Pradheep Rajendran
Release Manager
Coventry,COV
Summary
Experienced IT professional specialising in release management, implementation, and service transition in Agile framework and waterfall methodology. Bringing 8+ years' experience leading large-scale deployments in the Retail and Pharmaceutical industries. Excellent communication, planning and prioritisation skills. Detail-oriented Release Manager focused on providing defect-free products to clients. Working closely with development, QA and business teams to accomplish goals and exceed customer expectations.
Overview
2025
2025
years of professional experience
5
5
years of post-secondary education
1
1
Certification
Work History
Release Manager
Mckesson Corporation
London, England
1 2023 - 10.2024
- Contracted to McKesson Corporation as IT Release Manager, driving key releases, transitioning and project success
- Supported 5 major application releases, ensuring timely delivery and a 95% success rate.
- Provided training to the development team on new release management tools, boosting team efficiency by 20%.
- Coordinated bi-weekly status and progress meetings, ensuring stakeholder alignment throughout the release cycle.
- Leading release planning and tracking, setting key milestones and performance indicators to measure success
- Led 10+ release readiness reviews ensuring successful business go/no-go decisions, each resulting in a 97% launch success rate.
- Collaborated with support teams to address post-release issues, leading to a 40% faster resolution time.
- Preparing and delivering essential documentation, including service readiness reports, status updates, acceptance notes, deployment, and warranty packs
- Conducting Post-Implementation Reviews (PIR) and contributing to Go-No-Go decision-making processes
- Demonstrating strong stakeholder management by driving collaboration across teams to ensure seamless, aligned releases that meet business goals while minimising operational disruptions
- Managed various IT projects to meet deadlines and customer requirements.
- Managed release schedules effectively, ensuring timely delivery of multiple projects with tight deadlines.
Release Manager
Eli Lilly
Basingstoke, Hampshire
07.2020 - 01.2023
- Led teams in managing releases, software installations, and overseeing fault resolution processes
- Streamlined release documentation in Confluence, reducing content ambiguity by 60% and enhancing adherence to company standards.
- Service Management of ServiceNow dashboards, and custom reports
- Maintain Release schedules in PROD and DR environments
- Thorough understanding of Agile concepts and principles
- Day-to-day CAB calls, and bi-weekly SCAB calls to discuss the changes with / without outage
- Engaged in weekly calls with MIM team involving major issues discussed in the past week
- Daily stand-up and scrum calls to decide the progress of project deliverables
- Orchestrating fortnightly retrospective calls to discuss the success and improvements
- Implementation plan walkthrough calls prior to deployment and post-deployment calls with developers, project managers, and the business team
- Version control of every release on the Confluence page for everyone’s visibility
- Experience in both automatic and manual deployment initiation
- Hands-on experience in handling automated changes
- Generating everyday reports from Service Now to Service Manager, Scrum master, and developers to discuss the changes planned – success/failure
- Stake Holder communication for business improvements
- Sending hourly reports/scheduling meetings with MIM team to discuss the current issue
- After the root cause is identified involving various teams, communicate across the project team and Service Manager
- Collaborated with a team of 30+ developers and 9+ teams to effectively understand and deploy software releases, achieving timely deployment goals.
- Managed release schedules effectively, ensuring timely delivery of multiple projects with tight deadlines.
- Collaborated with project developers, quality assurance team members and business analysts.
- Developed comprehensive release documentation for seamless handoff to support teams, improving end-user satisfaction postlaunch.
- Maintained version control systems meticulously, ensuring accurate tracking and easy rollback capabilities when necessary.
Release Manager
Sainsbury’s
Coventry, Coventry
04.2016 - 07.2020
- Release Manager for the Commercial product family, responsible for migrating all stores to the new application.
- Coordinating with 9+ teams to migrate 250 stores to new application within span of 1 year to new application
- Successfully launched two live new stores using the new application.
- Collaborated with 9+ teams consisting of developers, testing team, production support and onsite store implementation team along with 3rd party hardware team.
- Initiating PROD walk-through calls post-release planning
- Presenting the detailed plan to respective teams and Business teams
- Every day presenting and explaining the changes to CAB and getting it approved
- Coordinated testing efforts across various departments to validate release readiness, ensuring high-quality products before deployment.
- Collaborated with cross-functional teams to ensure successful product launches, incorporating valuable feedback from stakeholders.
- All changes are reviewed with test approval and updated as per kanban board
- Negotiated resource allocations among competing projects to optimize overall efficiency without compromising individual deliverables'' quality or timing requirements.
- Developed robust contingency plans for unforeseen challenges, ensuring minimal impact on project delivery and customer satisfaction.
- Updating the status of change schedule in confluence every day
- Maintained version control systems meticulously, ensuring accurate tracking and easy rollback capabilities when necessary.
- Planned and orchestrated end-to-end processes
- Streamlined release processes by implementing automated tools and standardizing procedures, reducing delays and errors.
Other Role - Incident Manager
Sainsbury's
Coventry, Coventry
04.2020 - 07.2020
- Led incident management operations for the commercial product team at Sainsbury's
- Coordinated troubleshooting tasks with multidisciplinary technical staff during high-severity outages
- Engaged with application users to gather details on the impact and nature of incidents
- Provided prompt reports to senior management on issues affecting client service quality
WAS Administrator & Release Coordinator
TCS Pioneer, ITPL
Bangalore, India
01.2011 - 04.2016
- Handled pre-deployment preparation, implementation, report generation, UAT, production releases, and post-deployment reporting
- Coordinated with teams to ensure maintenance is completed within the scheduled window
- Organized workflow and delegated tasks effectively to ensure timely project completion without compromising quality.
- Taking ownership of deployments, manage issues, engage stakeholders for plan acceptance, secure approvals, and involve the business team post-maintenance to meet requirements
- Generated reports detailing findings and recommendations. Played a key role in enhancing QA processes, which reduced release-related bugs by 30%
- Clients: 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, AT & T Telecom, Citibank - Project One (P1)
Education
Master of Science - Computer Technology
Bharathiar University
India 07.2001 - 04.2003
Bachelor of Science - Computer Technology
Bharathiar University
India 07.1997 - 10.2000
Skills
Agile methodology
JIRA
Confluence
Github
Azure DevOps Pipeline
Managing releases
Stakeholder communication
Release planning
Working with vendors
Version control systems
Service Now
[Github] expertise
Certification
ITIL V3
Timeline
Release Manager
Eli Lilly
07.2020 - 01.2023
Other Role - Incident Manager
Sainsbury's
04.2020 - 07.2020
Release Manager
Sainsbury’s
04.2016 - 07.2020
WAS Administrator & Release Coordinator
TCS Pioneer, ITPL
01.2011 - 04.2016
Master of Science - Computer Technology
Bharathiar University
07.2001 - 04.2003
Bachelor of Science - Computer Technology
Bharathiar University
07.1997 - 10.2000
Release Manager
Mckesson Corporation
1 2023 - 10.2024
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