Presentation: Preventive Risk Management | Building resilience in programs beyond being proactive using mechanisms
Abstract: Effective risk management is a critical aspect in ensuring program success. When we think of risk management, we often refer to proactive risk management. It means that you as the program owner identify risks before they happen and define plans to avoid or mitigate the risks. However, all of these are done in the context of program execution or planning right before execution. One of the pitfalls with this approach is an impact at broader level for an organization or team which often executes more than one program in a year. Even though this is proactive risk identification/mitigation possibly leading to one program success, more often than not, it can be detrimental to other programs in pipeline and org/team’s overall goals. Preventive risk management using mechanisms aims to solve this problem much ahead in the game making the program more resilient.
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Biography: Lakshmi Sowjanya is a Senior Technical Program Manager in Amazon. With over 5 years of tenure in Amazon, she has ~7 years of program management experience in both start-up and big organizations. Her program management experience spans various domains and functional areas like – launching an OTT platform for Sun TV network, one of the Asia’s biggest TV networks with over 10M downloads and over 5M subscriptions worldwide; programs impacting the fulfillment network of Amazon across India, North America and Europe geographies; and compliance programs driving the Tax and legislative requirements for Amazon platform, all catering to millions of transactions done on Amazon platform across geographies on a daily basis.
Lakshmi has a rich experience driving large scale cross-functional programs and using Machine Learning to solve challenging problems and with high scale in the order of handling billions of products sold on Amazon.
Outside of work, Lakshmi is an avid writer on LinkedIn posting primarily about program management, leadership and reviewing books primarily on leadership. She is an active mentor for tens of program managers within Amazon and an interview coach outside of Amazon.
Lakshmi graduated from one of the most premier engineering institutes of India, the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras with a specialization in Electrical and Electronics. She also holds a post graduate degree in management from Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, India with a specialization in Strategy, Leadership and IT Management.
On personal front, Lakshmi has a 10-year-old daughter and they enjoy challenging each other on who can solve Sudoku the fastest and who can click and pose for photographs the best (daughter winning each time on both of these).
