Ramnath Kashikar

A seasoned IT Professional with 17+ years of experience in heading IT - Operations & Management (Customer Service Delivery and Program Management). Decisive, action-oriented and results-focused professional focused on agile values and principle driven Project Management. A certified Agile Coach, Scrum Master and Agile Practitioner experience involving Project Initiation, Planning, Estimation, Execution and Project Closure of strategic and diverse business solutions. Associated with Harman Connected Services (formerly known as Symphony Teleca Corporation, India Pvt ltd) since Oct'2003. Started my career with Harman as a Senior QA engineer to become a QA Lead, a QA Manager and currently I have been playing a role of a Senior Program Manager managing multiple retail accounts. SCUM has played a vital role in my professional life. I have been able to manage projects and customer expectations following the AGILE manifesto. I have been able to create the AWARENESS in the team about SCRUM and its benefits. Created the DESIRE in the team to learn and accept the change to adapt to SCRUM. Trained the team on Scrum principles and processes to be followed. Some of my achievements over the last few years following SCRUM over traditional project development methodologies have been: 1. Higher productivity and lower costs 2. Improved employee engagement and job satisfaction 3. Faster time to market 4. Better quality 5. Improved stakeholder satisfaction I have experienced SCRUM in the following roles: 1. As Individual: As per Agile manifesto, Value Individuals and Interactions over process and Tools. I have observed that there has been resistance from the team in adapting to SCRUM. The resistance was more from the senior members in the team about their roles and authority getting impacted negatively. The fear in the team was that the entire is exposed to the management and to the customer, there is no instruction on what to do, and there is no instruction that I can give. As a SCRUM Master/Coach I was able to build the confidence in the team and make them understand the values of new roles in the scrum team, helped the team understand their relevance to the goal. I played the SCRUM Master role where I learnt that a good SCRUM Master needs to be Responsible, Humble, Collaborative, Committed, Influential and Knowledgeable. As SCRUM Master, I played the role of a tester as well in the SCRUM team in one of the projects. In this role, I had a challenge in managing time to devote to SCRUM Master and to Tester. 2. As Team Collective Ownership encouraged the team feel responsible for the entire product being developed and the team was able to share the work load in any module of the program. This helped me in situations when the team member(s) was not available. Continuous Build and Integration was implemented to ensure that the code checked-in everyday is regressed against the regression test suite over the entire application. This helped me in eliminating some of the risks of big integration issues at the end of the development of each modules. The team worked together collaboratively in ensuring that there are no code merge or integration issues. As a SCRUM Master, I was able to showcase the progress of the development to the teams through the Sprint burn-down and Release Burn-down charts. This helped us predict the releases and plan accordingly. As a team, we did the retrospectives to understand the decline in the team’s performance and took actions to improve in the next sprints. I was able to boast the confidence of the team to embrace the concept of whole-team responsibility and whole-team commitment to deliver the working software at the end of each sprint, being a Self-Organizing team. As a team, we have been able to manage the product backlog through grooming sessions which helped us progressively refine the requirements. The team closely worked with the Product Owner in making the Product backlog detailed, estimated, emergent and prioritized. We have been able to adhere to Time boxes and maintained the cadence for Daily Scrum, Sprint Planning, Sprint review and Sprint Retrospectives. Measuring the team’s performance has been a good learning and exploration for me. We estimated using Story points and tracked the Story development using JIRA by breaking them into various tasks. My overall experience with Agile-Scrum has been that it is the mindset of the team and stakeholders that needs to be aligned to Agile manifesto. For the Team to be successful with SCRUM, the team should be: 1. Collaborative 2. Working independently 3. Flexible 4. Not afraid of experimentation