Maven Wave’s Uma Vandegrift Selected As One of Crain’s Chicago Business’ 2020 Rising Stars in Tech

Maven Wave, an Atos company, announces that Uma Vandegrift has been selected as one of Crain’s Chicago Business’ 2020 Rising Stars in Tech, which celebrates 25 up-and-comers who are advancing the Chicago technology ecosystem. After earning a fast promotion to Principal at age 29, Vandegrift founded and now leads Maven Wave’s Technology Delivery Transformation practice. She also developed and led an internal training program to teach agile and project management skills to Maven Wave’s consultants. A Georgia Institute of Technology graduate, Vandegrift is one of the youngest leaders at Maven Wave.

In addition to her client and training responsibilities, Vandegrift is passionate about women in technology. She has helped to bring women together through various events, including organizing a virtual event for women executive leaders in the financial services industry. Vandegrift is also passionate about mentoring young women, with five high-performing junior employees as current mentees.

“Maven Wave’s Management Consulting practice would not be what it is today without Uma’s considerable contributions,” said Nick Polachek, Management Consulting Practice Lead at Maven Wave. “The core of Uma’s contributions to our firm and the tech community at large is her distinctive ability to mobilize groups of people toward the betterment of a unified purpose. In the relatively short time she’s been at Maven Wave, she has advanced our standard agile training curriculum, helped build our healthcare and life sciences consulting expertise, helped form our Management Consulting practice, and led the charge on founding and leading the Technology Delivery Transformation practice. Uma is also one of the most influential mentors within Maven Wave, and she’s active in the broader Chicago tech ecosystem, working with startups and attending community networking events. Uma is one of the most capable and ambitious professionals that I have worked with in my consulting career.”

In one example of Vandegrift’s success, she was able to apply her approach to transformation to a large pharmaceutical company, leading one of the most successful and complex technology transformations in the industry. She created a long-term roadmap for the client to follow and her work allowed her client to achieve a time savings of around 25% per project.

“I’m humbled and honored to receive this recognition from Crain’s Chicago Business – a critical publication in the local community,” Uma Vandegrift said. “I’m deeply committed to the advancement of Chicago’s tech scene, and particularly to helping women within that ecosystem. At Maven Wave, we’re honored to be serving as trusted guides through the increasingly tumultuous business landscape, helping clients in all industries solve complex technical problems through cloud-based solutions.” 

The Maven Wave team, including Vandegrift, have helped Fortune 500 enterprises navigate the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, rapidly deploying solutions around telehealth, remote work, data visualization, and more. Maven Wave was acquired by Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, in December 2019 and is helping enterprises shape a cloud-forward future with Atos OneCloud.