Leera Dash

Senior Agile Portfolio Lead with management accountability for IT Funding, Lean Governance and Agile Operations across multiple portfolios (each approx. valued at AED 50M+) consisting of different business units with shared responsibility to maximize solution value delivery and benefits realization for Al Futtaim.
Strategic Investments Governance and Portfolio Management:
● Orchestration of Portfolio Leadership (Business, Architecture, Product, Delivery and Finance) to ensure governance is followed through for all investments from Strategy (Idea and Demands) to Portfolio (Programs and Projects) to Maintain (Enhancements and Support).
● Provide key inputs and data insights that enables stakeholders to make informed strategic decisions on funding allocation for each portfolio including Automotive, Health Care and Enterprise IT as part of the total IT investment within Al-Futtaim Enterprise IT.
● Focus on Business Value Delivery by establishing and facilitating collective forums for business and IT to define, plan, prioritize and roadmap all initiatives to be implemented by various portfolios.
● Assess new and ongoing investments, monitor risks, dependencies, reporting anomalies and Portfolio performance trends.
● Implement guidelines, processes, templates, and tools aligned to Lean-Agile principles to aid in collection and maintenance of initiative data and metrics in real-time dashboards and reports to drive transparency around Portfolio Performance.
Achievements: Designed and implemented streamlined process for review of Business Cases ahead of presentation at key Strategic Funding forums reducing Business Case review and approval times by 50%.
- Established process to streamline the Roadmaps of various Portfolios, enabled visibility of all initiatives within the portfolio providing increased transparency on reporting to stakeholders.
- Defined, created, and implemented KPIs to be tracked for Portfolio Management Office functions.
Agile Coaching and Mentoring: Create and publish training material, artefacts and documentation, conduct workshops to initiate agile adoption and change, encouraging a continuous learning culture.
● Scrum Master: Lead IT Digital Transformation program initiatives, apply Servant Leadership skills while acting as Scrum Master for cross functional teams. Deliver Continuous Improvements in sprints, independently and in collaboration with others. Manage backlog, Scrum boards, blockers.

In Charge of Portfolio management and governance for portfolios (Enterprise Technology, Group Services) comprising of various business units serving the Emirates Group.
Strategic Investments Governance and Portfolio Management:
● Collaborated closely with business and IT stakeholders to guarantee governance was followed for all projects and programs within the portfolios.
● Provided clear analysis and insight on portfolio financials, progress, quality, issues, and risks to support senior management in effective decision making, including portfolio funding decisions.
● Facilitated forums for Business and IT to identify and define the roadmap for portfolios. Responsible for ensuring consistency across Value Streams through reporting, Jira setup and Agile processes.
● Enabled Scaled Agile process and best practices, including governance, sprint cadence, PI planning.
Achievement: Enabled alignment and transparency across all layers within IT (Portfolio to Teams) while working towards achieving Strategic Portfolio objectives and maximizing business value.
● Agile Adoption and Coaching: Facilitated learning opportunities for people in the organization (talks, workshops) helping them learn important Scaled Agile concepts.
● Scrum Master Experience: Worked as Scrum Master for PMO Continuous Improvement initiatives. Set up and ran Scrum Ceremonies. Used JIRA and Confluence to track issues and report progress.
Achievement: Guided delivery teams within 2 Agile Release Trains in Agile principles, methods, and ceremonies during the Agile transformation in collaboration with LACE coaches.

Accountable for implementation of consistent PMO best practices for projects which enabled successful and timely delivery of IT’s commitments to the business within cost. Progressed to Program PMO Analyst serving the airline’s AED 250M PSS (Passenger Services System) transformation program comprising 76 projects.
● Strategic Program Governance and Support: Created and managed projects within the program. Defined and executed governance processes.
● Met regular and adhoc. reporting needs of stakeholders, provided necessary support on tools and process training, coaching and quality assurance.
● Project Management Reviews/Risk and Issue Management: Monitored risks and issues, ensured follow through to closure. Conducted Project Management Reviews and Health checks.
● Change Control: In charge of the change control work streams of all projects within the program.
● Business Process Mapping and Process Improvement Projects: Mapped and analyzed existing business processes. Defined and visualized new processes focused towards reducing inefficiencies and quality improvement.
● Achievements: Piloted automation of many PMO reports (Closures, Status Reports) resulting in reduction of time taken for report generation from 2 weeks to 1 day.
● Boosted PMO productivity by creating and publishing FAQ documents, user guides, ‘How-to’ videos on PMO processes, templates and tools. Co-authored handbooks on Project Management best practices as part of ‘Back to basics’ initiative run by PMO.
● Achievement: Recipient of Certificate of appreciation for contribution towards a key revenue generating project.

Headed IT and HR coordination activities for the retail conglomerate’s Oracle implementation project.

● Single Point of Contact for vendor and client teams.
● IT Coordination: Collaborated with Support and Development teams, highlighted project/infrastructure issues to senior management and worked towards closure. Responsible for analysis and creation of status reports.
● HR Coordination: Acted as HR Point of Contact for project team; headed admin for visa and travel requests, medical insurance renewals, timesheets, leave schedules, expenses claims, etc.
● Achievement: Awarded Certificate of appreciation recognizing my contribution as the touchpoint between Landmark Group IT and Tata Consultancy Services.

Worked in development and support projects for a US based Life Sciences client and a Netherlands based Telecommunications client for a leading IT multinational.
● TIBCO Developer and Support Engineer experience: Developed TIBCO interfaces, performed testing, defect resolution, incident management, deployment and other support/maintenance activities for two key projects.
● Onboarding Coordination: Conducted on-boarding of new joiners to projects.
● Project Documentation: Created and maintained project documentation.