GAURAV MEHRA
"Bringing Practical to the Ideal Agile; Common sense to the Business Processes"
Gaurav is an established Agile leader with over 20 years’ experience in technical management at Fortune 100, high visibility global organizations such as AT&T, Accenture, T-Mobile, Merck & Co/ MRL, VeriSign, and Life Insurance Corporation of India (world’s top 20 Insurance provider). His forte lies in Agile coaching/ mentoring, consulting, pre-sales, and leading distributed multi-continent, multi-cultural, IT/ software organizations, accounts, portfolios, and teams with a practical and measurable approach while harmonizing new and traditional frameworks.
Gaurav pays it forward to the next generation as an Associate Professor training MBA students and executives. He believes in the power of mentoring and teaching, done right! Being an entrepreneur turned intrapreneur, and a finance and accounting prodigy turned, software developer, turned manager, have helped him lead with empathy and efficacy. He has lead setup of three global delivery centers and COEs. He lead an award-winning Enterprise Agile engagement to customers satisfaction while growing it 10X in <3 years ($2M to $20M pa), reporting to CTO. His out of the box thinking leading to over 5X increase in Agile team’s productivity and quality of delivery in six months and adoption of practices across the portfolio. His servant leadership enabled new teams to repeatedly beat established competing Agile partners in quality, timeliness, and cohesion. He has converted multiple cost centers into profit centers, in less than a year. He has lead Agile transformations for organizations ranging from two collocated scrum teams to globally distributed multi-program portfolios of hundreds. He had a unique opportunity to set up and conduct Agile team performance research at AT&T/Accenture, a Fortune 100 organization, leading to publications and presentations. The finance, accounting, technology, and Biomedical background enabled him to lead a complex bi-modal Divestiture of the world’s largest High-throughput Gene Expression-array laboratory for the largest Pharma Merger. He also lead product development, sales, and implementations of industry’s first .Net SaaS e-commerce and shipping solution.
Gaurav’s belief in giving back to the community lead to his election to the Board of Directors of Project Management Institute (PMI.org) Greater Seattle chapter by over 2500 PPM practitioners (PSPMI.org). He is the Vice President of Programs leading a Portfolio of over five Programs from Technology to Events Management. He is a frequent speaker with over ten keynotes in USA, Canada, and India; hosts thought leaders for PMI/ PSPMI and has learned from the likes of Gene Kim, Dr. James Brown, Simon Sinek, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Captain Chesley Sullenberger, Eric Verzuh and Terry Schmidt. He has published articles with Scrum Alliance.
Gaurav is just as comfortable in the trenches working with the teams reading code and configurations, architecting a solution, as he is in a boardroom with C & V level executives, negotiating an M&A&D, training a class, or speaking to a global audience of hundreds of leaders. His focus is on continuously improving business agility, elasticity (not just scale), change management, and global workforce dynamics. Though Gaurav practices collaborative and servant leadership, he is never afraid to stand up for what is right. He strives to learn, receive feedback to assess how to serve others better, observe and provide emotionally intelligent constructive feedback. He believes that success, be it in life or projects, is determined just as much by immeasurables such as satisfaction, team cohesion, and motivation, as by measurable KPIs, budgets, and schedules.
He leverages and when needed develops creative frameworks, metrics, and KPIs to guide people and organizations onto the desired path of success. The disciplines Gaurav draws upon include
- Agile: Scrum, Kanban, Lean Six Sigma, XP, RAD, DevXOps, Waterfall/SSAD, Change Management, Facilitation,
- Portfolio/Program/Project/Product Management, SAFe, LeSS, Nexus, SaS, LFA, Business Analysis, Coaching,
- Behavior & Team Dynamics, Organizational Strategy & Planning, Innovation Games, Enterprise Architecture, Software Design
Gaurav has an MBA focused in Finance and Information Technology, a Master of Science in Computer Science, a Master of Science in Computer Science and Engineering with specializations in Data-Intensive Systems (scientific and foundational field of BI/ DW, Big-Data/ Data Science, AI/ ML) and Bio/ Medical informatics. He won multiple scholarships at OHSU, OR. He is certified by Scaled Agile Academy (SAFe-SA), Scrum Alliance (CSM, CSPO), Project Management Institute (PMP), Amazon Web Services (CCP) and Microsoft (MTA: Cloud, Security, Databases. MOS: SharePoint).
Verticals: Telecommunications, e-commerce, biotechnology/ bioinformatics, medical informatics, research, engineering, finance, accounting, law, and defense.
When I am not herding cats and running the amazing restaurant "Ham-n-Eggs", to which Y'all are cordially invited... you can find me biking and hiking with my wife and our daughter, salsa dancing, skydiving, flying a bird or possibly nerding about Machine Learning, DNNs, and algorithms!
Gaurav Mehra
MSCSE, MSCS, MBA,
PMI PMP, SAFe 4.5 Scaled Agilist (SA), Scrum Alliance CSM & CSPO,
Amazon AWS-CCP, Microsoft MTA & MOS
[email protected]
