Virendra Gupta

Virendra Gupta -

Currently working as Global VP - Product Engg - MOVE and Mobility for Tata Communications - A Global Digital Ecosystem Enabling Company.  Earlier worked as Senior Vice President – Engineering and Business Line Head – IT and Cloud BU R&D for Huawei India R&D Center, Bangalore, having business, technology, delivery and management responsibility of IT and Cloud BU R&D. Current team size is 200+. Have handled team size upto 800+ in past.

28 years plus experience in IT field. I have worked across wide range of technologies in IT industry.

My agile experience dates back to year 2000 when I was project manager for one of the USA customer from Hughes Software. Coming from waterfall background, it was a major mindset change for me. Customer expected that project will be done in agile way and every week, increments can be delivered and a working version is available for customer demo.  Later, when I joined Huawei India R&D center, I was the first one in R&D center to roll out a training on XP for my team members. I piloted Scrum back in year 2003-2004 timeframe in one of the OSS project.  I had to train and coach everyone including our quality group to understand this method. Main reason I adopted Scrum here was that requirements were not clear and changing continuously and customer was deeply involved in evolution of product. We were developing this product from scratch. 

My another major agile experience started sometime in beginning of 2008 when we started using this method in one of the core data management product development in my team. I had sent many core members for agile training to make agile adoption successful.  Through my and my teams effort, my business line was announced as center of excellence for agile for whole Huawei R&D. We developed agile coaching and training videos and material for whole Huawei R&D. My people went around various product teams in Huawei and provided training and coaching for agiile adoption.  I was also responsible for agile adoption task force in India R&D center and won award for the work done. 

Later on, I was the first one to pilot lean software development, scrumban and lean startup methods in whole Huawei. 

Now, agile has been adopted by whole Huawei R&D and has become integral part of product development process. I manage various teams in my BL who are using this method at different levels. I am also coaching a completely new team setup from lateral hires on agile methods and mindset which primarily draws from Scrum methodology.