My Professional Profile v.02-09

Objective
Engage in a challenging, value adding role for executing, managing and improving processes in training, quality, development of projects;

Professional Summary
• Over 14 years experience in IT in various roles and responsibilities;
• Customer handling skills; People handling skills across cultures and diverse backgrounds;
• Focus on quality aspects of project delivery and implementing them with needed tailoring;
• Diverse technology implementation experience in IT industry for application development and infrastructure configuration and deployment activities;

Roles and responsibilities

Engagement area Responsibilities
Project and Delivery Engagements • Offshore Service delivery for various application developments;
• Cost and budget management for new engagement proposals; interfacing with bidding and sales teams for new engagement proposals for fixed price and time & material proposals;
• Providing and coordinating administrative guidance for project management functions for associated projects;
• Interfacing with appropriate stakeholders (onsite delivery leads, peer project leads, program and group heads, support, infrastructure, testing teams)
• Delivery quality monitoring, contributing to platform dashboard, delivery metrics reporting and management, guided by CMMI and Agile methodology implementation;
• Conducting quality audits for projects, identifying their strengths, weaknesses, compliance to quality processes and improvements
• Implementing, improving and institutionalizing global project and processes framework - CMMI and Agile methodologies;
• Initiated and maintaining project level knowledge management processes;
• Decision analysis & resolution, issues and risks identification and mitigation;
• Inter-group communication and coordination management and improvements;
• Setting quality improvement measures and delivery and improvement milestones;
• Executing project plans towards customer contractual commitments to quality, cost and schedule for the organizational engagements;
Team engagements • Candidate selection, mentoring and skills assessment, training & career development;
• Annual appraisals of team members;
• foster open communication, informal interactions amongst members; encourage showcasing of individual talents of team members;
• with individual interactions, identify potential areas of concern and develop trust, responsibility and leadership talents in teams;
• Resource scheduling and management across multiple projects and multiple locations;
• Managing resource profiles and knowledge transfer sessions across resources;
Organizational engagement • Active part of CSR groups of the organization;
• Conduct project technical trainings
• Promote the culture/practice of information transparency and flow;
• Improving project decision making process;
• Contribute to the organizational KM initiatives at project level;
Customer engagement • Customer site (Japan, Hong Kong, US, Middle East) role:
• Onsite systems analyst – development, deployment of projects on test, staging & live systems, coordinating on call support;
• Client coordination, managing requirement definition, off-shoring requirements and coordinating deliveries from offshore;
• Onsite project management and execution role
• Offshore role
• Interface with customers via onsite leads
• Understand customer business direction, changing needs, and growth path; identify potential areas of business growth;
• Manage customer expectations via defect free deliveries; strengthen customer confidence via regular review calls, dashboard presentations;
Technology engagement • Understand project technologies and platform as required for the role; guide technical development soliciting active participation of organizational CoEs and other support groups;

Brief Occupation Summary
• Mahindra group: since May 2006 engaged in project and delivery management functions;
• Tata Infotech Ltd. Mumbai: Sept 1996 – April 2006 engaged as Programmer/Analyst role in system integration projects, Project Management/Onsite-offshore coordination for geographically diverse clients;
• Sprint RPG India Ltd. Mumbai: Sep 1994 – Dec 1995 engaged in Application Consulting of datacom networking and infrastructure;
• Global Telesystems Ltd. (GTL), Mumbai: Oct 1993 – Aug 1994 engaged in Wireless systems study/installation for radio frequency equipment for private clients;

Technical knowledge
Well versed in Project management tools of MS Project (for scheduling), Primavera; CM tools of MS VSS; Application development environment of MS Visual Studio, Borland JBuilder; Middleware products like BEA Tuxedo, BEA Weblogic server; experience in Programming languages C, VC++, UNIX shell scripts on UNIX and Windows platform with Databases like Oracle9i, SQL Server; and on administration tool like IBM Tivoli; Worked on telecom tools like Nortel Periphonics IVR Toolkit, Dialogic API based FONEPost application (Tata Infotech Ltd.) and exposure to Geneva Billing platform;

Career Overview
Worked in challenging environments in the communication and software industries in various roles.
From the beginning of my career, learnt and built my experience through practical hands on issue resolution.
Met different challenges in the technical roles in the wireless projects implementation and later in datacom consulting and software development.
As a application delivery project manager, implemented project management methodologies tailored as needed for project requirements. Effective resource scheduling and schedule fast tracking and crashing as per need, have been the approaches in project delivery role.
With respect to technical abilities for a project manager, with my technical and logical approach, have been able to lead projects based on different technologies successfully.
Key delivery role highlights:
- Timely delivery of a very challenging bank credit card portal redesign and transition from Java to COM oriented VC++ model with a severe experienced resource crunch and schedule pressures. Applied project fast tracking and work breakdown to implement key services of the portal in the first phase and shipped onsite, with supporting modules being delivered from offshore utilizing less skilled resources;
- Effective team integration and project monitoring for a financial database consolidation project managing with a hardware delivery delay, operating in agile mode with deliveries planned every 15 days; with work package prioritization, and alternate server space utilization, was able to have key software components ready to be tested and deployed on new hardware when available;
- Faced critical team issues while delivering a high visibility project involving end customer bill generation delays; with severe quality resource crunch, scheduled the available resources with cross project team members to effectively resolve the issue and put a timely fix in place;
- Improved metrics reporting of project ensuring effective data point collection for reporting on correct project performance; conducted team trainings for clarity on correct ways of metrics data reporting;
- Managing communication channels and regular reporting between stakeholders and team members has been key role in most project delivery implementations;
- Met key challenges in coordinating across multiple vendors’ project teams for release management and work package deployment over test and live systems by ensuring regular calls with key leads across vendor teams and daily dashboard reporting;
- Implementing agile methodology over standard delivery model was executed over a period of 1 quarter deliveries, ahead of the planned schedule of 2 quarter;
- Furthering the quality delivery agenda and implementing key quality processes and any possible improvements for the projects I have managed remain my key contribution to project delivery cycle;
- Ensuring team utilization in the times of extreme budget reductions is a very key challenge and I have been able to deliver on this account fairly well though within constraints of time and to some extent quality;
My experience is a mix of technical understanding and business translation of technology along with people understanding skills, which in today’s diversely distributed project teams is a must; my focus is towards improving RoI of any project by balancing key project constraints while maintaining quality, achievable within certain managed boundaries and suitable buy-in from the stakeholders;

Personal
Education & Training:
• Bachelors in Engineering [Electronics and Telecom];
• Institute: Shri Govindram Seksaria Institute of Technology and Science, Indore, M.P.
• University: D.A.V.V.
• PMP preparatory contact session Tech Mahindra;
• PRinCE2 Foundation Level certified;
• Organization training in different aspects of management and quality processes;
• Emotional Intelligence for IT PM workshop from IIT Bombay, Apr ‘08;
• NCST software training course Mar '96 - Aug '96;
Key Interests:
• Amateur Radio;
• Photography;
• Language and communication;
• Training & Education;
• Blogging