Sachin is available for hire
Hire SachinSachin Ranka
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
Mississauga, ON, Canada
Toptal member since April 1, 2021
Bio
Sachin is a seasoned scrum master with 18 years of overall IT experience in banking, retail, media, travel, insurance domains, and education. Focusing on Agile and Scrum since 2011, he is an Agile evangelist and a firm believer in servant leadership. As a Certified Scrum Master, Sachin has delivered multiple Agile transformation projects while leading co-located and distributed teams across the globe.
Project Highlights
Scrum Master at Royal Bank of Canada
Led two software development teams in maturing their Agile practices, thereby saving resources (12%), accelerating deployment (75%), and reducing defects to under 6%.
Scrum Master at Pearson
Coached three development teams on Agile Principles and methodologies to facilitate the Agile transformation while delivering projects.
Support Manager at John Lewis Partnership
Generated £150,000 in annual savings through automation and saved over £100,000 through other process improvements and services.
Expertise
- Agile
- Agile Transformation
- Jira
- Production Support
- Scrum
- Scrum Master
- Stakeholder Management
Work Experience
Senior Scrum Master
2021 - 2023
BMO Bank of Montreal
- Started as a scrum master of two UI/UX development teams. Coached them in self-organization and self-sustainability. Ultimately, I took up a third team to help with Agile transformation and repeated my success as with the other two teams.
- Trained the teams on complexity-based relative estimation techniques improving the predictability of deliverables and generating KPIs for further continuous improvements.
- Helped the Agile COE with feedback and helped improve the Agile transformation journey.
Scrum Master
2021 - 2021
Canadian Tire Corporation
- Led three software development teams in migrating on-prem fulfillment services to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform through Agile practices.
- Recognized areas of strength and improvement by employing appropriate coaching and development techniques for the team members.
- Provided feedback, coaching, and mentoring to team members while contributing to the Scrum Master Chapter (Community).
Scrum Master
2019 - 2020
Royal Bank of Canada
- Led two software development teams in maturing their Agile practices.
- Transformed Agile metrics to understand the overall team performance and target areas for improvement.
- Coached and mentored a cross-functional team of 10 members to deliver quality products through Agile processes.
- Migrated and automated all the scrum reporting to Confluence to reduce email clutter for stakeholders and centralize communications for efficiency's sake.
- Implemented Jira Service Desk for the data governance (DG) and data quality (DQ) teams. This enhanced the requirements intake process for the DG owners and addressed ad hoc requests raised by the DQ team.
Scrum Master
2016 - 2019
Pearson
- Coached three development teams on Agile Principles and methodologies with training materials and workshops to facilitate the Agile transformation.
- Led a product development project, using Oracle MDM for Product and for Customer Data.
- Worked with senior management, business owners, and release management to propagate the vision of the product, prioritize, and develop software release planning.
- Collaborated with product owners to coordinate grooming exercises to keep the product backlog relevant and prioritized and to ensure that the acceptance criteria (Definition of Done - DoD) were agreed upon and stories were ready for sizing.
- Facilitated scrum of scrum calls and team and cross-team retrospectives with other scrum masters to build good working relationships among seven Agile teams across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and India.
Senior ETL Consultant | Support Manager
2013 - 2016
John Lewis Partnership
- Designed and developed ETL solutions, electronic point of sale (EPOS), loyalty programs, and data warehouse initiatives.
- Provided production support (incidents, problems, and change management) for the live environment.
- Set up the service introduction function to provide design inputs to the development teams in an initiative to standardize best practices at an enterprise level.
Scrum Master | ETL Developer
2011 - 2013
Sainsbury
- Transitioned the team to the Agile methodology through active training and mentoring.
- Conducted daily stand-up meetings in two-week iterations; facilitated sprint reviews, retrospectives, and sprint planning.
- Collaborated with product owners to coordinate grooming exercises to keep the product backlog relevant and prioritized and to ensure that the acceptance criteria (DoD) were agreed upon and that stories were ready for sizing.
- Designed and developed ETL solutions for an EPOS replatform and labor-management initiatives.
ETL Developer | Lead SQL Developer
2010 - 2011
Travelers
- Collaborated with onsite coordinators to finalize business requirements.
- Supported and maintained the existing live environment.
- Provided development support to the respective teams during QAT and UAT phases.
- Designed and developed SQL solutions for bond and financial product initiatives.
Lead Operations Analyst
2005 - 2010
Orbitz
- Supported and maintained production environments while coordinating with onshore and offshore development teams for production deployments.
- Handled all the data migration activities and respective reporting.
- Enhanced and fine-tuned existing stored procedures, jobs, and DTS packages.
Project History
Scrum Master at Royal Bank of Canada
Led two software development teams in maturing their Agile practices, thereby saving resources (12%), accelerating deployment (75%), and reducing defects to under 6%.
The data quality team (DQ) had seven stakeholders and eight team members. The data governance team had three stakeholders and 12 team members.
Key Achievements:
- Saved 12% of team resources by streamlining Agile ceremonies and using Agile tools for reporting.
- Reduced deployment time by 75% by driving the end-to-end implementation of a CI/CD pipeline, using DevOps.
- Automated a metadata extraction and ingestion process in Collibra with a defect rate of less than 6%.
Key Achievements:
- Saved 12% of team resources by streamlining Agile ceremonies and using Agile tools for reporting.
- Reduced deployment time by 75% by driving the end-to-end implementation of a CI/CD pipeline, using DevOps.
- Automated a metadata extraction and ingestion process in Collibra with a defect rate of less than 6%.
Scrum Master at Pearson
Coached three development teams on Agile Principles and methodologies to facilitate the Agile transformation while delivering projects.
Project 1: Oracle Master Data Management (MDM)
Product team: 12 members
Customer data team: 10 members
Project 2: System of Authority
Migration of the legacy data distribution platform to a new AWS platform-based operational data store, feeding data to all the downstream applications.
Team: 12 members
Project 3: CDW to EDW Migration
Migration of data from corporate data warehouses to enterprise data warehouses.
Team: 10 members
Key Achievements:
- Coached three Waterfall teams in Agile methodology through active training and workshops.
- Reduced delays of multiple product deliveries by 60% in struggling Waterfall projects.
- Delivered migration projects from the CDW to the EDW by streamlining processes, improving cross-functional collaboration, and introducing automation opportunities.
- Continuously streamlined operational processes to strengthen projects in production environments.
Product team: 12 members
Customer data team: 10 members
Project 2: System of Authority
Migration of the legacy data distribution platform to a new AWS platform-based operational data store, feeding data to all the downstream applications.
Team: 12 members
Project 3: CDW to EDW Migration
Migration of data from corporate data warehouses to enterprise data warehouses.
Team: 10 members
Key Achievements:
- Coached three Waterfall teams in Agile methodology through active training and workshops.
- Reduced delays of multiple product deliveries by 60% in struggling Waterfall projects.
- Delivered migration projects from the CDW to the EDW by streamlining processes, improving cross-functional collaboration, and introducing automation opportunities.
- Continuously streamlined operational processes to strengthen projects in production environments.
Support Manager at John Lewis Partnership
Generated £150,000 in annual savings through automation and saved over £100,000 through other process improvements and services.
Led a team of four onshore and four offshore operations analysts while maintaining the ETL production environment serving as the data integration layer.
Key Achievements:
- Generated annual savings worth £150,000 by automating and optimizing environments.
- Drove cumulative savings of over £100,000 by reinforcing enterprise standard practices with a new service introduction function to help disconnected multi-vendor teams align with the product vision.
Key Achievements:
- Generated annual savings worth £150,000 by automating and optimizing environments.
- Drove cumulative savings of over £100,000 by reinforcing enterprise standard practices with a new service introduction function to help disconnected multi-vendor teams align with the product vision.
Education
2000 - 2004
Bachelor's Degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering
University of Madras - Chennai, India
Certifications
MARCH 2019 - MARCH 2023
Certified Scrum Master
Scrum Alliance
Skills
Tools
Jira, Abinitio, SQL, Slack
Paradigms
Scrum, Agile, Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), Change Management
Other
Stakeholder Management, Production Support, Scrum Master, Incident Management, Problem Management, Relationship Building, Coordination, IT Operations Management (ITOM), Agile Transformation, ServiceNow, Data Warehousing, Data Integration, Public Speaking, Software Release Management, Data Warehouse Design, Agile Coaching, Microsoft SQL Server, Scrum Coaching, Release Management
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