Shil Sondagar
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
Toronto, ON, Canada
Toptal member since October 28, 2020
Shil's journey in project management—over 15 years long—has provided him with in-depth and hands-on experience around all aspects of delivering quality projects, products, and services. From project and product management, delivery processes, and coaching, Shil is your well-rounded "get it done" professional. Shil's engagement style is collaborative and open while driving alignment to deliver high quality, valued projects that mesmerize the user.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile Coaching
- Agile Program Management
- Budget Management
- Change Leadership
- Mobile Apps
- Product Owner
- Project Discovery
- Technical Project Management
Work Experience
Director of Delivery and Engineering
Book4Time, Inc.
- Responsible for establishing effective project delivery principles and structure within the engineering and product departments during a high growth phase in order to promote effective and efficient execution.
- Led 12 large B2B project initiatives from requirements to release using Agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban, and/or Scrumban) across four parallel teams and product lines.
- Recreated and redesigned Jira and Confluence entities (workflows, screens, forms, permissions, templates, and so on) and projects to streamline and align the project management methodology instilled at the company.
- Introduced the concept of technical roadmaps to plan for short and long-term technical initiatives with the goal of uncovering technical uncertainty which would lead to successful projects.
- Led the project and program management transformation across cross-functional teams such as product, engineering, customer success, support, sales, and marketing to ensure that teams deliver customer value based on prioritized customer commitments.
- Spearheaded a multi-phased transformation from “doing Agile” to a “being Agile” mindset while defining a squad/pod type project delivery framework.
Director of Delivery and Engineering
Norton Lifelock
- Responsible for leading the program, project, and engineering teams while executing on over ten concurrent projects.
- Led large cross-functional collaboration initiatives that would enable and pave the path for a unified cybersecurity application, aimed at increasing customer base 10-fold.
- Worked hand in hand with leadership to strategize, plan, and prioritize roadmaps and projects/programs.
- Managed the program forecast and budget while optimizing operations to reduce cost.
- Oversaw and managed external and internal partners/vendors for integration with the products.
- Oversaw over 25 projects and releases over a 1.5-year period—ensuring the execution of the product and technical roadmap and leading to a year-over-year double-digit increase in the revenue and user base.
- Led the alignment of Agile values and practices across global engineering, product, marketing, and business development teams during a highly visible cybersecurity enterprise program delivery.
Director of Delivery and Engineering
SurfEasy, Inc.
- Responsible for leading the end-to-end project delivery of world-class software applications in the cybersecurity space.
- Guided the project delivery from ideation/discovery, design, development, QA, and post-production operations across 12+ products and 6+ platforms resulting in over 60 successful project releases.
- Responsible for growing and leading a highly ownership-oriented Agile project and engineering team.
- Managed external and internal partners/vendors for integrations with the products.
- Managed outsourced development deliverables according to scope and time plans across PST, EST, European, and Asian time zones.
- Led successful Agile adoption and transformation of the organization by assessing initial state and creating a strategic roadmap with leadership, stakeholders and teams to incorporate fundamental Agile values and principles.
Agile Project Manager
Architech Consulting Services
- Led and directed daily operations of multiple projects, ranging of 10-15 Agile team members.
- Managed $15+ million-dollar projects against business requirements and delivery metrics.
- Partnered with telecommunications and government transportation clients to understand their business needs and identify and prioritize their project requirements to develop and manage a project backlog.
- Identified, managed, and mitigated project risks, including tracking projects against metrics and preparing client reports, client communication, and presentations while managing product scope and controlling scope during the development.
- Facilitated effective Agile team meetings including standups, sprint planning, retrospectives, and demos while successfully managed the sprint backlog and key project elements (risks, scope, budgets, and schedules).
- Liaised between the client and the project team to ensure user stories/acceptance criteria are clearly defined, understood, and implemented successfully.
- Worked closely with a team of Agile project managers to define and refine tools and templates that track, monitor, and forecast delivery metrics.
- Spearheaded the adoption of Agile practices and values across product and engineering teams for Architech's SMB and enterprise clients during client engagements.
R&D Agile Development Manager
Complete Innovations, Inc.
- Managed and directed daily operations of a 25-person research & development organization with full accountability for team performance, goals, KPIs, best practices, and a budget of $2.5 million.
- Executed and maintained a resource plan, effectively allocating people, time, processes, and systems to deliver on multiple enterprise-level customizations and implementation projects using Scrum and Kanban.
- Led strategic planning processes to assess, change, implement, and continually evolve and improve the Agile development and project management processes.
- Managed outsourcing activities and maintained remote communication with developers; collaborated with cross-functional project teams to access, address, and resolve development, deployment, or support issues.
Scrum Master | Senior R&D Developer
Complete Innovations, Inc.
- Introduced, led, and incorporated Agile methodologies across the organization, including all training/development and process improvement initiatives in order to effectively manage projects of various scale.
- Successfully managed and released mission critical enterprise asset tracking solutions, servicing over 10K clients globally - on time and on budget using Agile methodologies.
- Credited with driving projects, processes, increasing visibility (transparency into the process), and overall improvements, which led to record sales and product line profitability gains.
- Led Scrum ceremonies and activities such as sprint planning, standups, retrospectives, risk analysis, team charters, product backlog, story-grooming sessions, pair programming, and TDD to manage projects from discovery to delivery.
Senior Engineer | Business Analyst
Complete Innovations, Inc.
- Managed and led complex projects through the SDLC process, ensuring project scope and deliverables were within timelines, budgets, and quality standards to meet customer needs.
- Successfully led and managed a large-scale implementation with an enterprise transportation and logistics client, valued at over $500,000 to the annual budget.
- Paved the path to incorporate Agile as a framework to enable success to project management.
Project History
Cybersecurity Platform
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.symantec.securewifiProject managed large cross-functional collaboration initiatives that would enable and pave the path for a unified cybersecurity platform, aimed at increasing the customer base 10-fold over the next two years.
The solutions were built to work on native Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows using an open-source back-end VPN platform.
The initiatives required tight collaboration between eight teams located across the globe and made up of program and project managers, engineers, and product managers. This initiative involved dependency mapping and tracking, large-scale program management and delivery, and risk-based management, all in an Agile environment.
Web and Mobile App Modernization for the Hospitality Industry
Launched a modern web and mobile responsive web app to serve over 1,000 enterprise customers in the hospitality industry globally within the project timeline with an increased scope!
I primarily worked with the product, business, and design teams to identify MVP and corresponding high-level UX/UI to estimate the development. I reviewed scope with the product, engineering, and QA teams and performed story mapping sessions to gauge user flows and associated technical requirements and design.
I collaborated with the main product manager to create epics and related stories, which were then estimated and converted to a project plan, ensuring that the higher risk elements such as API integrations, third-party deliverables, and test suites were closely managed and identified as the critical path.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering
University of Ottawa - Ottawa, ON, Canada
Certifications
Certified Scrum Master
Scrum Alliance
Skills
Tools
Slack, Trello, Jira, Office 365, Google Workspace, VersionOne, Microsoft Project, Confluence, Google Docs, Pivotal Tracker, Zoom, Skype, Asana, Bitbucket
Paradigms
Agile, Scrum, Agile Delivery, Agile Project Management, Lean Project Management, Agile Software Development, Management, DevOps, B2C, Kanban, Continuous Integration (CI), Change Management, Requirements Analysis, Responsive Web Design (RWD), Database Design, Cross-platform, Object-oriented Programming (OOP), Microservices Architecture, Test-driven Development (TDD)
Platforms
Android, iOS, Windows, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Industry Expertise
Professional Services, Logistics, Booking Apps, Technology, Architecture
Other
People Management, People Development, Scrum Coaching, Project Coordination, Change Leadership, Team Leadership, Team Restructuring, Program Management, Agile Program Management, Technical Program Management, Agile Product Delivery, Project Delivery, Statement of Work, Team Management, Agile Coaching, IT Project Management, Scrum Master, Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Project Management, Sprint Ceremonies, Release Management, Delivery Management, Product Delivery, Technical Project Management, Project Estimation, Scope of Work (SOW), Project Discovery, Project Tracking, Agile Transformation, Sprint Planning, Agile Sprints, Sprints, Websites, Client Management, Project Planning, Systems, Design, Software Design, Web Development, Databases, Leadership, IT Projects, Client Relations, APIs, Scalability, Operations, Remote Team Leadership, Mobile Apps, Native Mobile Apps, QA Automation, PMO, Cloud, IT Strategy, Roadmaps, Global Operations, Budget Management, Vendor Management, Strategy, Process Flows, Restructuring, Scrumban, Third-party Management, Quality Control (QC), Troubleshooting, Use Cases, Business Analysis, Gantt Chart, Risk Management, Executive Coaching, Annual Budgets, Hiring Process Development, Hiring, Technical Support, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Mobile, Quality Assurance (QA), Client Services, User Experience (UX), REST APIs, Business to Business (B2B), Mobile Web, Product Discovery, Service, Web, Story Mapping, Critical Path Analysis, User Stories, Discovery Workshops, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Scheduling, Product Owner, Desktop, Technical Leadership, Web Technologies, Product Ownership, Microsoft 365, Customer Service Management (CSM), RESTful Development, Request for Proposal (RFP), Microsoft Teams, Hackathons, Networks, Procurement, Budgeting, Forecasting, Build Pipelines, IT Services, GPS, Stripe, Security
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