
Rajinda Rathnapala
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
Singapore, Singapore
Toptal member since February 8, 2022
A certified and accomplished delivery leader, Rajinda has 13+ years of extensive experience developing, deploying, and scaling systems to drive business growth. He has successfully managed the end-to-end project lifecycle to deliver complex software projects and lead diverse teams while meeting budgetary constraints. Dedicated to building strong client relationships, Rajinda always streamlines processes and mitigates risks to achieve innovation and operational excellence.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile Coaching
- Agile Delivery
- Leadership
- Negotiation
- Process Improvement
- Project Planning
- Risk Management
- Stakeholder Management
Work Experience
Project Manager
International Flavors & Fragrances
- Led multiple parallel work streams, including the successful delivery of two critical projects crucial for the Q4-2022 business objectives: Brexit Enhancements and OpenText Migration, which required extensive collaboration across various functional teams.
- Streamlined project delivery by enhancing planning and monitoring processes and introducing and maintaining new processes, templates, and checklists that ensured successful project execution.
- Conducted weekly portfolio reviews with the Head of GRA Portfolio, offering insights on resourcing and ongoing delivery, while brainstorming solutions for challenges, risks, and issues.
- Managed leadership and client executive expectations through regular reviews highlighting key delivery points, risks, and issue mitigation. Established and utilized escalation paths effectively to achieve desired outcomes.
Associate Director of Delivery
Mitra Innovation
- Established the portfolio plan to meet revenue and profitability KPIs for 2021 that govern the existing accounts' growth and new logo acquisition strategies. Exceeded the original portfolio target by 25% reaching $XX million by the end of 2021.
- Finalized strategic accounts. Set targets for account managers. Improved account planning processes. Derived growth strategies for existing accounts that helped meet the 2021 KPIs and secured over $XX million backlog revenue for the 2022 portfolio.
- Led a team of business analysts and architects to identify business trends that complement organizational strengths. Derived business propositions and collaborated with sales and marketing to establish the marketing plan for new logo acquisition.
- Conducted retrospectives and a situational analysis at a portfolio level, determined the improvement areas, established business use cases, and finalized investments required to grow the portfolio.
- Worked with the portfolio architect and established the technology direction that complements the portfolio strategies. Created the capability development and management plans, reviewed monthly, and ensured the plan's alignment with the strategy.
- Performed capacity planning for the portfolio quarterly and followed up with resource management weekly. Ensured that resources were aligned with the revenue forecast and optimally utilized, and that risk mitigation plans were established.
- Forecasted weekly revenue, reviewed new pursuits, active pre-sales weekly, and profitability every month, and ensured KPIs were met. Also identified risks, planned mitigations, and provided confidence to the leadership on the portfolio health.
- Conducted fortnightly portfolio reviews with the CEO and COO to share highlights of revenue, profitability, resourcing, ongoing delivery, pre-sales, and brainstormed solutions and mitigations for portfolio challenges, risks, and issues.
- Led a billing pool of over 80 billing FTEs spread over 12 accounts. Conducted delivery reviews on all accounts from pre-sales and project initiation to closure. Provided recommendations. Coached and mentored PMs to ensure objectives were met.
- Managed expectations of the leadership and client execs via reviews focused on key delivery highlights, value creation, strategic partnerships, risks, and issues mitigations. Established and utilized escalation paths in meeting desired outcomes.
Senior Project Manager
Mitra Innovation
- Led and delivered over ten projects for client portfolios of startups, independent software vendors (ISVs), SMEs, and enterprises spread across the UK and the ANZ regions using Agile, Waterfall, and hybrid project delivery methodologies.
- Conducted multiple time-boxed discovery phases to establish the high-level scope, schedule, and cost. Configured the PM tools and introduced custom workflows and dashboards required for project execution, monitoring, and control.
- Identified and implemented process elements complying with ISO 9001 standards required to meet the project objectives, which cut across all five phases of the project governing scope, schedule, and cost baselines.
- Played the proxy product owner role. Established the high-level MVP scope with the client by leading in-person workshops. Provided detailed user stories for the development team for estimates. Set release and delivery plans.
- Fulfilled communication plans by managing project communication. Shared status reports to execs and senior leadership. Promoted transparency via scrum ceremonies complementing inspection and adoption that helped to manage project risks and issues.
- Established the stakeholder engagement plan and built healthy client relationships that contributed to gathering key information on the client's strategic roadmap and led to diversifying the offered services and growing the account.
- Created multiple contract types, such as a fixed bid, T&M, retainer, and related SOWs and CRs to ensure project delivery within the triple constraints. Led contract negotiations with the client's procurement, delivery, and technical teams.
- Conducted successful exec negotiations, utilized evidence gathered about project delays caused by the client's dependencies, and overcame challenges while maintaining strong client relationships.
- Established templates for sprint planning, sprint reports, exec reports, and delivery tracking. Shared the recommendation and process improvements with the PMO and head of process.
- Played the lead project manager (PM) role and led a PM pool of three senior project managers, two PMs, associate PM, and team lead. Provided guidance and coaching on the project management best practices and mentoring on career progression.
Project Manager
Sysco LABS Sri Lanka
- Played the scrum master role for multiple teams, facilitated the scrum ceremonies, trained development teams on the Scrum process and Agile development techniques and practices.
- Established detailed delivery plans by collaborating with leads from platform, database, reporting, payments, and feature development teams to ensure inter-dependencies are identified, timely prioritized, and delivered.
- Played the proxy product owner role and established the high-level scope for quarterly product releases features with the onsite product owner. Provided detailed user stories for the development teams for estimates along with wireframes.
- Sliced product features into user stories. Conducted the MoSCoW analysis and negotiated the scope with the POs to fit the crucial business functionality of larger features for quarterly product releases.
- Created exec reports and presented to senior leadership the team's progress weekly. Implemented risk mitigations with the sponsorship of the leadership.
- Defined the Agile Scrum process for the company as the company embraced Agile during the 2015 to 2016 period. Evaluated the applicability of SAFe principles to align releases across multiple teams to one quarterly product release.
- Conducted agile delivery training sessions for the company on the Scrum, Scrumban, and Kanban delivery methodologies.
- Introduced process improvements related to sprint planning templates, sprint reports, and exec reports.
Senior Software Engineer | Scrum Master
99X Technology
- Led the team as the scrum master for the distributed, cross-cultural Agile Scrum project teams, guided the development teams and the client on the Scrum framework and Agile development practices.
- Analyzed the user requirements to determine the feasibility of design and implementation within time and cost constraints.
- Led the solution designing and implementation while collaborating with internal and external stakeholders located onsite and offshore to procure and analyze information on multiple aspects of the projects.
- Coached the development team and the client on the Scrumban and Kanban delivery methodologies and practiced the hybrid delivery methodologies to achieve project objectives.
- Implemented process elements required to meet the project objectives and comply with ISO 9001 standards.
- Managed project risks. Escalated and resolved impediments that prevented the team from completing sprint goals and sprint scope.
- Collaborated with the product owners to ensure sprint retrospective action items were implemented in a timely manner.
Software Engineer
Virtusa
- Led the solution design and implementation for assigned components. Distributed tasks between junior engineers and monitored their progress. Escalated impediments to project leadership and sought support to finish deliverables on time.
- Assessed detailed project requirements. Identified areas that required clarity. Shared needed clarifications with a business analyst and risks related to project scope with the leadership.
- Established a technical approach for assigned features. Identified detailed task breakdowns, assumptions, dependencies, and technical risks. Used three-point estimations for task breakdowns. Shared them with project leadership for delivery planning.
- Performed a root cause analysis for defects. Identified fixes, impacted areas, and the effort required to fix them. Communicated project leadership for delivery planning.
- Conducted demonstrations on the completed deliverables for the project leadership and clients.
Project History
Elderly Care Platform
Launched the minimum viable product (MVP) for clinical trials.
My employer was at risk of losing the client. The project was handed over to me by the leadership to regain the client's confidence in the employer's ability to deliver complex projects.
I conducted in-person project discovery workshops with the client and cloud platform team. While playing the proxy product owner role, I utilized Agile and PMP techniques to establish the project scope, schedule, and cost. Dashboards and status reports were used to provide greater visibility of the project attributes for the client. I also performed frequent client exec reviews and demos on the team's progress.
By successfully managing the cloud platform team of over 14 developers and testers and delivering multiple releases of the cloud platform, I helped the client commence clinical trials and complete numerous funding rounds. This restored the client's confidence in my employer's delivery capabilities.
Pharmaceutical Platform
Launched and managed multiple releases of the pharmaceutical platform.
After conducting multiple project discovery workshops for different workstreams, I established the program governance and stakeholder engagement plan governing multiple client and employer's project teams. I derived the program level dependency and action items tracker while implementing a hybrid PM processes' governing scope, schedule, and cost. I also worked with the client's project managers in resolving the interdependencies within teams.
I successfully managed the employer's team of over ten developers and testers and delivered the MVP for this pharmaceutical platform, followed by multiple integrations and implementation projects to help them reduce the operational cost and increase revenue:
• The integration with multiple POS systems.
• The loyalty platform integrations.
• The identity platform implementation and integration.
• The data warehouse and reporting.
Mobile Apps for Gambling
Launched and managed releases of the mobile apps for gambling.
I conducted multiple discovery phases to establish the detailed scope aligned with the high-level scope captured under SoWs. I created and negotiated CRs with the client's procurement, delivery, and technical teams to ensure projects were delivered within the triple constraints. Also, I implemented hybrid project delivery processes across the projects and derived baselines for scope, schedule, and cost while bringing in flavors from the Agile delivery that increased the collaboration and synergy across the two companies, leading the client to select my employer as one of their strategic development partners.
I spearheaded a team of over 15 developers and testers that delivered the MVP for the mobile apps. The program, which enhanced customers' experience and promoted business growth, involved the development of the iOS and Android end-user mobile app and in-club iOS mobile app, and the design and implementation of CI/CD pipelines for application development and deployment using Azure DevOps.
Education
Master's Degree in Business Administration (MBA)
ICBT Campus | Associate College of Cardiff Metropolitan University - Colombo, Sri Lanka
Bachelor's Degree (Honors) in Information Technology
Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology | SLIIT - Malabe, Sri Lanka
High School Diploma in General Studies
Ananda College - Colombo, Sri Lanka
Certifications
SAFe 4 Agilist
Scaled Agile
Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO)
Scrum Alliance
Project Management Professional (PMP)
Project Management Institute (PMI)
Certified Scrum Master
Scrum Alliance
A Practical Approach to Kanban
QAI
Skills
Tools
Jira, Confluence, Project Management & Work Tracking Tools, Google Workspace, Slack, Office 365, Trello, Microsoft Project, Visual Studio, SQL, PostgreSQL, TortoiseSVN, SQL Management Studio, GitHub, SAP Plant Maintenance (PM)
Paradigms
Agile Delivery, Scrum, Agile Project Management, Management, Agile, Kanban, Waterfall Delivery, Agile Leadership, Azure DevOps, Design Patterns, Object-oriented Programming (OOP)
Industry Expertise
Chemistry
Other
Scrumban, Process Improvement Project Management, IT Project Management, Project Planning, Release Management, Scrum Master, Communication, Hybrid Project Management, Project Management, Agile Sprints, Planning, Project Tracking, Reporting, Sprint Ceremonies, Sprints, Sprint Planning, Sprint Retrospectives, Accountability, Web Project Management, Stakeholder Engagement, Progress Reporting, Project Delivery, Agile Product Delivery, Delivery, Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), IT Projects, Client Delivery Management, Cross-functional Team Leadership, Software Development Management, Communication Management, Microsoft 365, Project Management Professional (PMP), Stakeholder Management, Negotiation, Leadership, Business Administration, Product Owner, Product Management, Account Management, Process Improvement, Executive Reporting, Corporate Governance, Cost Control, Agile Coaching, Mentorship & Coaching, Profit Optimization, User Stories, Project Discovery, Risk Management, Program Management, Customer Success, Key Account Management, Dashboards, Business to Business (B2B), Business to Consumer (B2C), Digital Transformation Program Management, Process Flows, Technical Project Management, Schedule Optimization, Scope Management, Structured Facilitation, Backlog Grooming, Strategy, Requirements, Budgeting, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Best Practices, Cross-functional Collaboration, Risk Assessment, PMO, Functional Specifications, Web & Mobile Applications, Mobile Apps, Requirements & Specifications, Quality Control (QC), Performance, Vendor Management, Project Management Office (PMO), IT Business Analysis, Microsoft Teams, Software Design, Software Development, Portfolio Management, Mathematics, Physics, Growth Strategy, Revenue Modeling, Revenue Strategy, Workshops, Contract Drafting, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), .NET, JavaScript, Web Services, HTML, CSS, jQuery, Ruby on Rails (RoR), XML, C#.NET, ADO.NET, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework, Ajax, Microsoft InfoPath, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), Healthcare Services, Telemedicine, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Workflow, eCommerce, Internet of Things (IoT), Healthcare IT, Consulting, Training Content, SaaS, Startups, Security, SAP, Delivery Management
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