Vagesh Rupakula

This is Vagesh Rupakula, currently working as Senior Technical Program Manager at Walmart. I am a CSP, CSPO and CSM with 19+ years of IT Services and consulting experience including 5+years of project management experience with onsite-offshore coordination & distributed delivery management in different domains of Banking, Finance, Insurance, Infrastructure & Security. I have experience in leading teams for large enterprise software development and multi-tenant based deployments with expertise in different technologies like Content management, Web-service testing, SOA, Automation using UFT & Selenium, reporting, BPM etc. From 2012, I took the role of the scrum master and coach team and organization scum. Over last three years we successfully delivered two large development projects. For both projects Scrum was adopted as the agile method of execution for the projects due to the fact that the applications being developed are for new line of business where the requirements are evolving. Scrum teams are distributed into functional areas of application and worked using a product backlog. I provide necessary guidance to Product owners and Business Analyst team to create and maintain the product backlog using scrum practices like backlog grooming, prioritization, estimation revisions and release planning. I also followed scrum of scrum practice where representative from each team meets to coordinate the work of multiple scrum team. I also worked closely with the development teams on story estimation using planning poker method, sprint planning and capacity estimation. Trained teams on commitment for sprint, and helped the teams to understand the velocity and guided them on practices to improve velocity. I also mentored development teams to practice and adhere to the scrum practices and delivered potentially shippable increment at end of each release. As agile was new to any organization for it to implement at first, I took time to socialize different agile reports (ex. burn down chart, release burn down) to higher management. I defined processes and tools best suited to each project. Implemented Jira, TFS and Version One at the project level to manage agile project which later utilized at the organization level. As a hard believer of self-organized team, I always consider supporting the team instead of managing them. Inspect and Adapt was key statement of every team members. At the end of each retrospective, team tries to measure improvement and this practice give enormous satisfaction on not only what they are doing but how they are achieving it. From Team member perspective this is a big change from traditional software development model where they started feeling empowered.