Jayram Joshi

This was a multi-year core banking implementation and customization program and it was running significantly over budget and was substantially delayed. The client brought in my employer to remedy the situation.

The core banking product vendor was based in India. I was responsible for setting up the program, establishing trust-based relationships with the vendor as well as the client, and taking the program to a successful conclusion.

• Led a team in the as-is state assessment.
• Recommended remedial actions.
• Reformed Agile project management and engineering practices.
• Set up project governance.
• Prepared the release and roll-out plans.

The client was one of the largest scientific publishing companies in the world. The client approached my employer to help establish an offshore development center. The engagement involved hiring the initial team for the client, coaching and mentoring the team, and co-sourced delivery by following agile development practices.

Role: Program Manager

• Led a team.
• Helped the client hire and ramp up the team.
• Trained and coached them on agile development practices.
• Conducted a knowledge transfer with Europe and New Zealand-based teams.
• Gathered requirements, planned the release, and executed the product development for two different product lines.
• Managed stakeholders who were distributed in six countries and four continents.

R&D4.0 is a change program for the Pune center of one of the largest German conglomerates. The program aims to use an agile and lean way of thinking and working to transform all the functions within the organization.

I was the mentor and program manager for this program.

The program is in its second year. It focuses on five distinct business areas, namely customers, people, productivity, agility, and technical excellence.

We have used various Agile project management techniques like retrospectives, weekly standups, cross-functional teams, cadence, prioritization, and big visible information radiators to run the program.

The program has received significant appreciation across the organization. The next steps involve rolling out the program globally.

Learning Health was conceptualized as an App Store for standardized healthcare protocols and processes. I was involved in the conceptualization, architecture, POC development, and MVP development.

The product was a web and mobile application for hospitals, healthcare practitioners, and patients to make informed decisions based on the quality of care parameters.

The technology stack consisted of Java-based microservices deployed on AWS with business processes orchestrated using Bonita business process management.

My role involved technology strategy, platform engineering, and providing engineering leadership to the development team.

In the R&D 4.0 organizational change program that I run at Siemens Mobility Pune, the need for the role of head of technology office was identified. I currently play this role and my responsibilities include:

• Defining technology strategy and creating a legacy modernization roadmap.
• Defining the role in terms of KRAs, deliverables, and expectations
• Mentoring senior architects
• Playing the role in the interim till there are the right set of people ready to take up the role

The project involved developing a cross-platform application for one of the largest US airlines. Passengers use the app to check flight status, do web check-ins, book seats, and other convenient functions.

The project was awarded to a competitor who failed to deliver. My team was able to provide MVP with the highest quality standards and was followed by multiple points and a major release over a period of three years. This was one of the first cross-platform mobile applications developed in the industry before cross-platform frameworks became popular.

The project was also one of the earliest successful attempts of implementing CI/CD for such a mission-critical mobile application. The core part of the project was delivered by a cross-functional team of more than 40 people spread across the US, India, and Brazil.

The client was one of the most celebrated startups in the real estate sector in India. The client had an urgent requirement to develop an Android app for brokers before their next meeting with the VC.

The team delivered the demo-ready app in four weeks.

After the client got the next round of funding, the team was expanded to develop a 1.0 version of the app.

The project was delivered in an agile fashion. The team followed a rhythm of weekly sprints/iterations. A cross-functional team of 12 developers delivered 1.0 version as well as minor point releases.

Conceptualized, managed, and launched an online platform for art lovers. The platform offers opportunities for artists to connect with fans, publicize events, publish their work, and also offer their services.

The project involved the migration and redevelopment of a complex, real-time data collection application from Oracle Cloud to AWS. The application collects data from geographically distributed devices which send data every few seconds.

This data is then processed and fed to an ETL pipeline which processes the data and stores it in various formats. The data is used for reporting, analytics, and predictive preventive maintenance.

The client was a European industrial company with a market leader in compressors, vacuum pumps, and generators. The project involved coaching a cross-functional team working on the development of a new product. The team consisted of hardware and software engineers, project managers, services engineers, marketing and sales professionals.

The team was in the middle of launching a new product and was finding it difficult to transition to an agile way of working. The coaching involved:
• Assessing the as-is condition.
• Creating a road map for agile adoptions.
• Recommending and adopting the right tools for project planning, tracking, and CI/CD.
• Setting up a communications protocol.
• Establishing the cadence of various agile ceremonies
• Providing continuous feedback and a fine-tuned approach based on the evolving situation.

A Japanese consumer electronics giant had embarked on a significant brand overhaul, platform rewrites, and content unification program for its online marketing platform that served 140+ countries. Having failed in the previous two attempts, they approached my employer for the execution of this program.

• I had the bottom-line responsibility for the entire program, from requirements to early iterative delivery to the go-live of pilots. This was followed by localization projects for various countries and a rollout for all 140+ countries.
• The environment consisted of 25+ vendors contributing code, content, and testing efforts. I was responsible for planning, communicating, and coordinating various workstreams.
• Program had CEO and CMO level visibility. My account management counterpart and I were responsible for status reporting, dashboarding, and upward communication.

After the first pilot, within 14 months, the program ran for 18 months, with many countries going live every month.

The client has developed a no-code platform. At present two products are being offered to customers. One product is for managing agent/franchise lifecycle, incentives, and commissions. The second product provides a loan origination application.
While the client has significant traction in demand, they struggled with the speed of execution, quality of deliverables, and customer satisfaction.

I was brought in to enable this ambitious journey.
After a two-week assessment, a 3-phased approach was presented to the client that involved:
• Limited re-architecture to enable rapid development and deployment through CI/CD
• Change in engineering practices incorporating containerization, TDD, and test automation
• Improvements to requirements definition moving away from long requirement specs to atomic user stories
• Infrastructure as code (IaC)
• Well-defined project management practices

Mingle was a ThoughtWorks Studios product. It was one of the earliest agile project management products. I was involved in taking over the development when the previous program manager quit.

The key challenges faced were:

• Slowing down the pace of development.
• Inability to align product features with market demand.
• Ability to push through major releases in short cycles.

Over 24 months, we were able to address the first and third issues successfully but the second one.

I managed a platform engineering team of over 40 people. The platform was under development for years. It had multiple architectural challenges, leading to frequent non-functional issues, low quality, and many defects. All the deployments were manual, which led to significant inefficiencies in the deployment process.

A significant architectural overhaul was undertaken. A significant amount of unit test cases were added. End-to-end deployment automation was implemented to ensure one-click deployments. Profiling and load testing of the platform were performed to improve scalability.

As a fractional COO, I headed the Road to Future transformation program, optimizing operational efficiency and workforce strategy. My other responsibilities include:

• Defining 12 business impact programs for effective execution of the transformation.
• Owning three business impact projects—productivity, innovation, and workforce planning.
• Leading the business excellence group to improve execution discipline and leadership alignment.
• Establishing structured engagement frameworks, including standups, fortnightly meetings, and quarterly business reviews.
• Mentoring senior leaders to enhance organizational transformation efforts.

The project involved late intervention into a new version of the vacuum pump that the client team was developing. The green field development had faced several delays as the teams struggled with establishing cadence, following various agile ceremonies, and faced significant quality challenges.

As a scrum master and agile coach, I established the proper cadence of various scrum ceremonies after the initial assessment. A few changes helped the team immensely:

• Well-crafted DFR and DFD
• Dashboards and charts to radiate the true status of the project
• Effective retrospectives
• Focus on backlog health both in qualitative and quantitative terms. Over six months, teams were able to bring the project on track and deliver their first release.

The project was the first phase of a multiyear program that involved migrating the client's multiple OnPrime products to the public cloud.

The client team had been struggling to complete the requirements definition, create a reliable project plan, and implement a POC to launch a larger migration program for different products. The engagement involved:

• Understanding the current technical landscape.
• Creating as-is business process documentation.
• Identifying target technologies.
• Implementing POC to demonstrate the team's understanding as well as technical feasibility.

The team was able to demonstrate these aspects within three months of project initiation.