Aanu Gopald

Aanu is strongly focused on building a culture with agile at the heart of it. Aanu stands out with her ability to dive in, diagnose, and works with the team to put together an action plan to strengthen unhealthy teams and situations. She is also passionate about teaching & coaching - sharing her wisdom and experiences to raise up other scrum masters, engineers, and product partners around her.

Aanu is a great asset to the Small Business Lending Teams. Because of her leadership, communication, and scrum project management practices, our teams are successful. She does a wonderful job of keeping us "Agile" and becoming top performing self-organized agile teams. Aanu is always steering us in the right direction towards success and Business acceptance. She helps bridge the gap between IT and Business, especially when we have difference of opinions (definitions). Also, Aanu has played a major role to improve the delivery metrics by guiding us in preparing process improvement plans resulting in delivering the best quality work to Business. She promotes open communication both formally and informally between team members, Product Owners, and external groups resulting in several successful sprints. For instance, Aanu has introduced several practices and tools in our retrospective meetings to encourage participation and open communication. Therefore, by having a variety of options to explore the sprint cycle, our team has addressed and improved several challenges faced by the team. As a final point, Aanu is very supportive and provides sound advice to ensure that our teams are successful. Most importantly, Aanu has a great rapport with our teams and we respect each other which makes it easy to work together to build a quality product. In addition, she also encourages team members to take Agile Certification Courses offered by Capital One University. I really appreciate her dedication and ability to motivate our product line to excel. Your words of encouragement and recognition of efforts is well appreciated.

Aanu has been an amazing partner for the Small Business Salesforce Program this year. We faced numerous challenges as our program transitioned to agile, and Aanu was a great asset for every member of the program team. She provided training and coaching for structuring our ceremonies, teams and roles. As we iterated and found things that didn't work, Aanu provided feedback and worked with us to find alternative solutions. She listened to our concerns and had endless encouragement when we were frustrated. An example of Aanu's partnership is when she came to McLean Virginia to help with our program reset. She led team building exercises, helped define expectations of roles, and provided agile training for our team. She was willing to take time away from her teams to help ours, and that spoke volumes to everyone involved. I feel so fortunate to know Aanu. She's a huge advocate for technology and business working together, and we are a stronger organization because of her.

Aanu has been the beacon of Agile sense to the entire Small Business engineering community. She is strong guide to her teams in the ways of Scrum and is always willing to assist other teams as they strengthen their Agile awareness under her tutelage. She was a great asset to my program and a strong change agent as the program moved to BAU. Her commitment the Agile is extraordinary, and she is always looking for new ways to assist Agile teams in understanding the context of Scrum, and guiding them toward being truly self-managing. In my experience, Aanu is �coachable,� always willing to listen to concerns or considerations about team dynamics or her performance, and always takes appropriate action. Overall, she is a joy to work with, and I would be thrilled to work with Aanu again, should the opportunity arise.

Aanu is an excellent coach, mentor, trainer to my teams and the organization. She has a very vast knowledge of Agile mindset, principles, and values. She joined us at the nick of time and realized the teams lack the understanding of Agile mindset and ways of working. In her first week, she identified Anti-Agile patterns within the teams and came up with recommendations that can help the teams to embrace the Agile mindset, principles, and values and improve ways of working. She innates understanding of collaboration and teamwork bring the agile values and principles to life for the teams she coaches and leaders she works with. In addition to mentorship, Aanu taught several classes relating to full Scrum adoption, including coaching classes. Additionally, Aanu identified topics relevant to specific teams and effectively facilitated "training sessions and Scrum Masters community of Practice" to further the teams and Scrum Masters understanding of these topics. She brings an infectious enthusiasm to her day to day activities and understands at a fundamental level how to coach individuals and teams as they transform the way they work. Aanu taught us the value of servant leadership and helped us to adopt it, coached us in ways to build effective relationships with our business stakeholders, and showed us the value of continuous learning, innovation, and constructive conflicts. She continually challenges us to become more mature and does a wonderful job of keeping us Agile & successful. She is always steering us in the right direction towards success and Business acceptance. Aanu guides us to constantly improve our processes, team dynamics, and practices that work best for the teams. She has prepared process improvement plan to deliver best quality work to Business. She is very helpful and has played a major role in helping improve the commitment/productivity /delivery metrics. She always brightens a room with her infectious sunny disposition. She is able to convert negative comments into an opportunity for improvement by validating. In short, Aanu is an exceptional agilist and an invaluable asset.

I have known Aanu for more than 2 years now as part of being active in the agile community in the DFW area. Aanu strives for excellence in anything she is involved in. Her helping and kind nature bring the best in people around her. She is a budding star in the agile community. I look forward to seeing Aanu achieving her dream, vision, and purpose of bringing agile to her home country and her home continent.

Aanu, you have been the most attentive Scrum Coach I have worked with. You have an expert knowledge of the agile principles and hold us accountable to them. You are tenacious in removing impediments that are blocking our continued progress. I have enjoyed your techniques in helping us to continue to improve as a team. The new techniques make things interesting and make us think differently about things. You demonstrate loyalty on a regular basis. You are able to bring issues to the surface without calling out anyone in particular and we all appreciate you for that. I have enjoyed working with you and look forward to our continued improvement.

Aanu you are the best Agile Coach I have worked with. The Credit Path teams are matured agile teams today, all credit goes to you for making several agile process improvements. The agile ceremonies were long and ineffective before she started with us. A great team player, balances between tech and business teams, creating a friendly environment where every associate can flourish. Being a scrum master Manager, she has several other responsibilities but is always on top of things.

Aanu is a great team player and agile evangelist. I have really enjoyed working with her as part of the NorthStar Agility team and getting to know her on a personal level. She is a leader and is able to command respect from a room. She has that leadership presence and yet embodies all of the agile values and principles as she coaches her team and the program. She displays confidence and pushes on the status quo when she speaks, she knows what she is talking about. I was able to witness how her teams respond to Aanu in an informal setting and I can tell they hold her with very high regard.