Manali Das
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
Coventry, United Kingdom
Toptal member since September 22, 2022
Manali is a Certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and scrum master with 14 years of experience in the IT industry. She specializes in streamlining and strategizing project approaches and managing stakeholders' expectations. She formulates project roadmaps and defines the scope, schedule, budget, quality, and risks. She delivers projects in AI, blockchain, crypto, web, and mobile. Manali delivers user-centric experiences and is passionate about working with teams and achieving goals.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- IT Project Management
- Jira
- Resource Management
- Risk Analysis
- Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
- Scrum Coaching
- Scrum Master
- Stakeholder Management
Work Experience
Technical Project Manager (via Toptal)
Semita Agency LTD
- Created a project roadmap plan for a $60 million project and a product backlog for the entire project. Organized the product backlog based on priority and identified risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies.
- Conducted all scrum ceremonies, sprint planning, sprint refinement, sprint retrospectives, sprint demos, and PI planning workshops.
- Introduced several process improvements and strategized several ways of working guided by SAFe Agile methodologies. This helped in optimizing team delivery.
- Introduced several process improvements and strategized several ways of working guided by PMP (PMI) methodologies. This helped in optimizing team delivery.
- Created a budget baseline for the entire project as part of cost management and regular milestones to check the rate of deviations. When the deviation was more than 18%, there was no further discussion on handling cost creep.
- Served as a product manager and played a crucial role in defining the vision, strategy, and product roadmap for the product.
- Created a RAID log describing risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies.
- Conducted workshops for gathering and prioritizing requirements with teams, partners, sponsors, leadership teams, and all stakeholders. Took charge of the workshop agenda and created necessary materials.
- Demonstrated strong leadership to all project stakeholders for requirement elicitation, functionality prioritization, defect resolution, and resource management.
- Showed proficiency in managing various types of complexities during project integration and deliveries. Such complexities are due to integration errors, data incompatibility, technical or code-based errors, and functionality-based errors.
Program Manager
Arcastine Solutions Pvt Ltd
- Chaired several workshops to determine, finalize, and agree on project scope, requirement, timeline, criticality, and priority with various stakeholders. Often played a key role in prioritizing the functionality.
- Created a program roadmap, including a synchronized project roadmap for five projects. Also maintained a feature/capability release tracker.
- Held regular meetings to manage expectations with various stakeholders. Ensured that program, vision, and mission goals were aligned with all departments, especially with marketing and sales.
- Partnered with release management to align the sequence and timing of technology deliverables. Partnered with scrum masters and POs to understand the status and ensure release impediments are logged in Jira and prioritized for on-time releases.
- Coordinated with deployment teams on the status of releases, ensuring understanding of current and future release scope, timeline, and status. Proactively worked with product release trains to ensure all future features and capabilities were met.
- Utilized Jira dashboards to monitor the release cycle. Improved Jira workflows and custom fields to optimize execution. Used metrics to implement continuous improvement across the agile development lifecycle.
- Communicated agile best practices across the organization. Improved ritual consistency and efficacy within agile teams and the engineering organization. Helped agile teams to become self-organizing.
- Worked with product management to help teams understand the features and goals for each sprint/release. Improved backlog decomposition and estimation. Based on retrospective feedback, consolidated, triaged, and made recommendations.
- Organized program increment (PI) events occur every 3 – 4 months. These events are attended by 300+ stakeholders. Took responsibility for space booking through Outlook and office managers.
- Served as a product manager and worked as a product consultant, and was proficient in prioritizing the functionalities. Helped teams understand the features and goals for each sprint/release. Improved backlog decomposition and estimation.
Project Manager
MedTech Review, LLC
- Managed 40+ teammates, vendors, partners, and clients and their clients.
- Identified several areas for improvement and provided plans, methods, and strategies to achieve them. Pointed out three areas: underproduce, overproduce, and overburden. Identified several roles and processes that were not adding value.
- Performed resource management based on skillset, availability, project timeline, and other aspects.
- Conducted a regular RAID analysis workshop with the stakeholders to ensure all risks were documented and understood. Prepared risk registers listing all risks, dependencies, assumptions, and issues. Assigned the risk-owner a mitigation plan.
- Worked on Smartsheets to organize and align the multi-project dependencies, especially during the release of the products. During the release phase, uncertainties and risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies (RAID) often need planning and mitigation.
Volunteer Project Manager
NGO - Cancer Research India
- Served as a project and delivery manager to create portals for all staff nationwide and two apps for on-field staff's handheld devices.
- Built a product roadmap and timeline for the apps and portals, keeping in mind their scalability based on future requirements.
- Determined a budgetary baseline as guidance for tracking the value gained and cost incurred during the project development.
- Created a requirement document in the form of backlogs. There were product and sprint backlogs containing the requirements with the estimated completion time and priority.
- Organized events for fundraising, bidding to create awareness for the foundation.
- Organized events for fun activities for the volunteers.
Scrum Master
Agoverse, Inc.
- Joined the team as a project and product manager for highly modern technical projects using AI, GenAI, and facial recognition techniques.
- Handled various stakeholders involved with this project who required regular updates. Streamlined the stakeholder management process by creating a stakeholder register.
- Created a Jira board for the project, as well as epics, features, and user stories. Also built a dashboard for a quick view of the various stakeholders.
- Worked as a project manager and led a team of data analysts to augment data on market research.
- Led the project's discovery phase, which resulted in several workshops with stakeholders for requirement analysis. Ensured APT documentation of the requirements—functional, software, and infrastructure—for successful discovery completion.
- Conducted regular brainstorming sessions with the project leadership team, going through decision-making, often resulting in re-prioritization and prioritization of functionalities based on the latest market trends.
- Created baseline KPIs to monitor the project's progress. Tracked and reported progress regarding project timelines, deliverables, milestones, mini-milestones, and quality against the set KPIs.
- Functioned as the main interface between the technical team comprised of developers, architects, machine learning experts, UI/UX devs, full-stack devs, and the company directors/CEO.
- Handled project management and project planning, including scope management, schedule management, budget management, quality management, resource-skillset management, stakeholder management, and procurement management.
- Served as a project manager; handled product delivery and ensured that the dev team delivered functionalities based on the product vision and mission communicated by the director or CEO.
Agile Project Manager
Siemens
- Joined as a project manager. Led multiple development projects and teams involving different departments, vendors, and partners across multiple nations and time zones. Successfully delivered and deployed projects and moved them to the maintenance phase.
- Worked as a single point of contact for the projects. Interacted directly with clients, vendors, and all stakeholders. Managed the budget and other financial aspects of the projects. Planned the release and delivery roadmap for the program.
- Transformed waterfall projects into an iterative model and gradually introduced Agile without impacting the delivery. Worked as agile coach for the teams. Introduced Agile practices such as XP methodology which are encouraged in pair programming and testing.
- Worked as a line manager of 30+ teammates, supervising goal setting, yearly appraisal, and career growth. Regularly involved in employees' yearly progress and goal achievements.
- Organized several hackathon events. Coders from all across the organization attended these events in person. Each coder was given a unique ID and password to access their coding questions.
- Led the project for creating the Dubai Smart City application with the help of AR/VR technology. This app provided the view (in virtual reality) of an ideal, beautiful city with perfect roads, buildings, children's parks, etc.
- Managed a project that moved from a .NET codebase to Java, simultaneously delivering and not stopping to meet clients' needs. Planned the transition in a phase-wise manner and moved the entire code with less than 10% slowing down.
- Managed supply chain for various projects. Led project-based procurement, finance, inter-department communication, and approval.
- Managed communication for multiple departments, including project team, developers, department leads, directors, etc. Created stakeholder registers and modes of communication preferred by them.
- Showed a strong expertise in sending out directions and guidance to teams when needed. Excellent communication during the crunch time period before project closing, when important communications are sent.
Agile Project Transformation
Shell
- Joined the team as an application lead and Agile transformer. Oversaw module delivery with the help of Agile methodologies.
- Developed and delivered the modules for the upstream section. Worked with teammates and SMEs in different time zones. Liaised with various stakeholders as required to successfully deliver the project.
- Managed requirement analysis with stakeholders. Chaired meetings and organized sessions for discussion, including learning workshops and doubt clarifications.
- Maintained the Agile teams and gradually transformed Waterfall teams into Agile teams.
Project Manager | Product Manager
Boeing
- Created a project roadmap for the entire six months. Added monthly and fortnightly milestones to keep close track of the valuable trio budget, scope, and schedule. Managed multiple projects that are part of the same program.
- Stabilized the project and set up multiple teams. Went through the process of Storming, Forming, and Norming. Interviewed and hired teammates based on their skill set and set up the team. Created a RACI matrix to provide clarity to the team on RnR.
- Gained profound knowledge of AI, blockchain, and NFTs. Utilized generative AI on facial recognition features.
- Contributed to excellent reporting on the project's current status to all stakeholders. Created weekly, fortnightly, and monthly reports to the leadership team. Provided the status of scope completion, budget safety, project quality, delivery status, and bugs/defects.
Change Manager | Software Project Lead
IBM
- Served as project lead, overseeing the delivery of several modules of the Telecom partner software application.
- Managed the primary software applications and also other smaller applications. Liaised with teammates and stakeholders, providing them with updates. Created weekly reports and chaired meetings.
- Acted as a change manager. Analyzed the change and assessed impact, handled proper communication with affected teams and documentation of the changes, creating a communication channel and discussion platform.
Lead Developer
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
- Joined Hewlett Packard as a .NET developer and soon shouldered the responsibility of team leadership. Handled a co-located team and headed the module delivery.
- Conducted various process improvement initiatives where the team would create reusable .NET libraries and enable department-wide teams to use them. This initiative reduced delivery time and defects.
- Held multiple department-wide hackathon practices and identified the source and solutions. With the help of this initiative, several new innovative ideas came up, leading to an increased number of patents.
Project History
cRSP | Next Generation Project
https://sid.siemens.com/v/u/A6V11272777Managed and delivered a cRSP based project for creation of logic for remote doors.
Managed MindSphere Project for Digitizing a Portion of Mumbai Factory
https://siemens.mindsphere.io/enManaged and delivered several releases using the CSAT rating 7 to 9.
Oil and Gas Dashboard Creation
Managed projects for creating various mobile and web apps for the oil and gas industry and consolidating the data into a dashboard.
Dashboard Creation PG
Created a dashboard for all suppliers, acknowledging the product requirement and providing a chat app in SW so all stakeholders could communicate when the shipments were sent and received.
Alohomora | Branding
Created branding of a relatively dull initiative, "creating a reusable library," with the approach of a hackathon," in such an appropriate way that it became an interesting habit of the employees.
Education
Master's Degree in Computer Science
Mount Carmel College - Bengaluru, India
Certifications
PRINCE2 Practitioner Certification
Axelos
Project Management Professional (PMP)
Project Management Institute (PMI)
Certified Scrum Master
Scrum Alliance
SAFe 4 Agilist
Scaled Agile
ITIL Foundation Certification
ITIL
Skills
Tools
Jira, Project Management & Work Tracking Tools, SQL, Slack, Confluence, Asana, GitHub, Excel 365, Salesforce, HubSpot, Trello, Figma
Paradigms
Agile, Agile Project Management, Agile Leadership, Scrum, Agile Product Management, Lean Project Management, Design Thinking, Agile Workflow, Implementation Project Management, Agile Delivery, Management, Business to Business to Consumer (B2B2C), Waterfall Delivery, Requirements Analysis, Kanban, B2B, Testing, Change Management, DevOps, UX Design, Organizational Change Management (OCM), Acceptance Testing
Platforms
Oracle, Shopify, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Azure, Blockchain, Android, iOS, SharePoint 2007, WordPress, Windows Server 2012, Monday.com
Industry Expertise
Oil & Gas, Technology, Energy, Professional Services, Consumer Products, Business Technology, Transportation & Shipping, Digital Marketing, Healthcare, Supply Chain Management (SCM), Industrials, Digital Agencies, Logistics, Agriculture, Nonprofits, Electronics, Banking & Finance, Premium Content Subscriptions, Entertainment & Leisure, Education Technology (Edtech), FDA
Other
Microsoft Teams, IT Project Management, Stakeholder Management, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Scrum Master, Project Management, Program Management, Project Planning, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Team Leadership, Project Timelines, Digital Transformation Program Management, Optimization, Reporting, Dashboards, Best Practices, Coaching, Consulting, Middle East, Oil & Gas Project Management, Scope Management, Technical Project Management, IT Consulting, Technology Consulting, Scope of Work (SOW), Engineering, Product Development, Hiring, Agile Transformation, Agile Coaching, Sprint Planning, Agile Practices, Startup Consulting, Advisory, Web Development, Communication, Project Management Professional (PMP), Planning, Tracking, Business Delivery Management, Communication Strategy, Innovation, IT Projects, Cost Analysis, Communication Management, Budget Controls, PMI, Data Analysis, Management Consulting, Complex Program Management, Social Media Apps, Process Optimization, Progress Reporting, Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), Project Management Office (PMO), Manufacturing Project Management, PMO, Project Tracking, Mobile App Development, Mobile Applications, Web & Mobile Applications, Risk Assessment, Workflow Tools, PCI Compliance, Project Scoping, Product Discovery, Backlog Management, System Administration, Microsoft 365, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Estimation & Planning, Remote Work Consulting, Strategy, Business Development, Organization, End-to-end Implementation (E2E), Project Reporting, System Implementation, Software Implementation, Product Ownership, Leadership, Product Roadmaps, Agile Sprints, APIs, JSON, Risk Management, Business Process Automation, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Applications, Project Scheduling, Mind Mapping, PMO Development, Project Leadership, User Stories, Stakeholder Engagement, Hybrid Project Management, Research, Business to Business (B2B), Cross-functional Collaboration, Cross-functional Team Leadership, Product Management, Order Management, Inventory Management, API Integration, Project Management Operations, Vendor Management, Project Delivery, Evaluation, Waterfall Methodology, Coordination, Software Evaluation, Effort Estimation, Lean Portfolio Management, Portfolio Management, Facilitation, Stakeholder Interviews, Agile Product Delivery, Software Project Management, Detail-oriented, Organizational Leadership, Web Applications, Mobile Apps, Technical Requirements, Certified Project Manager, Web Platforms, System Integration, Mentorship & Coaching, Product Owner, Delivery, Technical Product Management, Small Business, Product Strategy, New Product Development, Budgeting, Workshop Facilitation, Release Management, Statement of Work, Websites, Relationship Management, Sprints, Sprint Retrospectives, Automation, Software Integration, Project Management & Delivery, Customer Success, Microsoft Office, Technical Program Management, Digital Project Management, Customer Support, Operations Management, Task Automation, Process Automation, Internal Communications, Operational Workflow, Strategic Planning & Execution, Growth Strategy, Executive Support, Accountability, Data-driven Decision-making, Software Development, Team Management, Operational Excellence, Organizational Design, Strategic Planning, Energy Management, Regulatory Compliance, Event Management, Event Planning, Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), Chief Operations Officer (COO), Objectives & Key Results (OKRs), Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Product Vision, Risk Analysis, Scrum Coaching, Presentations, Project Coordination, Staffing, Requirements, Process Improvement, Agile Program Management, Opportunity Assessments, Process Flows, Business Operations, Digital Transformation, Workflow, Financial Modeling, Forecasting, Process Improvement Project Management, Business Models, German-English Translation, Project Budget Management, Content Writing, Operations, Startups, Documentation, Operational Streamlining, Healthcare Services, eCommerce, QA Testing, Training, Technology Trends, Manufacturing, Electrical Engineering, Functional Specifications, Engineering Design, Operational Efficiency Improvement, Project Rescue, Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A), Integration, Cybersecurity, IT Security, Process Design, Frameworks, Data Products, Enterprise Architecture, Project Discovery, Business Process Analysis, Healthcare IT, Consumer Applications, Discovery Management, Business Analysis, Process Mapping, User Experience (UX), Standard Operating Procedures Development, System Migration, Process Documentation, Cloud, IT Infrastructure, Cloud Migration, Branding, Marketing, PeopleSoft, Data Analytics, Supply Chain, Digital Platform Development, Compliance, CRM APIs, GDPR, Global Operations, Lean Startups, Client Portals, MERN Stack, Marketplaces, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Web 3.0, Medical Devices, COO, Human Resources (HR), DCF Valuation, Electric Vehicles, Production, Data Management, Process Control, Quality Assurance (QA), Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), Internet of Things (IoT), User Research, Cloud Platforms, Analytics, Software as a Service (SaaS), Troubleshooting, Process Analysis, Data Lakes, Operational Assessments, Direct to Consumer (D2C), Custom CRM Modules, CRM Design, CRM Systems, Enterprise Product Portfolios, Digital Strategy, Business Transformation, Non-fungible Tokens (NFT), Regulations, Discovery, Biotechnology, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Chatbots, Facial Recognition, Account Management, ClickUp, Legal, Billing, Data Integration, React Native, PHP, Laravel, Quality Auditing, Augmented Reality (AR), Unity3D, C#, Unity, Business to Consumer (B2C), Trading, Investments, DocuSign, Field Service Management, Performance Management, ServiceNow, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), Product Launch, Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), Resource Management, Web Project Management, ITIL, .NET, App Development, Virtual Reality (VR), Discovery Workshops, Germany, SaaS, French-English Translation, Notion, Software Design, Technical Writing, Copywriting, Database Security, Upgrades, Vendor Selection, Medical Software, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Full-stack Development, Smart Contracts, Spanish-English Translation, User Interface (UI), Source Code Control System (SCCS), Marketing Technology (MarTech), Freight, Electricity, Technical Business Analysis, UI Design, Databases, FDA & EPA Regulations
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