Pradeep Tammineni
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
Calgary, AB, Canada
Toptal member since October 25, 2022
Pradeep has been a technical program manager for the past decade, working with multiple teams concurrently to realize organizational goals and objectives. He uses tooling to augment the delivery efforts of the program teams. Despite being exclusively in the agile milieu for the past five years, Pradeep is equally adept at traditional project management and often leverages his extensive experience in it to manage programs in an agile environment.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile
- Agile Coaching
- Confluence
- Jira Administration
- Office 365
- Stakeholder Management
- Systems Thinking
- Technical Program Management
Work Experience
Staff Technical Program Manager
Rakuten
- Joined the team as senior technical program manager. Established the way of working for program management.
- Delivered two programs, improved communication at all levels through newsletters and focused meetings, and mentored two technical program managers in the first six months.
- Led the ideation, development, and execution of a release management process focusing on the visibility of releases and communication across the organization through the Atlassian suite. This led to a 55% reduction (YoY) in incidents caused by releases.
- Led the ideation, development, and execution of the incident management process. Used Jira and automation to ensure teams have the means to log, measure, and subsequently learn from the incidents, leading to a 15% increase in efficiency.
- Directed seven scrum teams across three continents to build a vendor-agnostic gift card store, addressing vendor risks. Managed stakeholder engagement across legal, partnerships, and security.
- Led the modernization of the home page for rakuten.com, impacting 15+ million users. Managed risks and engagement across marketing, sales, AI, and development teams in timely releases and final delivery.
Program Manager
Kar Auction Services
- Served as a senior scrum master for two teams. Quickly rose to be a program manager, accountable for the release train delivery with five scrum teams. Set up processes to support the program increment (PI) planning for the teams (quarterly).
- Conceptualized and created reusable assets like the capacity planner, team performance tracker, PI readiness tracker, and PI health tracker used by scrum teams and programs to effectively plan and subsequently measure the health of a PI or sprint.
- Led the change management with the organization's transition to a robust on-demand release process, thereby reducing the operational overhead for around five teams by 8–10 hours per week and resulting in savings of around $480,000 per year.
- Conceptualized and organized a zero-budget hackathon during the pandemic to boost the morale of the teams in the organization.
- Directed integration of two distinct marketplaces, enabling cross-platform inventory access. Established frameworks for communication and risk management across biz units with differing methodologies.
Senior Project Manager | Senior Scrum Master
Cognizant
- Oversaw eight consecutive release cycles at RBC while increasing the flow by 25% and ensuring 100% functionality with each cycle. After the burn-in period, the team was able to consistently hit 90–100% of targets over multiple sprints.
- Managed a $3 million program at Travelers constituting four projects in multiple phases–migration of the business applications, services, and servers to a data center resulted in OPEX savings (infra maintenance cost) of $250,000 per month.
- Coached the teams in the transition from Waterfall to Agile development in sprint planning, estimation, backlog refinement, scrum meetings, retrospective, root-cause analysis, and continuous improvement during concurrent 3-week sprint cycles.
- Worked closely with the project directors and portfolio managers in standardizing the project tracking practices.
- Employed visualization techniques to ensure an optimal degree of visibility for the issues and risks in executive dashboards and status reports.
Project Lead | Management Consultant
Accenture
- Led an organization-wide transformation project at Chubb and participated in the change management initiative for rolling out a social intranet. Doubled as a product specialist leading the prod support team and a project lead.
- Led the application delivery efforts from inception through delivery and warranty management. Created, managed, and executed project plans. Identified, analyzed, managed the risks, and optimally managed teams' workload.
- Facilitated the periodic preparation of high-quality and focused portfolio-wide executive dashboard reports entailing key measures, productivity metrics, and key project information presented to the client organization's executives.
Project History
ADESA and TradeRev Marketplace Integration
https://www.karglobal.com/new-digital-integration-seamlessly-connects-adesa-and-traderev-marketplaces/Led the project of integrating two business units (separate marketplaces) under KAR, allowing users from one marketplace to access the inventory of another.
• Managed the delivery of the program with five different scrum teams, remote and co-located.
• Set up the framework for planning, communication, project tracking, and other execution processes. Given the program spanned two business units with disparate ways of program management, they relied on communication to set the guardrails for the teams to function in a well-coordinated manner.
• The program was completed successfully—on time and without any post-release issues due to the effective collaboration techniques employed.
Rakuten Gift Card Store
Led the project to make the Rakuten gift card store vendor-agnostic.
• Managed the delivery of the project with seven scrum teams, remote and co-located across three continents and five different time zones.
• The project is aimed to make the Rakuten gift card store vendor-agnostic, reducing the risk of relying on one/few vendors to offer gift cards to Rakuten customers.
• Worked with vendors to ensure the information exchange between internal teams and vendors was optimal and timely.
• Worked with key internal stakeholders, including legal, business, partnerships, and security, on getting the necessary checks and approvals to ensure the project progressed smoothly.
• Managed the project through ideation, prototyping, delivery of the minimum viable product, subsequent phases, and further enhancements.
• Informed the stakeholders, including CXOs, SVPs, and VPs of the program via weekly newsletters.
• The program is completed with at least two vendors’ support gift card management.
Social Intranet for Chubb
http://village.chubb.comLed the project of building and rolling out a social intranet based on Jive for Chubb insurance.
• Managed the project with a client team (Chubb) and vendor team (Accenture) across two continents and doubled as a Jive product specialist.
• This was an organization-wide transformation project for Chubb and ACE Limited US for rolling out a social intranet. The organization was using a traditional SharePoint site as an intranet.
• Liaised with multiple teams–internal and external, co-located and remote–to achieve projects’ objectives.
• Coached the team to do effective demos as they built out features.
• Formed multiple focus groups across the regions and ensured the prioritization of further development for key features, factoring in the feedback from focus groups.
Education
Master of Business Administration (MBA) in IT Strategy and Marketing
Indian Institute of Technology Madras - Chennai, India
Bachelor of Technology Degree in Information Technology
Koneru Lakshmaiah College of Engineering - Guntur, India
Certifications
PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)
Project Management Institute (PMI)
SAFe Program Consultant
Scaled Agile
Certified Scrum Master
Scrum Alliance
Project Management Professional (PMP)
Project Management Institute (PMI)
Skills
Tools
Jira, Confluence, Slack, Zoom, Office 365, Atlassian, Project Management & Work Tracking Tools, Microsoft Excel, Trello, Google Sheets, Asana, Google Workspace
Paradigms
Agile, Agile Project Management, Scrum, Lean Project Management, Rapid Prototyping, Requirements Analysis, Change Management, Azure DevOps, Agile Leadership, Design Thinking, Kanban, Business to Business to Consumer (B2B2C), Management
Platforms
SharePoint, Monday.com, WordPress, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Webflow
Industry Expertise
Digital Media, Automotive, Healthcare
Other
Jira Administration, Excel VBA, Aha!, Project Management, Microsoft Teams, Program Management, Technical Program Management, IT Business Analysis, Systems Thinking, Web Project Management, Microsoft Office, Communication, Feature Planning, Jira Administrator, Project Estimation, Project Planning, Scope Management, Business Analysis, Process Improvement, Process Flows, Process Mapping, Dashboards, Project Reporting, Progress Reporting, Technical Project Management, Project Coordination, Executive Presentations, Agile Program Management, Detail-oriented, Scrum Master, Digital Platform Development, Hybrid Project Management, Project Management Professional (PMP), Team Leadership, Organization, Process Optimization, Best Practices, Templates, Sprint Planning, Digital Project Management, Waterfall Methodology, Atlassian Plugins, Project Tracking, Scope of Work (SOW), Budgeting, Reporting, Workflow, Estimation & Planning, Innovation, Creativity, Product Development, Project Management & Delivery, Project Discovery, Backlog Management, Operations, Operations Management, Stakeholder Management, Digital Transformation Program Management, Work Breakdown Structure, IT Projects, Planning, Project Management Operations, IT Program Management, Scheduling, Product Ownership, User Stories, Software as a Service (SaaS), Project Scheduling, Task Scheduling, Cross-functional Team Leadership, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Technical Requirements, Feature Prioritization, Project Scoping, Management Consulting, Resource Management, Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), Sprints, Team Management, Delivery Management, PI Planning, Waterfall, Agile Coaching, Newsletters, Discord, Marketing, eCommerce, Web Programming, End-to-end Implementation (E2E), Risk Management, Process Design, Standard Operating Procedures Development, Data Analytics, Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Databases, Project Management Office (PMO), APIs, Python, ClickUp, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Product Management, Customer Support, Discovery, Workshops, Notion, Discovery Workshops, User Onboarding, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Integration, ChatGPT, Business Consulting, Web & Mobile Applications, Jira Service Management, IT Infrastructure, Apps, Training, Data Structures, IT Project Management, Jive, User Experience (UX), Data Migration, Microsoft SQL Server, XML, Startups, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Airtable, Elasticsearch
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