Sunil Mundra is a Principal Consultant=Advisory at Thoughtworks. He has hands on experience in Agile Software Delivery and Consulting, Client Engagement, Product Management and Business Analysis. Sunil has demonstrated expertise in implementing Agile Adoption and Transformation, Envisioning and optimization of IT solutions based on business drivers and Architecting end-user IT products in the banking and finance domain. He has experience in working with clients across 16 countries spread over 5 continents.
As a Principal Consultant, Sunil brings expertise in Agile Maturity Assessment, Agile Training, Coaching for Agile Adoption and Transformation, Change Management, Client Engagement and Stakeholder Management Sunil has extensive experience in addressing challenges arising out of Distributed Development. Sunil’s skills are complemented by extensive domain and analytical experience throughout his career. He has been involved in all aspects of IT product conceptualization, development and implementation.
Sunil’s domain area of expertise is finance with significant experience in the areas of consumer finance, corporate finance, foreign exchange management, and cash management. He has considerable experience in leading business analysis and product implementation teams in all these areas.
Sunil has spoken on Agile related topics at national and international conferences. Sunil is also actively involved in the Agile related groups supported by LinkedIn.
Thoughtworks Experience
A mid-size bank in Australia
The Bank is in the process of replacing their Core Banking Platform, with a product which is being developed by a globally reputed IT company (henceforth referred as ‘The Partner’). The product development and customization are being done out of their centers in India.
The Bank and The Partner have agreed that the customizations to the product will be developed and delivered based on Agile principles and practices. The scale of the Program is large such that there are multiple teams across various modules working at both The Bank and The Partner sites, and the Program is expected to run for multiple years.
Sunil started on this engagement as an Agile Coach., He was soon elevated to be The Bank’s Leadership representative at the Partner’s site, not only due to the impact of his Coaching, but also because he built strong relationships and won the trust of key stakeholders in both organizations
Sunil’s role on the 19 months engagement has spanned across multiple areas-Training on Agile basics for the Partner’s teams, Coaching the Partner’s teams on Agile Practices, Advising on best practices for Distributed Development and advising The Bank’s leadership team on both strategic and operational matters at the Program level. As the Program is scaling up, Sunil played a key role towards ensuring the scale up is sustainable and that the change is managed in line with the overall objectives of the Program.
Picture Archival and Communication System (PACS) Division of a Global Engineering Conglomerate
The client engaged ThoughtWorks to assist them with Agile Adoption. As part of the engagement Sunil coached 4 teams working on a PACS product. As part of the engagement, Sunil conducted workshops on Agile Fundamentals and coached the teams on Scrum Processes and Practices. These included User Stories, Backlog Grooming, Sprint Planning, Daily Stand Up Meetings, Retrospectives, Story Wall etc. Sunil provided individual mentoring to the 4 Scrum Masters.
During the engagement Sunil also focused on increasing collaboration between the Product Owners, who are based on shore and the development teams, who are off shore.
Sunil also regularly interacted with middle and senior management stakeholders to appraise them of the adoption progress and also to work with them towards creating organizational level enablers for Agile adoption.
A Pioneer in the Healthcare Industry providing solutions which connect Pharma Companies and Health Care Professionals
The client is a leader in providing IT driven products that act as bridges between pharma companies and health care professionals. These include products for providing healthcare information, e-sampling of drugs and interactive medical learning material over mobile and web. The client has multiple development centers in USA and one center in India.
The engagement with the client was for assessing their IT organization and capabilities not only from the delivery optimization perspective, but also examining their interfacing with business and product management functions, organization structure and roles and their offshoring strategy, and recommending a plan of action for making their IT organization ‘world class’.
Sunil was involved in assessing all the aspects stated above. This primarily involved interacting with their leadership team and practitioners on the ground, examining their development process and practices, and collaboration between on shore and off shore centers.
A Global Pioneer and Leader in providing Self Service Solutions for Consumers
The client provides self service solutions for consumers across multiple industries including banking, air transportation, healthcare and retail. The client has helped companies around the world better connect, transact and interact with their customers. The company makes both hardware and software required for the solutions.
The engagement till date has involved Assessing 8 teams across various stages of their Product Lifecycle for Agile transformation, and also formulating Vision and Plan for implementing the transformation. The Agile Maturity Model (AMM), covering 10 management and technical dimensions was the primary tool used for assessment
The engagement spanned the client’s development locations across USA and India and Sunil led the Assessment of the teams that were distributed in India. Sunil also spent time in USA to understand the objectives and drivers of the engagement and meet the client’s primary stakeholders.
Besides conducting the Assessment, Sunil was also involved in producing several deliverables, which were delivered to the client on completion of the Assessment phase. These included Future State Vision for their 3 types of teams, Roles and Responsibilities in Development teams in an Agile environment, Guidelines for Distributed Development and Guidelines for Agile Metrics.
Sunil has also conducted multiple workshops on ‘Agile Fundamentals’ at their offshore development center in India.
Hospital Information System Product Division of a Global Engineering Conglomerate
The client has a distributed development set-up for developing a product for hospital management. The client engaged ThoughtWorks for assessment of their context with respect to Agile adoption and coaching for increasing the effectiveness of Agile practices, as they are faced with significant delays in bringing new versions of their product to the market.
The engagement spanned the client’s development locations in the USA and India, with the strength of the India center being 250+ people. Sunil was the Program Advisor/Delivery Principal for the India side of the engagement. He led a team that comprised process and technical coaches. His role included closely interacting with key stakeholders to determine the engagement drivers and direction, implementing Agile practices, guiding and mentoring the coaches in the assessment and coaching phases, making periodic presentations to key stakeholders on the findings and progress of the engagement, and liaising with ThoughtWorkers working on the onshore leg of the engagement.
Global Provider of Software Services to the Telecommunications Industry
The company develops, implements and manages software and services associated with Business Support Systems (BSS) and Operational Support Systems (OSS). The software systems support the full span of customer lifecycle revenue management, customer management, service and resource management and service delivery.
The client had launched the Agile Adoption Program over a year ago but was not seeing any improvement in the quality of their products. The client engaged ThoughtWorks to help assess the current state of their engineering practices, identify areas of improvement and help create knowledge awareness about the practices that were found to be weak. The engagement scope was 3 product lines, whose development is distributed across India and Israel.
Sunil was the Client Principal and Program Advisor for the engagement. His role involved working with key stakeholders in India and at their Global Headquarters in Israel to crystallize the engagement drivers, understand similar initiatives implemented in Israel with a view to achieving maximum consistency across locations, guiding and mentoring the technical coaches on the engagement, and presenting the findings of the assessment and recommendations using an appropriate framework.
Institute for Reproductive Health
IRH is a non-profit organization working towards improving reproductive health worldwide. They develop, test and implement simple and effective fertility awareness based methods of family planning.
IRH engaged ThoughtWorks to create a system that informs women about their fertility status through mobile phones, via SMS. This was a pioneering effort towards an information based low cost and non-hormonal method of family planning, and is named CycleTel.
Sunil was Business Analyst and Scrum Master on this project, and worked with client stakeholders who were distributed between USA and India. . Since the solution was based on a new idea, Sunil worked closely with the client and facilitated envisioning the system to be developed. Sunil was also responsible for creating and detailing user stories, working closely with developers, preliminary testing of functionality, backlog prioritization, iteration planning, tracking metrics based on velocity and conducting showcases at the end of the iterations.
Other IT Experience
Principal Functional Consultant, R Systems International, Pune, India
Sunil led the Product Management function for 5 end user products, in the consumer-lending domain. He was also responsible for creating the functional architecture for these products, leading a team of Business Analysts that were involved in product development and implementation, interacting with internal stakeholders and clients for determining future direction for the products.
All of these products were developed ground up, wherein Sunil was involved in all phases of the product development. Given that time to market and customer feedback were critical drivers for products, the development was performed using Agile principles and practices. Sunil was also responsible for driving product enhancements, based on product road map.
Sunil also led multiple implementations, across the globe wherein he was involved in facilitating CXO level stakeholders in envisioning their business drivers and in helping to map them to the appropriate IT solution.
Product and Account Manager, CashTech Solutions (India) Pvt. Ltd., Pune, India
Sunil was Product Manager of a Collections product, in the Cash Management domain. Sunil’s responsibilities included managing product implementations, driving product enhancements based on product road map, pre sales and knowledge management.
Sunil was also the Account Manager for 2 major clients.
Non-IT Experience
Besides working in IT, Sunil has experience as a practitioner in the areas of consumer market research, retail lending, corporate finance and corporate treasury management. All these roles involved significant interactions with a variety of external stakeholders.
Sunil is also a visiting faculty member of management education institutes in Pune, India since the past 18 years.
Recognition and Awards
Sunil’s whitepaper titled ‘APR Demystified’ was published on his ex-employer’s website
Sunil received ‘Star Performer’ award from client, as appreciation for contribution towards successfully implementing lending solutions across multiple locations worldwide. The client is Consumer Finance division of a global conglomerate based in USA.
Sunil was invited as a consultant to be part of IT solution envisioning initiative by a bank in Italy, based on his reputation of having expertise in that area across other banks globally, within the same conglomerate. This was despite the fact that the solution development was being outsourced to another vendor.
Thought Leadership at Conferences
Sr. No.
Conference Name
Date
Topic
1
Agile Tour 2011, Bangalore, India
Nov. 2011
Learnings From A Decade Of Agile In Practice
2
Agile Brazil 2012, Sao Paulo, Brazil
Sept. 2012
Distributed Development Best Practices
3
Agile Tour 2012, Chennai, India
Oct. 2012
Stand Up Meeting Anti Patterns
4
PM Conclave ’12, Mumbai, India
Dec. 2012
Importance and Challenges of Distributed Development
5
Internal Conference in IT Division Of World’s Leading Business Consulting Company, Gurgaon, India
Mar. 2013
Distributed Development Best Practices
6
MIFOS (Microfinance Open Source) Summit 2013, Jaipur, India
Oct. 2013
Agile 101
7
Agile India Week 2013, Pune, India
Oct. 2013
Your Team Is Not Agile If…
8
Agile Leadership Day, Zurich Switzerland *
Nov. 2013
Observing and Enabling The Agile Mindset
9
Agile Kerala 2013, Trivandrum, India
Nov. 2013
Observing and Enabling The Agile Mindset
10
Agile Tour 2013, Bangkok, Thailand
Dec. 2013
Your Team Is Not Agile If…
Distributed Development Best Practices
11
Internal Conference of Rotary Infotech-A Division of Rotary International, Pune, India
Nov. 2013
Agile Is Not Fragile
12
India Agile Week 2014, Mumbai, India
June 2014
Do You Really Need An Agile Coach?
13
India Agile Week 2014, Pune, India
June 2014
One Planet, One Team
14
Regional Scrum Gathering India 2014, Hyderabad India
July 2014
Your Team Is Not Agile If…
15
Internal Conference in IT Division Of A UK Based Multinational Bank, Pune, India
July 2014
Observing and Enabling The Agile Mindset
Distributed Development Best Practices
* Only Non-European Speaker at the Conference
Skills
Agile Adoption and Transformation: Assessment, Training, Coaching, Distributed Working, Metrics
Domain Experience: Consumer Finance, Corporate Finance, Cash Management
Methodologies: Agile, Lean, Kanban, Waterfall
Business Tools: Bugzilla, Mingle, Jira, MS Office suite, MS Visio
Requirements Analysis: User Stories, Use Cases
Process Optimization: Business Process Modeling, Workflow Design
Leadership: Business Process Modeling, Workflow DesignClient Engagement, Stakeholder Management, Change Management
Education
Master of Business Administration, Clark University, USA. Majors: Marketing and Finance
Bachelor of Commerce (Hons.), Shivaji University, India. Major in Advanced Accounting and Auditing
