Ranjeet Sankar

Seasoned Agile Coach with standout experience of 22 years, reflecting year-on-year success in systematizing fit-for-purpose agile ceremonies across teams and coaching leaders on agile values, design thinking, customer value, product management.

PROFILE SUMMARY

• Versatile and Transformative Agile Leader with a steadfast career record of over 22 years in providing thought leadership to reimagine capabilities and processes, enabling the transformation to an agile digital mindset across information technology and business teams supporting operations for the operating and enabling value streams. Stellar career reputation in driving change through partnering, influencing, and collaborating with product-centric teams to deliver customer-focused outcome-driven results.
• Demonstrated excellence and leadership expertise in driving large-scale agile projects from initiation to closure, executing significant technology initiatives, and bringing new directions to organizational project practices for tangible and intangible benefit. Decisive leadership – foresees the deployment of agile project management technologies and revitalizes the usage for securing desired outcomes. 
• Leveraged prowess and strategic vision in handling a portfolio of projects while managing technical matters with a distinction in driving new technology initiatives. A difference in planning, leading, organizing, and motivating agile project teams to achieve high performance and quality in delivering rapid and extreme development projects that provide exceptional business value. 
• Standout experience in orchestrating the Agile best practices such as time-boxing, continuous integration, code/design reviews, transparency, accountability, rally tracks, product visioning, technical debt reduction, self-management, empowerment, and role training resulting in realized velocity improvement of over 100%.

• As a senior Change Agent for new agile transformations, steered detailed discussions with leaders to understand the current way of working and the deviation from their expectations pointing to the problem statement, there by supporting the transformation leaders overall starting to create a sense of Urgency, Build a guiding coalition, form a Strategic vision, enlist volunteers, remove barriers, generate short-term wins, sustain acceleration, institute change without stoping.
• Integrated the Agile transformation process with the organization’s core business which enables Business Agility, acting as a catalyst for identifying and applying new ways of working, enabling organizations to design and implement an effective transformation roadmap
• Developed partnership with organization leaders to be effective in complex, uncertain, and rapidly changing environments by applying system thinking to surface the bottlenecks and dysfunctions; engaging with the leaders who guide them to accelerate the transformation journey
• Facilitated large events /open dialog sessions with leadership teams to enable agility, evaluating and advising Agile Frameworks, process and structural changes at the organization level, suggested organizations’ policies to support Agile ways of working to overcome the resistance to change
• As part of process changes at the organizational level, facilitated discussion with the HR department and other leadership teams to move to a collaborative development practice to replace traditional performance management, through regular feedback, communication, and coaching, influencing leadership team to make the performance goals for individual contributors with the new ‘Agile Mindset’ goals
• Developed new agile teams using the Tuckman stages, explaining the intention and by setting a good example based on knowledge and experience, in the Forming stage. Later during the storming stage, resolved conflicts and organized feedback sessions. In the norming stage, created momentum pulling the team to the performing phase and then-on continuously improving to ensure the team does not fall back to storming again
• Organized Inception and Team kickoff sessions to align agile teams on objectives, trade-offs, customer needs, regular touchpoints throughout the project along with administering Customer Journey mapping workshops for the teams to understand the end-to-end customer journey empathizing the customer perspectives to map what customer sees, where they see value and where they have painpoints
• Orchestrated Design thining training and workshops, helping teams to get a better understanding of how to think differently about customer problems as well as providing basic tools and techniques to reframe the problem, test and validate ideas and define a true MVP
• Lead Value stream mapping workshops for the agile teams, helping the teams to prioritize the work, providing unique approach to customer-business values and Maping out process, allowing team to focus on the value for customer and minimize waste
• Showcased successfull performance improvement of agile teams, utilized Agile Maturity Assessment as an important coaching tool to highlight the Key Performance Indicators per Key Value Areas like Time to Market - release frequency indicating the speed of the team, Customer satisfaction - high quality of deliver results, Velocity, Lead Time, Value delivered for Scrum and Queues, Throughputs, Lead time - Cycle time, WIP for Lean development
• Dexterously steered the Agile teams towards SAFe transformations, identifying value streams and agile release trains, leading program teams to launch ART through program increments, and coaching teams on agile and scaled agile maturity.
• A significant chunk of experience in agile coaching using human-centric methods like Johari Window, Plutchik’s Wheel, SCARF model, and design thinking approach with Coaching models like GROW / OSCAR / CIGAR / CLEAR for around 50 teams.
• Orchestrated and drove the agile coaching sessions for 200+ Sr. Associates and 80+ Fresher Associates in Tech Mahindra, which resulted in 40% of cost-savings.
• Facilitated the ISMS / GDPR and QMS policy audits by leveraging experience in Agile Project Planning, Agile Estimation, Agile Quality, Agile Metrics, and Agile Maturity Assessments across verticals.
• Designed, developed and effectuated the internal training materials to facilitate the Agile transformation for IT and non-IT clients in various verticals from scratch. Identified and worked to resolve barriers to scaling the use of agile. Engage daily with teams to overcome roadblocks and implement scalable solutions to improve the team and organizational agility.
• Developed Agile Practice Maturity Assessment Framework possessing evaluation criteria for Team Dynamics [Team Collaboration / Self Managing-Self Organized / Cross-functional / Rasining impediments / Team is dedicated], Product health [Time to Market / Product Backlog / DoR - DoD / Vision-MVP-Product Roadmap-Release], Business-Team collaborations [Dedicated PO / Dev-Business collaboration / Prioritization], Agile Practices [All Ceremonies on time], Engineering practices [Testing / Code Review / Defects / Technical Debt] to showcase the maturity levels of agile teams in the organization

Bachelor of Engineering in Civil Engineering from Madras University