Udara Samarasinghe Email & Phone Number

Sri Lanka

Colombo, Western Province, Sri Lanka

Key Responsibilities• Developing detailed project plans, scheduling releases, tracking progress, managing changes to project scope, and prioritizing conflicting requirements.• Leading and coaching multi-disciplinary teams to adopt and consistently apply Agile practices to achieve a high level of agile maturity.• Facilitating Scrum ceremonies and utilizing Scrum artefacts to ensure incremental value delivery.• Conducting organization-level Agile/Scrum training sessions to help teams understand the Scrum fundamentals and pragmatically adopt an Agile mindset.• Collaborating with product managers and US Product leadership to consolidate and maintain the program roadmap.• Timely and accurate reporting of program health to stakeholders at varying levels from dev teams to the Sysco USA leadership team – ensuring transparency and business alignment.• Mentoring subordinates, project managers, and Scrum Masters to achieve professional excellence and impactful career growth.• Resource management – accountable for program/project resource allocation, hiring new resources, backfills, contract renewals, and timely accurate maintenance of resource metrics.

Colombo, Western, Sri Lanka

Contributing as a project manager, Scrum master, Scrum trainer, mentor, and overall contributor to organizational goals.• Directing multiple cross-functional teams to successful project delivery using Agile.• Facilitating and leading Scrum ceremonies including sprint planning, daily stand-up, sprint reviews, and retrospectives.• Collaborating with product owners and engineering leadership to define project scope, goals, and deliverables, ensuring alignment with organizational OKRs.• Tracking team performance and progress towards project goals using agile metrics and remediating deviations.• Guiding development teams on Agile/JIRA best practices, collaboration, and continuous improvement.• Coaching Scrum through organizational training sessions as well as external events (e.g. public webinars).• Orchestrating the delivery of multiple projects within the program to avoid release conflicts and to ensure optimal delivery sequence for business value.• Optimizing project status reporting procedures and data visualization tools for effective communication with senior leadership, and enhance project transparency.• Liaising with external partner organizations (e.g. Channel Partners, Learning management system businesses) for joint ventures and resource management.Most Notable Accomplishments:• Delivered multiple channel partner integration projects which enabled Pearson to exponentially increase channel partner enrolments and thereby Higher-Ed revenue.• Collaborated with AWS to complete a Lift & Shift infrastructure migration project which reduced operation risk and increased resiliency by 50%. • Saved the company >US$ 60,000 in server costs after taking over a severely deviated Bitesize migration project and delivering it on time using effective Scrum & Project Management strategies.• Consistently achieved scores >95% in organizational Scrum maturity KPIs.• Streamlined new member onboarding process by >30% using newly created templates and procedures.

Sri Lanka

Key Responsibilities:• Directing multiple cross-functional Scrum teams to successful project delivery.• Facilitating quarterly planning sessions based on Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) which included program increment (PI) planning and dependency mapping.• Leading Scrum ceremonies including sprint planning, daily stand-up, sprint reviews, and retrospectives.• Collaborating with product owners, architects, and engineering managers to define project scope, and ensure delivery accuracy.• Contributed to program-level roadmap refinement tasks.• Supported teams to adapt to the remote working model introduced by the COVID-19 pandemic. • Fostered communication to maintain delivery discipline and team morale during the pandemic.• Tracking team performance and progress using Scrum metrics and reports.• Guiding development teams on Agile/JIRA best practices, collaboration, and continuous improvement.• Coaching Scrum through organizational training sessions.• Liaising with internal teams and external partner organizations (e.g. Channel Partners) for joint ventures.Most Notable Accomplishments:• Successfully transitioned a project team from a vendor organization to Pearson Lanka. I personally coached the new team on Scrum, SAFe, and Jira practices. The transition method and artefacts are now used as templates for project transitions and onboarding new members to projects. • Adapted to the remote working model during the COVID-19 pandemic and maintained excellent delivery accuracy and team engagement despite the communication challenges due to physical distancing. • Converted Scrum trainings to a fully virtual model that retained their effectiveness even during the pandemic, and garnered excellent feedback from participants for each session.

Sri Lanka

Key Responsibilities:• Directing multiple cross-functional Scrum teams to successful project delivery.• Facilitating and leading Scrum ceremonies including sprint planning, daily stand-up, sprint reviews, and retrospectives.• Collaborating with product owners, architects, and engineering managers to define project scope, and ensure delivery accuracy.• Tracking team performance and progress using Scrum metrics and reports.• Guiding development teams on Agile/JIRA best practices, collaboration, and continuous improvement.• Coaching Scrum through organizational training sessions.• Liaising with external partner organizations (e.g. Channel Partners) for joint ventures.Notable Accomplishments:• Delivered channel partner integration (LTI standard 1.1) project which enabled Pearson to tap into the lucrative inclusive access business model, and thereby increasing Higher-Ed revenue.• Consistently achieved scores >95% in organizational Scrum maturity KPIs.

Sri Lanka

• Spearheaded highly dynamic R&D projects (worth over $1.8M p.a.) for a top-tier retailer in the USA.• Managed geographically distributed cross-functional teams comprising of engineers from SE, BA, UI, and QA disciplines, and liaised with SMEs, technology partners, and external consultants to ensure project success. • Won company award for the “Best Customer Centric Innovation of the Year” (2017). • Coordinated project resource allocations and monthly financial cost reporting (with VP of Sales).• Coordinated and conducted multiple outreach programmes including university guest lectures, workshops and presentations to increase brand awareness for Zone24x7 and showcase innovation achievements.Other responsibilities included: - Timely project status and resource allocation reporting, - Procurement of items required for development, - Negotiating resource assignments with different departments, - Maintaining knowledge base,

Sri Lanka

Performed duties in the role of Scrum Master, which included:- Ensuring that all work done in my team adhere to the development process,- Coordinating work and stakeholder engagement in relevant projects,- Proactively addressing impediments faced by my team,- Successfully introducing work processes to prevent product release delays- Effectively communicate with local and foreign stakeholders,- Solving complex problems that require intricate inter-team collaboration,- Extensively monitoring KPIs of my team and striving - together with my team - to improve performance and delivery by identifying shortfalls and taking necessary action to rectify them,- Mentoring team members to achieve more and increase productivity,- Collaborate with other teams' Scrum Masters to collectively improve the process and the organization.Performed duties as the Product Quality Owner (PQO) of my team, which included:- Responsibility for the quality of several core modules of Cambio's flagship product,- Providing approvals to major releases and test plans,- Managing all quality aspects of relevant projects,- Analysing requirements, creating test plans and coordinating test efforts,- Incident management,- Perform tasks as backup Product Owner,- Frequent and effective stakeholder engagement (local and foreign)- Conducting trainings on responsible modules when required,- Guiding and mentoring quality assurance engineers,- Overseeing the implementation of my team’s test automation efforts,- Collaborating with other teams'​ PQOs to collectively improve the quality of the product.Tool competence:- JIRA v6.x (Issue tracker)- TestLink 1.9 (Test management tool)- Greenhopper (Agile project management tool)

Colombo, Sri Lanka

Performed duties in the role of Scrum Master, which included:- Ensuring that all work done in my team adhere to the development process,- Coordinating work and stakeholder engagement in relevant projects,- Proactively addressing impediments faced by my team,- Effectively communicate with local and foreign stakeholder s,- Solving complex problems that require intricate inter-team collaboration,- Extensively monitoring KPIs of my team and striving - together with my team - to improve performance and delivery by identifying shortfalls and taking necessary action to rectify them,- Mentoring team members to achieve more and increase productivity,- Collaborate with other teams' Scrum Masters to collectively improve the process and the organization.Performed duties as the Product Quality Owner (PQO) of my team, which included:- Responsibility for the quality of several core modules of Cambio's flagship product,- Managing all quality aspects of relevant projects,- Test planning and reporting- Analysing requirements, creating test plans and coordinating test efforts,- Incident management,- Performing tasks as backup Product Owner,- Frequent and effective stakeholder engagement (local and foreign)- Conducting trainings on responsible modules when required,- Guiding and mentoring quality assurance engineers,- Overseeing the implementation of my team’s test automation efforts,- Collaborating with other teams'​ PQOs to collectively improve the quality of the product.Tool competence:- JIRA (Issue tracker and agile project management tool)- TestLink 1.9 (Test management tool)

Colombo, Sri Lanka

Responsible for:- Bug reporting and verification- Test case creation- Test case execution- Regression testingTool competence:- JIRA v3.7 (Issue tracker)- TestLink 1.9 (Test management tool)- Serena Agile Planner (Agile project management tool)

Master Of Business Administration - Mba, Business Administration And Management, General, Distinction

Qualification awarded: Master of Business Administration with DISTINCTION Qualification award date: 23-Nov-2021 Level of qualification.

B.Sc. (Hons), Information Technology

Activities and Societies: Secretary - IT Student Community (2008/09)

Diploma, Management

Education record

Activities and Societies: Secretary - Leo Club of Ananda College (2003/04)

Education record

European Computer Driving License