Hamidha Saib

Certified Scrum Master (CSM) and Agile delivery leader with over 10 years of experience leading end to end IT project delivery, release deployments and SDLC/STLC optimization complex banking, telecommunications, and enterprise environments. Proven track record of driving project initiation, scoping, milestone planning and resource capacity across up to 3 cross functional engineering teams simultaneously in order to deliver products successfully at a 95% ontime deployment rate across weekly release schedules. Facilitating cross-functional dependency mapping between teams, managing delivery risks and resolving bottlenecks to reduce operation WIP by 15%.

Skilled at establishing process and procedures aligned with business objectives, and integrating quality assurance, security, and compliance into CI/CD pipelines. Ability to combine practical delivery experience with domain familiarity in telecommunications and financial systems (PASA, BankServ Africa, Trading platforms) to build high-performing engineering teams.

Agile Project Manager/ Quality & Release Manager at GLOBETOM (2020-04 – Present)

• Mentor and coach 3 cross-functional teams (23+ engineers), and new starters in Scrum and Agile principles. Manage project deliverables from initiation to completion, establish milestones, scope and acceptance criteria across development, QA and operations workstreams. Maintain visibility over project health using Jira and Confluence. Perform proactive risk mitigation, reporting and escalations. Ensure efficiency during scrum ceremonies and daily stand ups by removing impediments. Balanced resource capacity across cross functional teams, aligning delivery priorities with product owners and stakeholders to maintain project pace. Managed dedicated Jira and Kanban board to visualize and track test automation framework subtasks and defect remediation, to help improve task throughput and eliminate delivery bottlenecks across sprint cycles. Improved sprint velocity by 15% by refining the backlogs, defining strict acceptance criteria and mapping out clear user stories in close collaboration with the product owners and various stakeholders.
• Led alignment workshops and deployment sign-offs with 6+ key business stakeholders and 2 external vendor groups. Provided clear status and risk reporting on a daily and weekly basis. Carried out defect cause analysis and post-mortems in order to implement targeted preventative measures which lowered post-production defects by 90%.
• Serve as Release Manager orchestrating weekly release schedules and deployments across 3 cross-functional engineering streams. Aligned the scope and capacity to hit an on-time target delivery rate of 95%. Drive go-live release sign offs and manage strategic relationships with client release managers and planning teams.
• Proactively identified and resolved cross-team bottlenecks and performed cross-team dependency mapping to reduce excessive WIP by 20%. This ensured smooth release flows and operational continuity.
• Established standardized testing methodologies and workflows aligned with ISTQB standards. Embedded automated regression into continuous integration delivery pipelines, drastically reducing post-production defects by 90%. Translated complex business requirements into detailed user stories, maintaining full test coverage and ensuring final product aligned with business goals. Managed test planning, reporting and resource allocation to ensure optimal team utilization. Mentored 10 QA engineers, identified upskilling areas through KPI evaluations and implemented training to foster continuous team growth.

IT Consultant (Placed at various client locations) at EXPLEO SOUTH AFRICA (2007-09 – 2020-04)

Agile Project Manager/Scrum Master at Mass Discounters (2020-01 – 2020-03)

• Managed end to end project execution across 2 cross-provincial project team. Established transparent progress reporting dashboards which improved sprint predictability by 15% and aligned remote stakeholders on deliverable status.
• Coached 12+ team members in Agile practices. Increased story completion cycles by 20% by removing execution blockers and driving technical alignment across business units.
• Managed risk mitigation, project progress reporting and stakeholder alignment to keep deliverables on track

Scrum Master & Release/QA Manager at Grindrod Bank (2017-05 – 2019-12)

• Served as Project Lead driving scope verification, risk mitigation and go live execution for Interbank compliance projects, to achieve 100% audit pass rate and zero post production incidents. Coached 3 retail division teams in Scrum practices, facilitated structured backlog refinement in Redmine, and increased sprint predictability by 20% across multi-unit release cadences.
• Led delivery, defect triage, and go-live verification for critical Interbank compliance projects (PASA and BankServ Africa) using SPIRA, ensuring 100% pass rate on internal audit standards and zero regulatory incidents post-production deployment.
• Managed an external automation vendor to drive a 30% increase in automated regression coverage. Strictly enforced performance SLAs to reduce vendor turnaround time by 15%.

QA Lead at Nedbank Retail & Nedbank Group Technology (2014-11 – 2017-03)

• Directed cross-functional functional, integration, and regression testing across 2 core digital and web banking applications, safeguarding systems which were servicing millions of active retail customers.
• Chaired daily cross-functional defect triage sessions with 15+ stakeholders (product owners, enterprise architects, developers, vendors). Reduced average defect resolution time by 20% through clear accountability mapping.
• Managed the transition of 80% of manual workflows into automated regression packs, which helped to shorten software testing cycles by 4 days, and expanded the overall test coverage.

Senior QA Analyst at Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) (2010-11 – 2014-10)

• Executed functional and regression testing for high-availability front-end and back-end trading platforms using HP Quality Center. Followed traditional waterfall and V model methodologies.
• Collaborated with Product Owners and BAs during requirements validation and UAT execution.

QA Analyst at British Gas / Symantec / Derivco (2007-09 – 2010-10)

• Tested gaming applications, IT solution applications, smart metering SAP modules and enterprise applications using automated and manual testing frameworks.

Post Graduate Diploma in IT Management – MANCOSA (2023)

Bachelor of Technology Degree in IT – Durban University of Technology (2008)

National Diploma in IT – Durban University of Technology (2003)