Prakash Bettadapur, Senior Management Consultant and Executive Advisor, AgiLeanIT
Mr. Bettadapur has over 35 years of experience in engineering leadership, product development, organizational change leadership, and management consulting in various technology sectors including Networking, Network Management, Embedded Systems, IT, Enterprise Software Solutions, Cloud Application Development, Analytics, Big Data and Machine Learning. He has been in senior leadership roles managing several large teams of over a hundred people in various locations in USA, Canada, India, and Russia. He has always been an unrelenting champion of software engineering excellence, creating and promoting best practices in his own and client organizations. As an early adopter of Lean and Agile, and as an Evangelist, he evolved the key disciplines and practices across the software development lifecycle and was responsible for Agile transformations in various medium and large divisions/business units, and across very large companies such as Cisco Systems.
Mr. Bettadapur was one of the earliest advocates of leveraging the potential advantages of outsourcing software product engineering. As a manager of engineering teams in the early 90s, he worked with top leadership to define processes to ensure successful offshore software development in India and Russia. His work in Bell-Northern Research, Nortel Networks, Cadence Design Systems and in Cisco Systems enabled his employer and clients to achieve leadership excellence in global software engineering. Over the years, he successfully quantified the benefits of good software engineering practices through success stories and metrics. As a senior advisor and accomplished mentor, he has embraced Agile-Lean startup principles and has mentored and led the product engineering teams in several startups in the Silicon Valley and in Bangalore, India during the recent years.
Representative engagements include:
- Enterprise Transformation Through Lean Agile Principles and SAFe® Program Implementation – As a Lean and Agile evangelist and senior engineering leader, convinced the top leadership of a large software business to embrace Agile transformation. Led the entire effort over a period of two and a half years to transform a 2000+ person organization with over 120 large programs to completely transform its culture and adopt proven Lean and Agile practices.
- Stakeholder Management and Product Managers – Established strategy for Product Managers to work with their stakeholders on how agile management would be beneficial for all and created appropriate metrics to prove the results. Executed the plan with the business unit teams, working through the agile adoption period for a successful overall outcome.
- Mentoring, Coaching, Training and creating Communities of Practice – As the leader of Agile Transformation effort, worked to change the culture of every organization. Initially by training the teams in principles and practice, by bringing in additional trainers and coaches, and establishing the communities where everyone could share practices and thrive. Also trained executives and the managers to foster the right culture across the organization.
- Engineering Leadership – Built a large-scale Cisco IOS Network Operating System extending Agile principles to embedded and hardware development. Transformed a troubled cloud-hosted network management program in two years as a model program demonstrating the benefits of agile principles. The transformation radically improved the product quality, improved business 300% and overall team productivity by 10 times. Managed and led over 15 large multi-year programs which were all engineering success.
- Customizing Scaled Agile Transformation – Most enterprises, divisions and business units had their own preference for scaling agile implementations. While SAFe provided a usable framework, many groups had reservations for fully adopting them. Other Frameworks such as LeSS provided less guidance for multi-sprint planning and were considered inadequate. Created a better customizable framework incorporating the best of SAFe at the program level guidance, while creating a more cohesive teaming and better adopting Scrum/Agile principles overall. This framework was broadly adopted across Cisco
- Creating Cisco–wide Agile Transformation Playbook – Created a playbook for transforming other divisions/business units across Cisco based on learnings from my initial transformation
- Leading Customer Experience Journey Mapping – Led teams on the Customer Experience Journey as part of creating a new product category for Cisco. Selected different personas for the products/capabilities, chose potential customers across the world, met several (30+) customers, and mapped their experiences to the entire lifecycle to help create the new experiences. Successfully completed program in record time leading to Cisco acquisition of AppDynamics
Certifications
Mr. Bettadapur is a Certified SPC (SAFe® Program Consultant) and Enterprise Agile Coach, Certified Scrum Master (CSM), Certified Product Owner (CSPO) and Certified Scrum Professional (CSP). He has Business and Engineering undergraduate degrees from India, and Masters in Computer the Science from University of Alberta, Canada. He has completed the highly sought-after Business Executive Education Programs from Stanford University Graduate School of Business (LEAD) and School of Engineering (SIE), and has been applying the latest best practices in entrepreneurship to mentor companies in Strategy, Marketing, Business Models and Lean Startup.
Mr. Bettadapur has a number of patents registered with the US Patents and Trademark Office, including:
- 7,126,941 (130348), 7,821,965 (952526): Managing packet voice networks
- 7,293,080 (238953), 7,873,908 (293251): Network Management – Discovery, User Interface related
- 7,953,886 (482932), 7,908,594 (493913): External Programmatic Interface for IOS CLI Compliant Routers
- 7,779,398 (496103), 7,784,036 (496577), 7,698,694 (496638): IOS CLI Parser related patents