Biography
Saravanan Varadan Chakrapani - Passion for Agile
My Agile journey started in 2009 while I was a Solution Architect for huge waterfall projects that spans years and sometimes had 100+ resources working on them. Agile was a new age term to me. I was, so to say - unwillingly forced into Agile world. The first few months was difficult, then something life changing happened. While involved in Agile rituals (was not perfect still), but I could start seeing the team contributing more, Product owners inputs were instant and just in time which helped the team deliver faster and most importantly the Product owner and the business was happy. We could accomodate change requests late in the cycle, which in turn meant the delivered product had better value, ROI was better and within a few months senior leadership were looking forward to demo meetings.We still had Iteration 0 for projects which helps is planning the overall framework and just in time planning every iteration. Iteration grooming meetings also helped identify PoC which were added as user stories/spikes in the backlog. From the team prespective the team became more empowered, they pulled tasks that they wanted to do, I noticed that what was committed by the team was delivered as their personal ego was at stake if they dont complete what they committed.
Overall I realized that people play a key role in the success of a project and not just process and tools. After a couple of successful implementations, no looking back - from a avid hater of Agile I was converted to a passionate servant leader in Agile! I have trained 100's of folks , done implementations for fortune 100 companies and lead the Agile CoE for my company. I am on my way to CSC and CST! :)
Work experience
Computer Sciences Corporation, Program Manager
January 2009 - Present, CUPERTINO, CALIFORNIA, US
I started off as a Scrum Master and became a Scrum coach in 2 years
Scrum Master from Jan 15 2015 to March 18 2011 and
Enterprise Agile Coach from March 18 2011 till date
Diversified experience in handling project/program of size 25 – 600+ resources with budgets ranging from 3M to 40M from startups to some of the fortune 100 companies
Program management- Scrum/XP and Kanban
Instituted Quality Assurance processes, methods, techniques and best practices, enhancing overall quality of systems by 80% in some projects, and reducing total number of high priority/critical issues reported to the support team
Organized and facilitated sprint planning, daily stand-up meetings, reviews, retrospectives, release planning, demos and other Scrum-related meetings
Mentored the new team members to ease into Agile culture
Possess extensive experience in spearheading successful agile transformation initiatives for GAP, PayPal, Lowes, Farmers, Guardian, Thomson Reuters, etc.
Distributed Managed Service Agile projects in PayPal
Lead Agile CoE for CSC
Liaise with business and technology to help drive enterprise wide Agile transformation
Hands on implementation of the enterprise plan and ensuring success by driving the change to the grass root level
Driven training initiatives for hundreds of resources in Scrum and Kanban ( VPs , finance, legal, directors, managers and agile teams in various organizations)
Understand the culture of the organization and provide customized Agile flavors to ensure effective and successful adaption
Implemented Value driven delivery (Scrum + XP) in DWBI team for one of the leading product companies
Successful tools integration is pivotal in the adoption of Agile with the teams as it makes their lives easier. It drives efficiency and benefits the organization by stimulating growth and reducing cost
Expertise in BDD, TDD, Scrum, XP, Kanban, Scrum, Scrumban, Crystal, DSDM, SAFe
Expertise in implementing Agile solutions in distributed teams, offshore / near shore centers