Poornima Manian

• Release Train Manager – £25M Contact Centre Cloud Transformation | Major UK Bank
  
  
• Led end-to-end delivery of a multi-year (£25M) contact centre transformation, migrating from a legacy platform to Amazon Connect on AWS to enable scalable, remote-first customer service.
• Directed a cross-functional team of 50+ over a 3-year period, orchestrating Agile release trains to ensure consistent delivery across multiple workstreams.
• Standardized customer engagement processes across the bank, enabled 360° customer visibility, and laid the foundation for a proactive engagement model — significantly enhancing CX and operational efficiency
• Facilitate ART Event : Facilitate program increment (PI )planning sessions every quarter for 6 agile teams, ensuring cross-team alignment, backlog prioritization, and consistent delivery cadence.
• Coaching and Mentoring :Collaborate with Product owners and stakeholders of 6 agile teams to prioritize and refine the product backlog in implementing best practices to enhance productivity and quality
• Cross Team Co-ordination :Ensure effective communication and collaboration across 6 teams to achieve program goals and deliverables
• Risk Management: Identified and managed 50+ cross-team dependencies and 10+ program-level risks per PI cycle, enabling smoother execution and reduced delivery delays.
• Stakeholder Engagement :Led weekly ART Syncs with 6 product managers, architects, and business owners, ensuring visibility into progress, impediments, and value delivery.
• Performance Tracking : Monitor and report on program performance, including progress toward objectives, team velocity and other key metrics

Project Manager/Scrum Master – £1-5M | Retail Banking | Payments | Compliance | Transformation | Major UK Bank

• Delivered multiple high-impact projects valued between £1-5M across Retail Banking, focusing on Payments modernization, compliance initiatives, and bank-wide transformation programs aimed at improving customer experience and operational efficiency, within scope, on time, and within budget
• Successfully led cross-functional teams with 25+ members through the full project lifecycle, driving regulatory adherence streamlining customer-facing processes, and supporting large-scale platform and process changes.
• Engaged 15+ stakeholders and product owners, ensuring alignment, feedback loops, and feature prioritization.
• Facilitate Scrum Events: Organized and facilitated over 100+ Scrum ceremonies, including daily stand-ups, sprint planning, sprint reviews, and retrospectives.
• Removed team impediments proactively, resolving an average of 5–10 blockers per sprint by coordinating with cross-functional stakeholders, resulting in a 20% reduction in delivery delays and improved team throughput.
• Created and maintained Agile delivery plans using Jira, aligning epics, features, and sprint-level deliverables with business objectives for projects up to £5M, ensuring transparent scope, resource planning, and timeline management across multiple Agile teams
• Also developed detailed Waterfall project plans outlining scope, milestones, deliverables, resource allocation, timelines, and budgets for projects valued up to £5M, achieving delivery within 5% variance of baseline schedule and budget through rigorous stage-gate controls and risk management.
• Led cross-functional project teams of 25+ members, fostering collaboration and alignment with project objectives, resulting in improved team productivity and successful delivery of projects valued up to £5M on schedule.
• Managed stakeholder communication across business and technology groups, providing regular updates on project status, risks, and issues for initiatives up to £5M, leading to enhanced transparency and 95% stakeholder satisfaction in post-project reviews.
• Identified and managed 10+ project risks per initiative, implementing proactive mitigation strategies that reduced delivery disruptions by 25% and ensured alignment with risk tolerance across stakeholders and governance boards.
• Applied structured change management processes, including creation and maintenance of Master Change Records (MCRs) and Task Change Records (TCRs), tracking changes to closure with full audit trail, ensuring 100% compliance with governance standards and minimal disruption to project timelines.

• Mainframe Lead technically involved in understanding the requirements, developing the high level solution design, detailed design and developing the codes using COBOL, IMS -DB2 and JCL.
• Collaborate with the project's managers and developers to complete work aligning with established objectives.
• Took complete ownership of the projects from offshore, and thereby mentoring the team.
• Reviewed activities regularly to identify opportunities for improvement.

• Involved in detailed documentation of software development processes and updates.
• Coded programs in COBOL- DB2 and JCL based on specific functionality requirements.
• Employed best practices in software development to complete high-quality applications in line with schedule targets.
• Developed technical handbooks to represent code and design of new applications.