Sanjay Ganesan , Watford, United Kingdom

What am I brilliant at :
I am very good at making every team member valued and managing a team - I measure my approval rating by how well I am respected and liked by my team members. This is directly related to the transparency with which I manage the team - being honest, taking all view points and discussing matters as a team. People compliment me on how well I protect them from other parts of the business when certain outcomes are not as was expected. I own up to any criticism or non-complimentary feedback and take ownership of it myself. However, when things have been going well and credit given, I mention and credit my team members for the success and compliment them in the appropriate forums, without whom I am just a figure-head. I also communicate well with clarity and with a listening mindset, which helps others appreciate the fact that each team member is being heard and valued.

What I love to do :
Setup a QA function where none exists, owning the QA function for the whole organisation and setting up clearly defined processes and appropriate roles with ownership and accountability for the same.

What people compliment me on :
Some of the compliments I have received in the past few roles are as follows, which I have copied below verbatim:
"After you started, we feel more relaxed and stress-free"
"We could actually ping you at any time and talk to you so easily and you were
helping us"
"You were one of the best managers to work with. I didn't find the client and vendor feeling, rather it was more like a team!"
"Thank you Sanjay! And thank you for supporting us and talking for us where ever possible! I have been in projects previously where our superiors or manager would commit more and ask us to work more than expected. For the first time in a long we never felt the pressure to work! We actually wanted to go an extra mile just for that !"
"we never felt like .you are a client and we are from different organisation... Whenever we get something we always look for you http://*******.** are really gonna miss you Sanjay...i'm sure we will never get a test manager like you"

Bio
I have over 25 years of IT industry experience and have been witness to the technology transition and advancement. I started as an Analyst-Programmer in C and Cobol and moved into Maintenance and Support roles before I considered myself a good candidate for Testing. This was just after the Millennium bug issue in late 1999 and early 2000, after which Testing started getting the focus it deserved as a stand-alone activity in the evolution of any Software product.
My experience of having worked for several clients spread across several various location in the UK has also helped me understand the right approach to worked alongside colleagues from different cultural backgrounds as well.
My strengths are team leading, people management, analytical skills to seek solutions when things don't work out as planned and expected and my communication skills.
My most recent experience was to analyse the gaps in the Project/Product deliverables with Quality as the focus. I joined Chubb in a newly created role to oversee all Quality aspects in the Ignite programme and take measures to improve product quality. As part of this I created a QA Governance policy based on existing process maturity after multiple discussions with team members in different role - BA, Product Owner, Scrum Master and the Business users. This was reviewed, approved and signed-off. Following this I worked on drafting a high-level Test Strategy to cover all Projects in Ignite across Digital. This was also reviewed, agreed and approved after multiple discussions following my walk-through sessions for all teams. Then I started working on the small steps required to be put in place for teams to follow to ensure Quality is improved and pre-defied Quality gates criteria were met. This was made mandatory to exit on phase of testing to transition to the next phase. I also re-designed the Project templates in Jira to standardise it across all new Projects. Prior to this, there were 7 different project templates with no oversight of what any team was doing. I also reviewed revised the Jira wok-flow to ensure standardisation - from over 9 different transition states to jut 5 transition states. Attaching test evidence was made mandatory. This was also useful for Audit purposes. I also took ownership of Test Automation for Regression test in 3 phases. When all three phase were completed over a period of 9 months, we have test coverage of 60% of Regression test execution covered, saving 4 days of a 10 day Regression test cycle. These tests were later customised to be executed on the SIT environments as well to help support the Development teams.
One of my more critical findings was that the SoW for each Project had very less accountability and ownership in place. There were more items marked as "Out of Scope" than "In scope". I reviewed this and made master copies and circulated to all Project leads to ensure there is more value gained from our vendor partners.
There were a few instances wherein meeting were being used as mud-slinging opportunities, where I interrupted these sessions and requested the sessions be held in a consensual manner respecting each other. This earned me the respect of the Vendor partners so much that when there were dependencies that impacted their wrk, I would be their first point of contact to help with these.
This was the most recent of Projects.
Likewise I have had similar experience during my role with Premier Farnell which was when managing a different organisation, work culture and teams.
In both these organisations, I enjoyed my role and responsibility I took on.
And at first even though others were not very open and accommodating, over a period of time I gained their trust and respect, so much so that I was the single point of contact for all things related to testing and quality of code.
I must add that all credit goes to the wonderful team members I had who were committed and went above what was expected when situations arose wherein extra time an effort was needed to meet testing targets and Release timelines.