Rama Govardhanam

• Enhanced key stakeholder participation by 60% by facilitating project planning meetings and scope, defined project metrics, creating milestones and stakeholder engagement plan.

• Developed and managed project plans, risk plans, communication plan for the Charitable and Pesticide business licensing projects.

• Met project deadlines without sacrificing build quality or workplace safety.
• Monitored project performance to identify areas of improvement and make adjustments.
• Coordinated with cross-functional teams to resolve project issues and mitigate risks.

• Scheduled project milestones, and status reports based on detailed project data.

• Managed project using Azure DevOps and maintained sprint/ceremonies for multiple projects.

• Established CD/CI Azure process improvements

• Used Cosmos database to read and archive data for the application in development phase

• Coordinated activities of internal and external technical teams between stakeholders, including vendor partners for AFIS (Animal & Food industry Services) project.

• Identified changes to scope, time-line, notified customers of risks, made modifications and resolve problems within a mutually agreed upon timeliness.

• Maintained project status information and provided project status reports to Information Systems management and project stakeholders.

Environment: .Net, APIs, ADO DevOps, SQL Server.

• Facilitated Scrum framework – sprint planning, backlog grooming, daily scrums, sprint reviews, and sprint retrospectives.
• Worked closely and listened to team members' feedback to identify issues and resolve conflicts.
• Planned Agile best practices and encouraged team cohesion, overcoming impediments, and hurdles to productivity.
• Led sprint reviews and planning meetings to promote full team engagement.

• Improved team performance by identifying, managing, and supporting solutions of impediments resulted in achieving 99% of project deadlines.

• Helped product owner find techniques for effective product goal and PB management resulted in application features that increased sales by 48%.

• Coordinate internal resources and third parties/vendors for the flawless execution of multiple projects

• Ensure that all projects are delivered on-time, within scope and within budget

Environment: Lexis/Nexis, .Net, Sales APIs, ADO DevOps, COSMOS Database, Splunk.

GEICO | Scrum Master/Project manager-NextGen 1.0 and 2.0, 01/2017 – 01/2018

• Identified and removed impediments that resulted in meeting sprint goal in 99% of sprints.

• Ensured user stories were 100% ordered, defined, and ready to be worked by the team for each sprint that increased productivity.

• Ensured the quality and execution of sprint plans and implemented retrospective action items from previous increment.

GEICO | Sr. Systems Analyst / Product Owner, 01/2016 – 01/2017

Safeguarded business optimization compliance by identifying compliance priority levels for each change control. Collaborated with stakeholders to discuss credit score and pay plan change control impact.

• Analyzed requirements and created a roadmap of the project 6pay 9.5% pay plan, Credit score for Deceased SSN and NY Military discount (Veteran). Owned project and status meetings.

• Created and prioritized backlogs and conducted sprint planning meetings, provided estimations and then conducted requirement walkthroughs for developers and testers.

• Wrote clear understandable acceptance criteria for user stories and defined application scope for change control.

• Participated in release verifications and conducted retrospective meetings.

GEICO | Sr. Systems Analyst – Auto, Cycle New Business, 12/2013 – 12/2015

Processed applications and helped customers and Geico agents (online) to quote an accurate rate and convert to policyholders.

• Elicited requirements from business SMEs and change into functional requirements for converges.

• Created a Traceability document for the requirement to test case. Performed functional, system, ad-hoc and regression testing for state rollout.

• Conducted Disaster Recovery testing for Auto and Cycle sales applications.

• Provided technical support using knowledge of complex technology to solve problems and support new projects.
• Designed testing scenarios for usability testing.
• Identified and tracked software defects and supported developers in resolving problems by completing additional tests.
• Wrote and optimized test cases to maximize success of manual software testing with consistent, thorough approaches.

• Developed Test Plan based on the requirements in Rational Quality Manager (RQM).

• Performed manual and automation testing (IBM Functional Tester, Performance Tester tools).

• Wrote and executed SQL queries to verify backend values.

• Conducted 508 compliance testing using the Sort site 4.0 and identified non-compliant defects and used JAWS screen reader to verify the open 508 compliance issues.

Environment: SQL server 2008, Rational Functional Tester, RQM, Rational Performance Tester, Sort Site, Jaws Screen Reader.