New team mate at MaidSafe, Chennai: Vinitha

Hello! everyone this is Vinitha Vasanthkumar and I have joined the Chennai MaidSafe office as an Assistant Manager. I am from Chennai, India and have spent most part of my childhood in the middle east, Oman. I speak English and 4 native Indian language Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Tulu and have elementary level proficiency in French and Arabic.
Being exposed to diverse cultures and communities early on makes me an inclusive and adaptive person. I trust that people and places bring out the best in me. So, I began working on the art of driving team collaboration and facilitation. What keeps me going is bringing positive transformations to people and organizations that I connect with. An emphatic spirit that believes in the power of humanizing business to solve problems better.
On a personal note- I am naturally inclined towards spirituality and have been practicing yoga and meditation for over a year now.
I hold 5+ years of professional experience, 4 in Business Analysis-Digital Transformation and 1 in Agile Project Management.
Taking you through my journey, right from the graduation days until now:
I did my under graduation in BSC. Information Systems Management from SRM University, Chennai.
The course helped lay a foundation in concepts of system engineering and management that culminated in my 1st job with cognizant as a Programmer Trainee.
I worked on support and enhancements for an HR Payroll App that dealt with the payment processing for Cognizant. I dabbled with coding using C# and.ASP Dot net technologies, interacted with business owners and project stakeholders as a part of requirements discussion and project status update meetings. It all came to me then that I had a natural flair in understanding the need of the business, to come up with solutions through collaboration with a wide array of people. To further direct my career, I did my MBA in affiliation with Bharathiar University — specializing in marketing and Information Systems Management.
As luck may have it, I landed a job with a start-up called Enterprise Touch in Chennai as a Business analyst for mobility and web app projects for government organizations in Qatar.
The fast-paced environment of a start-up is such that before I could even realize, I was handling requirements for multiple accounts — ensuring that the design, development, testing activities were aligned with the requirements also facilitated UAT activities with the customer. I have designed processes and documentation practices based on project and customer requirements. Gained exposure and understanding of technologies/platforms like Kony, OutSystem, and ORACLE APPS. My work involved being constantly engaged with clients to forge better relationships, manage expectations, which resulted in clients signing us on for more projects.
Mid of last year, when the organization had to respond to the order of the day with adaptive planning methodologies. The head of delivery decided to set up an Agile practice and I was identified as one of the agile champions endowed with the responsibility to drive adoption of scrum within project teams and clients. I took up a CSM Workshop and certification with scrum alliance to support this initiative. Simultaneously, worked on a mobility project for a telecom company as a project manager/scrum master. I performed the functions of planning and executing within a time-box and budget, managing resources, highlighting project risks and dependencies to a customer, facilitating project meetings and managing releases.
Most recently associated with L&T Infotech managing the BA & project coordination activities for the OTIS Mobility account before MaidSafe happened.
I stumbled upon MaidSafe through an HR Consultant who asked me to try out for an opening with the Chennai office. Over the next few days, I started reading up about MaidSafe. The sheer novelty of an autonomous, distributed and democratic internet with the highest levels of security, protection of privacy struck a chord with me. I see immense potential for learning with this venture.
In the coming days, I aspire to contribute to MaidSafe with adaptive project management, championing continuous improvement through process initiatives, driving collaboration between teams & communities. I am delighted and thankful for this opportunity.