Sundeep Vissavajhala
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
Hyderabad, Telangana, India
Toptal member since June 2, 2022
Sundeep is a diligent and resourceful professional with 12 years of experience in the industry. He has outstanding communication, leadership, and organization skills that enhance service delivery and efficiency. Sundeep is skilled in Agile program management, estimations, budgeting, Agile methodologies, and customer engagement. He enjoys managing various functional teams' deliverables and providing high-quality business assurance with stringent timelines and challenging speed to market delivery.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile
- Jira
- Kanban
- Program Management
- Project Management
- Release Train Engineer (RTE)
- Scrum
- Scrum Master
Work Experience
Level 1 Lead | IT Project Manager
S&P Global
- Facilitated program increment (PI) planning readiness by fostering a continuous exploration process that drove the synthesis of a vision, a roadmap, and backlogs through pre and post-PI planning events.
- Facilitated the PI planning event. Summarized team PI objectives into program PI objectives and published them for visibility and transparency. Helped manage risks and dependencies and escalated and tracked impediments.
- Worked with the product and solution management teams, product owners, and other stakeholders to help ensure strategy and execution alignment. Drove relentless improvement through inspect and adapt (I&A) workshops.
- Reported status updates and metrics to senior leadership on the performance and efficiency of the Agile release train (ART). Collaborated with the product management to ensure the highest value was prioritized and requirements were clearly defined.
- Worked with the Agile program management office (APMO) on the program execution and operational excellence. Coached leaders, teams, and scrum masters in the Lean and Agile practices and mindsets.
- Guided and influenced scrum teams to meet sprint commitments and helped them remove impediments. Put in place an overall release strategy and ensured predictability of the release.
Scrum Master | Project Manager
PT Achilles Advanced Management
- Set up the workflows and held workshops evangelizing voluntary adoption in the development team.
- Integrated Jira for workflow management and issue handling throughout the project.
- Helped the team in coming up with the release management process and facilitated the successful release of the 1TRX product to production.
- Helped set up the process for training beta customers and tracked the issues to get closer to having the product go successfully live.
Project Manager
Paysafe Group
- Joined the team as a project manager but became a program manager to manage a program worth $3 million and ten Agile teams. Oversaw the exchange-to-exchange (E2E) delivery of the program executed in Agile, Scrum, and Kanban methodologies.
- Formulated, organized, and monitored inter-connected projects and coordinated cross-project activities. Led and evaluated project managers and other staff. Developed and controlled deadlines, budgets, and activities.
- Identified several risks and dependencies that impacted project delivery, stakeholder communication, and expectation management. Collaborated with product management to ensure the highest value was prioritized and requirements were clearly defined.
- Created and managed long-term goals. Developed a budget and operating plan for the program. Implemented and managed changes and interventions to ensure project goals were achieved.
- Met with stakeholders to facilitate communication regarding project issues and decisions about services and make it more transparent. Produced accurate and timely reports on the program's status throughout its lifecycle.
- Ensured goals were met in all areas, including customer satisfaction, safety, quality, and team member performance.
Project Manager
SS&C Eze
- Acted as a servant leader by helping the team when facing impediments to achieving sprint commitments. Assisted the team in solving problems rather than provide solutions. Fostered the team to be self-organized and facilitated all Scrum events.
- Organized a sprint review meeting with business stakeholders and drove the team towards achieving a business goal. Acted as a liaison between the stakeholders and teams to negotiate the sprint scope.
- Identified project risks and raised them proactively. Recognized process issues and improved them, ensuring that the teams followed Agile processes in each sprint at the user story level according to the definition of done (DoD).
- Identified several risks and dependencies that impacted project delivery, stakeholder communication, and expectation management. Collaborated with product management to ensure the highest value was prioritized and requirements were clearly defined.
- Monitored the Agile metrics like velocity and a burndown chart in Jira at the program level and reported them to the stakeholders. Communicated clearly and consistently with the stakeholders about the project status.
Scrum Master
Optum
- Worked with the product management team to maintain a healthy product backlog. Organized sprint planning, product backlog grooming, sprint retrospective, stand-up meetings, and product demo for a purchase order.
- Assisted the product owner in the backlog refinement and prioritization of the backlog items. Organized sprint review meetings with the business stakeholders and drove the team toward achieving their business goals.
- Fostered the team to be self-organized. Communicated clearly and consistently with the stakeholders about the project status and was pre-emptive when problematic issues arose.
- Identified several risks and dependencies that impacted project delivery, stakeholder communication, and expectation management. Collaborated with product management to ensure the highest value was prioritized and requirements were clearly defined.
Consultant
ADP
- Joined the team as a senior QA and was promoted to a scrum master role when the Agile transformation started in the company. Managed one team as a scrum master and worked as a QA lead for a team of ten members.
- Organized sprint planning, product backlog grooming, sprint retrospective, stand-up meetings, and product demo for a purchase order. Coached new team members in Scrum values and encouraged full participation from every team member.
- Prepared test cases based on user stories and a traceability matrix. Performed end-to-end testing and database testing using SQL. Created and executed automation scripts in Selenium WebDriver using Java.
- Represented the QA team in project meetings, performed end-to-end testing, executed test cases individually, and assisted team members. Published weekly status reports in the QA repository. Provided an approval of readiness for implementation.
Project History
CSM Pricing Calculator
Launched and managed several releases for the CSM Pricing Calculator project as a release train engineer (RTE). Facilitated program-level processes and execution, drove continuous development, managed risks, and escalated impediments as required.
Independent Software Vendor Platform
Delivered an MVP for the entire independent software vendor (ISV) platform on time by leading multiple development and business readiness teams, managing stakeholders in three different regions, and conducting beta testing with three clients.
Eze Eclipse Reconciliation
Increased business value by including process improvements and fostering better alignment between stakeholders and a development team. Reduced business as usual ad-hoc requests from 60% to 20% in sprint backlogs to increase feature development.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Electronics and Communications
Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University - Hyderabad, India
Certifications
PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)
Project Management Institute (PMI)
Certified Scrum Master
Scrum Alliance
Skills
Tools
Jira, Confluence, Skype for Business, Slack
Paradigms
Agile Project Management, Scrum, Agile, Kanban, Agile Software Development, Requirements Analysis, Azure DevOps, Change Management
Other
Microsoft Teams, Scrum Master, PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP), Agile Program Management, Stakeholder Management, IT Project Management, Project Management, Project Planning, Estimation & Planning, Project Scoping, Backlog Management, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), Team Leadership, Project Delivery, Project Timelines, Project Estimation, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), PI Planning, Project Discovery, Release Train Engineer (RTE), Project Budget Management, IT Program Management, Program Management, Process Documentation, Hybrid Project Management, Waterfall Methodology, Risk Management, Discovery Workshops, Roadmaps, Lean Portfolio Management, Beta Testing, QA Automation, Selenium WebDriver, Project Management Professional (PMP), Fintech, Scrum Coaching, Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Technical Project Management, Agile Coaching
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