MANU AGARWAL

Location: Noida, UP, India

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manuagarwal007/

Email:manu.agarwal@yahoo.com

My YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnEsbgpAaJnpAGAOZ_FhxDI7kN1gQ39uJ

Enterprise Agile Coach in Xebia With 20+ Years of experience

Presently:
✔ Consulted Many big organizations on SAFe, Scrum, Kanban, Spotify and helped them start Agile Release
Trains of more than 200 Team members by doing Consultancy, Coaching, Tool Leadership, Metrics
Management.
✔ Conducting the following Trainings, Coaching, Handholding:
o Safe Agilist (Done 20 plus Trainings)
o Safe POPM (Done 3 plus Trainings)
o Safe For Teams (Done 20 plus Trainings)
o Safe for DevOps (Done 3 Trainings)
o Safe RTE (Done 3 Trainings)
o Safe for Scrum Master and Advance Scrum Master (Done10 Trainings)
o Agile Scrum Master (Almost 5000 people trained) and Advance Scrum Master workshops to
teach scrum masters to behave like “servant leaders”
✔ Working with Teams to create and implement improvement plan for “being agile”
o Working with Developers to instill characteristics of a High Performing Team.
o Working with DevOps resources to imbibe the culture of shared responsibility, automation, Lean
agile principles and helping them guide to better alignment to organization goals.
o Working with Architects to ensure just the right amount of Intentional Architecture is suggested
and teams have lots of autonomy to decide on emergent architecture.
o Working with Leadership to challenge them for any metrics they want and help them understand
the importance of measuring flow of Features, Bugs, Risks and Debt.
o Working with the Product Management Team to help them understand design thinking, MVP,
correct Feature and Story writing and splitting, and helping create Product Roadmaps and Story
Maps.
o Working with Teams to help implement Agile Project Management Tools (JIRA and
AzureDevOps) with full visibility into the progress of features and stories to all levels of
Organization by creating multiple kinds of dashboards.
o Helping teams identify and remove bottlenecks by using mock interfaces, toggle on/off features.

Xebia India, Level 4, Capital Cyberscape, Sector 59 Gurgaon, 122002

www.xebiaacademyglobal.com
 o Creating and maintaining CoPs, conducting Brownbag and Coding Dojos for teams to instill multi
skills
✔ Helping teams to understand the power of visualization in understanding roles and responsibilities in an
Agile world for all different roles.
✔ Expert in Data Analysis using Excel as a tool.
✔ Expert in JIRA and AzureDevOps
✔ Expert in Conducting behavioral, SAFe and All kind of Agile Trainings for Scrum and Kanban Teams

TECHNICAL SKILLS

Programming Languages C#.NET, ASP.NET

Agile Project Management Tools JIRA, AzureDevOps

Experience/Education/DOB – In Nutshell
✔ Jan 2012 – Mar 2022 – DGM – HCL America (ID 51411353)
o Joined HCL America in Bellevue, WA, USA in Jan 2012 as Scrum Master in Microsoft MSN.
o Started Microsoft’s Xbox Development Account in July 2012.
o Moved to Noida, India in Nov 2012. SME for Cosmos based proposals and working closely with
Sales team on various Proposal preparation and presentation.
o Working as Enterprise Agile Coach in Agile CoE, since June 2014.
o SAFe consultant since 2016 and now Certified SPC 5.1; Working on large enterprise level
transformations.
✔ Aug 2003 – Jan 2012 – Software engineer to Technology Architect – Infosys Technology (ID 23913)
o Graduated from Functional Tester to Automation tester to managing the Test Automation
frameworks, to writing web services to Biztalk Developer to Technology Architect in a very short
time span of 6 years, just because was working in high performing teams throughout in Microsoft.
o Trained in Pune and Moved to Hyderabad in Microsoft Projects in Testing.
o Moved to US in Oct 2006 and worked in Caterpillar Projects (Peoria, IL, US) from Oct 2006 to Mar
2008 as Project Manager.
o Moved to Bellevue, WA, USA in Microsoft Projects in March 2008 and Left Infosys at onsite in Jan
2012, from same account.
✔ March 2003 – Aug 2003 – Senior Officer (Marketing) – Indorama Synthetics, New Delhi
o Sales and Marketing of Polyester Yarn and Chips in North India region.
✔ June 2002 – Mar 2003 – Assistant Manager (Sales) – Ashoka Mercantile Limited, Surat
o Sales of Nylon Yarn in Gujarat Region.
✔ May 2001 – June 2002 – Graduate Engineering Trainee – Modipon fibers Company, Surat
o Trained in Shop Floor for 3 Months and moved to Surat for handling Sales of Nylon Yarn.
✔ July 1997 – May 2001 – B Tech Textile Technology – TIT&S Bhiwani, Haryana, 71% (With honors)
o Third Rank Holder in University
✔ March 1997 – 12th – CBSE – 81%
✔ March 1995 – 10th – CBSE – 80%

Xebia India, Level 4, Capital Cyberscape, Sector 59 Gurgaon, 122002

www.xebiaacademyglobal.com
 KEY RECENT PROJECTS EXECUTED

June’14 – Mar’22 Deputy General Manager – Agile CoE

Employer: HCL Technologies

Here I worked as an Agile Transformation Consultant in Agile Center of Excellence (I was the first SPC in HCL)
Key Responsibilities:

✔ Doing assessment of Programs for Agile readiness using interviews and Gemba walks, creating
improvement roadmaps, base-lining current practices, training, handholding, guiding and then re-assessing
on improvements made.
✔ Getting the best from all frameworks created a new scaling framework for HCL partners which had
cadence and rhythm (from SAFe) for whole of portfolio along with Autonomy (from Spotify) and focus on
delivering value (Implementing Flow with Kanban) with highest levels of visibility (Scrum) to all layers and
measuring the right attributes for different layers (From Flow Framework – Project to Product)
✔ Aligning Coaching style (Shu-Ha-Ri) with Tuckman Model (Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing)
to change gears from Teaching, Handholding to Mastery and contextualizing the process to own needs.
✔ My Unique coaching style is telling stories from my experiences with a great passion and ensuring
small improvements spread over time to give time and space for cultural assimilation.
✔ Coaching Leadership – on measuring the right things to drive culture towards right direction is my forte. My
Mantra is, if we don’t use metrics for making decision, then lets’ not waste time in those measurements, and
Metrics drive behavior, so measurement goes a long way in establishing trust in organization.
✔ Conducting the following Trainings, Coaching, Handholding for multiple Accounts:
o Partner Admin for SAFe Gold Partnership with HCL
o Safe Agilist (Done 20 plus trainings)
o Safe For Teams (Done 20 plus Trainings)
o Safe for DevOps (Done 3 Trainings)
o Safe RTE (Done 3 Trainings)
o Safe for Scrum Master and Advance Scrum Master (Done10 Trainings)
o Agile Scrum Master (Almost 5000 people trained) and Advance Scrum Master workshops to teach
scrum masters to behave like “servant leaders”
o Working with Developers and Architects to teach them concepts of Pair Programming, Maintaining
a balance between Intentional and Emergent Architecture and how to contribute and participate in
Coding Dojos and CoPs for picking new skills.
o Doing DevOps trainings to teach teams concepts of culture of shared responsibility for Build and
Ops; how to Reduce Build Duration by Managing the Automated and Build Verification Tests;
concepts of Automation of CI/CD pipelines and How recovery can be made robust; How to
implement the concepts of Lean in whole DevOps Operations.
o Teaching Testers to how to shift left testing by looking at BDD, TDD, ATDD.
o Product Owner Product Manager workshop for Design Thinking, Product Roadmap creation, Story
Map Creation and Feature and Story elicitation and estimation methodologies. Also working closely
with PO/PM to let them understand the role and define the “what” part of requirement only and let
the teams decide on “how” part of the requirement, by keeping the requirements INVESTable.
o Client workshops on how measure flow of Features, Bugs, Risk and Debt and how to act like
Leaders in an Agile Organization which can pivot without guilt.
o Tool set up (JIRA, AzureDevOps) from scratch to help Programs look at flow of Features, Stories,
Bugs, Risks and Technical Debt and helping teams work with minimum constraints.

Xebia India, Level 4, Capital Cyberscape, Sector 59 Gurgaon, 122002

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 o Teaching everyone in the organization the power of visualization (for Roles, Requirements and
Designing and Developing Stories) and how to understand the Principles of Agile and Lean Agile to
better grasp the practices suggested by Agile methodologies.
✔ SAFE implementations done in Novartis, Ikea, HnM, QD, Q2, Wawa accounts. Working as Consultant in
all these accounts for small day to day Tool and Agile Workshops and small helps for alignments.
o In Wawa helped set up Jira Align for Digital Transformation Program, with 5 Feature Development
Teams, 3 Database Teams, 1 Infra Team and 1 Enterprise Architecture Team with 2 way
movement of data from JIRA align to JIRA. Trained all stakeholders in Agile thinking and helped set
up Product Management office with Design Thinking workshops and Story elicitation workshops.
Conducted first and second PI Planning with full ART successfully and delivered.
o In Q2, Helped the account learn Product Management techniques, Dashboard management,
Metrics Management (Using JIRA as only source of truth and minimum manual intervention) and
trained all Senior Leadership in Agile thinking.
o In QD, worked with Senior leadership with Doing Agile to Being Agile workshops and helped launch
first ART for SAP programs by channeling the smaller functional requirements and enabling the
flow based framework. Had to spend extra time with Product Management to help them divide
requirements into smaller chunks for flow.
o In Novartis, helped the App development factory to streamline flow with setting up workflow in
JIRA, so that small app development can start and end with desired results in very short time.
✔ Implementing Tools like Jira and AzureDevOps so that Agile Program Management can be effective.
Expert in AzureDevOps, JIRA, Confluence and Version One.
✔ Agile CoE is Part of Digital and Analytics practice in HCL, where I have worked on creation on FENIX
Framework, ASM 2.0 Strategy, VDA Framework and helped create new Agile Scaling process from
partner accounts using the Cadence and Synchronization aspects from SAFe, Spotify, and all other scaling
methods.
o FENIX – is quadrant based Digital approach for Accounts to compartmentalize the Programs into
Differentiating and Target and then implement correct People, Process and Tools to those
quadrants to understand how an Organization is spending (Run to Retire, Fail Fast, Customer
Centric or Long Term) and to create a Target State for organization with step by step approach.
o ASM strategy talks about how Integrated Ops teams can be structured for efficiency and scale and
how organization needs to shift focus from operation to cooperation.
o VDA looks at various aspects of Distributed Agile and suggests levers to work in a virtually
integrated way in post Covid world.

July’12 – June’ 14 Account Manager – XBox Knowledge

Services
Employer: HCL America Client: Microsoft Corp (Redmond, USA)

Here I worked as Account Manager for multiple Projects: DBUnloader and Knowledge Services.
DBUnloader: Microsoft intents to store Xbox Usage related data in Cosmos (In-house Tool to Manage and Analyze
Huge amounts of Data, Generally 5TB per day). Microsoft also intends to generate reports out of this data for
Business to Analyze. DBUnloader allows importing data into Cosmos from other SQL DB’s. I am a Program Manager
for this project. I took requirements from other teams who wanted their data to be stored in Cosmos and then my
team imported this data, set up process to get delta and gave the location of data to other teams to Analyze.
Knowledge Services: In this project, my team prepared reports that were relevant for the business and which enabled
them to Manage metrics and make decisions. I worked with external teams to gather requirements for the reports
they wanted out of the data from Cosmos. Development work happened in Scope language, which is combination of
C# and SQL. I worked as Account Manager (Delivery) in this project.
Key Responsibilities:

Xebia India, Level 4, Capital Cyberscape, Sector 59 Gurgaon, 122002

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 ✔ Issue/Risk Management: Making sure that no risk can derail the delivery and being on top of them all the
time.
✔ Taking care of key deliverables of the team and making sure communication to Client Weekly/Monthly is
crisp and clear.
✔ Implementing 2 week sprints and doubling up as Scrum Master.
✔ Creating weekly/monthly Release plans and aligning those to the Sprints.
✔ Gathering requirements, working on creating a healthy work backlog and implementing features based on
priority.
✔ Entering details of new features or enhancements needed in TFS work items and creating Functional Specs
so that Dev have enough information on what needs to be done.
✔ Working with Client and various other teams to understand what they need and building upon the requests.
✔ Removing the bottlenecks from the processes and enabling the team to deliver.
✔ Showcasing the effort of the whole team and value addition we bring on board by partnering and owning.
✔ Handling retrospective meetings and making continual improvements by taking inputs from all team.
✔ Taking care of aspirations/issue of the individual team members and making sure each deserving candidate
gets aptly recognized and rewarded.
✔ Creating an environment of friendly competition in the team.
✔ Organizing trainings for fresher and making sure to have continuous pool of resources to be on-boarded in
short span of time.
✔ Giving visibility to Top Management on Status of the project and planning and implementing the target
revenue/margin growth.
Significant Highlights:

✔ Started this account with just myself and within two months ramped it gradually and steadily up to 10 Dev
members.
✔ Created good rapport with the client in very less time and we were entrusted with complete end to end
Management of three projects.
✔ Made this Program Fixed Price and made significant improvements in Operating Margin.
✔ SME for Cosmos and handled all proposals from Microsoft for Big data Management.
✔ SME for Agile and member of task force to implement Agile across all Microsoft projects.

Jan’12 – June’12 Sr. Technical Manager – MSN Living Website

Employer: HCL America Client: Microsoft Corp (Redmond, USA)

Here I was the Scrum Master/Coach and Feature Manager for http://living.msn.com and http://health.msn.com
websites.
Key Responsibilities:

✔ Implemented the best practices of Scrum and coaching and helped team in implementation.
✔ Worked with the External Teams and created the Functional Specs.
✔ Owner of Sprint Planning, Daily Standup, Retrospective and Triage meetings.
✔ Did high level Story point estimates and maintained healthy stack-ranked sprint backlog based on the
velocity of teams.
✔ Maintained the KanBan board (Electronic and Physical) and gave superior visibility to the Leadership on
what each team member is currently doing and managed the risks and issues.
✔ Worked in 2 week sprints and Monthly release trains.
✔ Made sure that 10 Onsite Dev, 6 Onsite Test, 3 Offshore Dev and 3 Offshore test (Total 3 Teams), each
have enough work for the sprint and been on top of issues and resolved them as fast as possible.

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 ✔ Took care of Customer relations and needs, and prepared reports for showcasing ROI and quality
deliverables.
Significant Highlights:

✔ Cracked the challenge of doing Sprint Planning for two co-located Sprint Teams at the same time.
✔ Implemented the KanBan and gave superior visibility to Leadership.
✔ Implemented Bug-Jail, to reduce the overall bug count at any given time. My teams worked with Max 5 Open
bugs at any point of time.
✔ Highly technical project. Picked up the domain quickly and created personal relations with team in short
duration.
✔ Made sure that team does not falls back to waterfall within Sprint and doing Scrum in true spirit.
✔ Coached other external teams for Best Practices in ScrumBan.

Jan’11 – Jan’12 Technology Architect – Microsoft Service

Bus Employer: Infosys Technologies Client: Microsoft Corp (Redmond,
USA)

This project involved creating Middle tier application platform that hosts web services that allow users of these
services to create Service Requests in multiple systems.
Key Responsibilities:

✔ Managing Team of 5 People at onsite and 4 people at offshore.

✔ Working with the Client PM’s and creating the FS and documenting the user scenarios.
✔ Worked as Automation expert and guided the team for laying the foundation of testing framework.
✔ Working in 6 week sprints and handling multiple roles and Scrum Master and handling the scrum of scrums
as well.
✔ Doing high level estimations and preparing estimates for the resource requirement in the project.
✔ Handling the task allocation for global team and keeping the team motivated.
✔ Taking care of Customer relations and needs and preparing reports.
Significant Highlights:

✔ Handled the Program Manager and Automation Expert roles in this project, which involved almost 15 people
and 5 Teams, each working on different features in their own 6 week sprints.
✔ Highly technical project. Laid the groundwork for Automation Testing of web-services by working on MAUI
Automation Testing framework and creating a layer over MAUI API that made using MAUI easier for other
testers to be used.
✔ Brought the team up on technical capabilities for handling the Automation Testing.
✔ Wrote FS for integration of diverse systems for Service Request Create/Update. Generating a Universal
Data Contract which could handle all the fields of downstream systems was a big challenge which was
successfully handled.
✔ There were more streams in this project where I was only a resource Manager.
✔ In V1 my Test team, found almost 99% bugs in requirements stage and hence improved the ROI, by
reducing the effort of Developers and all the team.

Sep’08 to Jan’11 Project Manager – MS RXD Partner Program

Employer: Infosys Technologies Client: Microsoft Corp (Redmond, USA)

Xebia India, Level 4, Capital Cyberscape, Sector 59 Gurgaon, 122002

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Here we tested the web Site www.partner.microsoft.com which handles millions of partners of Microsoft. This portal
has a content management site (CMS), where site admins manage the content and publish it after previewing.
Published contents are seen at Portal website by the users. Automation testing was done using internal Microsoft
automation framework (Edison) and using C#.NET.

Key Responsibilities:
✔ Managing Team of 5 people at offshore and working in two week sprints and churning out features fully
tested and signed off.
Significant Highlights:
✔ Rose from Test Lead to Technology Architect in this project and handled all different kind of responsibilities
with success.
✔ Utilized Scrum methodology and managed small teams in diverse locations.
✔ Very good understanding of the Portal and Partner domain because remained in this project for long time.
✔ Managed the churn in project by keeping KT plan ready and ramping up team members in virtually zero
times.
✔ Brought automation levels up from 30 to 90%.
✔ Managed deployment of daily builds, where automated BVT’s would run and reports were sent in mails to all
stakeholders.
✔ Prepared SLA’s for defects in Test Automation code and managed the client expectations all the time.

Xebia India, Level 4, Capital Cyberscape, Sector 59 Gurgaon, 122002

www.xebiaacademyglobal.com