Lakshmi Ramaseshan

I'm an Agile evangelist and look for every opportunity to promote the benefits of Agile!

I started my Agile journey in 2008 when I worked as a Senior Developer in a GIS company. I got the opportunity with work with an experienced Agile team in and lead a new team to get them to follow the Agile process and methodolody. We used Scrum, constituted daily stand ups, planning/review meetings and retrospectives and started to change the mindset of the development team to think in an agile manner. I worked in a Scrum Master role but was also playing dual roles as a Project Manager/and helping the business analysts with requirements gathering & documentation. I got to play a Scrum Master role on more than 15 projects in a 3.5 year time span, varying in size & complexity and also in the type of contract - some being time & material and some being fixed price & fixed scope. It was interesting to see the response to the Agile methodology from different product owners we worked with and my focus was always to bridge the gap of communication between product owners and development teams, bring about transparency and set better expectations for delivery.

I moved onto to working with a publishing company solely as a Scrum Master, but also as a Project Manager. In this role I helped work with seasoned teams to get them to be more efficient in delivery and with new teams orienting them to the agile process. I also participated actively in the enterprise Agile discussions and presented and coached our teams on efficient Agile delivery, writing better user stories, assessing and calculating business value points and finally the value of good retrospectives. One of the main teams I worked with - started to deliver defect free releases with an implementation of a better process overall. The process involved better roadmap & prioritization, better backlog review & grooming, better user stories, implementing QA automation helping the quality assurance of the product over time & motivating and coaching the team along the way. The success of this team was - they came a high performing team over time, worked well with each other, communicated efficiently and relyed about each others strengths to get them to the finish line.

In my most recent role I had taken on I was an Application Manager & Agile Coach. The challenge to bring the whole company to think in the Agile Mindset, focus on making the different functions understand the benefit of the Agile framework, and holding to the principles so they can see the benefits over time was my mission. The development team was very new to Agile and I left them with a stable foundation to continue to grow on. Product & DevOps teams were formed, a Scrummaster was trained for each team, Communities of Practice for BA/QA were setup and a Product Mgt function has started to evolve. This has been a rewarding engagement & I look forward to helping more organizations in becoming Agile!

At First American my role was an Sr. IT Project Manager/Agile Coach where I led a couple of teams that were part of a Large Program and helped them understand their own potential and become more self-organizing. Along with coaching teams, I also worked with other ScrumMasters within First American to have some consistency with practices across teams, started w Communities of Practice approach with a Book Club/Lean Coffees and Lunch and Learns.

At Assurant as a Sr. ScrumMaster & Agile Coach I continued to spread the wealth & benefits of "Being Agile" and helping the Program "Evolve" into a Self-Organizing program by focusing on one team @ a time. I was able to contribute to the Program by conducting "Back to Basics Workshops" focusing on specific practices that would help their agility. I also helped coach other ScrumMasters as part of the ScrumMaster COP that was led by our Agile Practice Leader. 

I'm currently a Sr. Agile Coach at Paciolan & I'm excited to be working across teams and the entire organization - including Tech Teams, Business/Product Teams & HR to think "Lean" and use practices to work more effectively and eliminate Waste from the system. This is by far the most rewarding role I've been in & I'm looking forward to contributing to the organization and local community.