in delivering better results than before. This would also detail the necessary Agile and operational metrics across the project teams, the program and the portfolio levels that aid the mid and senior management to take informed decisions. As always, this would not cover the IP and actual data of the organization but provide a clear framework to substantiate the process.
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