My name is Murali Varadarajan, and I am a IT professional with around 20 years of experience in technology across financial, healthcare, reta... Read More
My name is Murali Varadarajan, and I am a IT professional with around 20 years of experience in technology across financial, healthcare, retail, service and construction industries. I have over a decade serving the in financial sector ( ecommerce, finance, marketing , Investment banking, consumer loans and Credit cards with Citibank, Wachovia, Wells Fargo and Bank of America)
Coming from a entrepreunal mindset and a civil engineering background I had trouble relating to procedural languages like cobol and PL1 initially when I started working for a software firm in India. The leap into Microsoft technologies then with visual studio helped set my bearings straight and fun begin. One of the first books I read and was influenced by then was Rapid Development which formed the basis of value delivery and customer focussed approach in my belief structure.
I applied Rapid Development techniques scucessfully in Citi as a development lead to achieve many milestones for the team. The next assignment in another bank saw me witness a colossal IT failure that made me think on how to prevent this in future. I then turned my career into a direction which I am cherishing even now. I started researching the ways to increase efficiencies and value delivery and researched a lot on manufacturing, project management and software industry in general.
Coming into Wachovia gave me for the first time a chance to rebuild a failing team and put into practice something that I could scale to the organization. Agile was mantra, scrum was the path chosen which paved the path for me to create the first successful agile team in wachovia in 2007. I was pulled in for scaling it across the Corporate investment banking area where I trained, coached and mentored many teams including building a Application lifecycle management workflow for the agile teams.
I started a discussion group to keep the momentum growing on scrum and with my colleagues co-founded the Agile community of practice. I also joined in the operational commitee in the Project Management community of practice with Wachovia and Wells to gain buyin for Agile in the traditional project management bodies in the organization.
My journey into Agile evangelism continued with Premier where a IT restructuing was underway and served as a coach, scrummaster and consultant for the tools and technology including ALM team building.
The biggest challenge however has been in the last couple of years now in bank of america as a consultant where I built the first scrum team in ecommerce with a 60 member team across geographical locations working in a time where the need were motivation , team building, value delivery and shift in organizational goals. Over 7 years now after starting with Agile & scrum I continue being an evangelist in my many projects and roles and strive to spread the word with presentations and coaching within the clients space and also the local community with participations and volunteering presentations and talks with various organizations and firms.
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