SUMMARY

• High performing Program/ Project management professional with 15 years + of extensive international leadership experience in agile software product development & services with a right mix of program management, technical & engineering skills, customer management, cross functional team management, & Partner management.
• Trustworthy, enterprising, self - motivated team player, relishing new technologies and challenges, with proven track record in managing successfully small to large multi-sites programs, 15+ software products, applications & multiple projects by improving performance, encouraging innovation, simulating trust & team collaboration, strategic sourcing, leveraging excellent written and verbal communication skills & never give up attitude.
• Cross functional team management .Agile and waterfall .Full IT project and product lifecycle
• Program KPIs setting/tracking .Requirements mgmt .Product mgmt/Backlog prioritization
• Program strategies/plans/ efficiencies .Reporting/meeting .Stakeholder/ Senior mgmt/ customer
• Continuous Process Improvements .Risk & Issue mgmt. .Release / Change management

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Confidential, San Jose, CA

Principal Program manager PDU Network analytics and management

Responsibilities:

• End to end Program management of new & existing network data analytics & management software products, comprising of multiple concurrent projects, across entire Ericsson product portfolio from access, RAN to core, Cloud/SDN/NFV, under tight deadlines, from incubation to release delivery to multiple Tier 1 customers, in an agile manner, managing multi-site cross functional teams, multiple stakeholders, multiple partners.
• Driving regular product releases schedules (yearly 2 main, 4 patch), ensuring co-ordination across cross-functional teams (product management, systems and technology, engineering, test, operations, support,, sales and marketing) and adapting to impacts rapidly.
• Being Hands-on, in setting, tracking & coordinating product lifecycle cross-functional milestones, through regular review meetings, dashboards across multiple sites.
• Ensuring creation & tracking of project scope, schedules, and dependencies as well as tracking project budgets, metrics, project cost accounting for product releases across the program.
• Actively encouraging recording of risks and facilitating risk mitigations, obstacles removal
• Responsible for providing regular management report on the progress/ issues/ escalations.
• Active participation in creating, maintaining and improving program product development process, procedures and templates including evangelizing usage across the teams
• Leading and driving program governance, reviewing multiple project proposals to executive audience and presenting the same through various product release gating process for making start or stop decisions for various teams using a data driven approach
• Mainly responsible for helping in definition and articulation of scope of program for Product development unit ensuring it ties up with overall vision of Ericsson Network leadership strategy
• Mentoring & leading 5 Program managers & teams on software development project lifecycle, estimation techniques & quality process based on best practices of agile methodologies for increasing value to customer & company and increase collaboration
• Responsible for communicating and articulating across multiple stakeholders and cross functional teams for aligning project scope & deliverables, by building a trusting and safe environment for constructive & creative problems solving of conflicts
• Successfully brought the completely off track complex NGN NMS cloud based product release program and delivered first GA release in record 9 months, through optimum chunking of features to fit releases, accurate team capacity calculations/ visualization, various process/people/ tool improvements, improved cross functional team communications, Improved risk/issue dependency process’s, artefacts review and approvals, managing stakeholder expectations using realistic and accurate data based reporting.
• Implemented a new online requirement management tracking tool & early estimation process with release breakdown vs estimates, to transform chaotic scenario across multiple sites, involving multiple stakeholders, improving estimation vs actuals by 50%
• Instrumental in driving a strategic key initiative to move the NG NMS product onto an Open stack based Cloud platform to be licensed as SaaS from prototype to product in record 6 months’ time, for Tier 1 operators.
• Designed, Implemented, conducted & tracked a new program governance for identifying, approving strategic initiatives in line with business goals for providing customer solutions, to encourage innovations to support emerging technologies by delivering technical reports, PoCs, Prototypes working agile with customers
• Improved velocity of existing legacy product releases by 50% and reduced cost by 40%, making them viable and profitable, by streamlining e2e process, proper feature prioritization, accurate resource tracking, ensuring adequate, improve automated tooling, improved product & customer documentation.
• Designed and delivered putting a systems improvement program for customer requests and issues in product design & architecture, which increased the customer satisfaction to a high figure of 94 %, reduced customer support requests and bugs by 30%, and enabled a consistent roadmap of 2 main releases/ year and 4 minor.
• Being a key member of the Program task force to successfully implement agile transformation program across multi sites, in record 6 months’ time, uniting disjointed, non-co-operative cross functional team.

Confidential

Program manager Senior

Responsibilities:

• End to end Program management from initiation, to successful closing of multiple projects for delivering multiple concurrent products & services (new and existing) for multiple Tier 1 operators, leading several Matrixed multi-site based agile cross functional teams of permanent, contractors and Partner teams, involving regular interactions & reporting with multiple levels including “C” customer executives and senior management.
• Responsible for creation of the e2e program plan across the cross functional groups and also monitoring and controlling progress against that agreed plan
• Actively encouraging recording of risks and facilitating risk mitigations
• Responsible for long term relationship building with senior management in customer and within Ericsson by communicating and interacting regularly on multiple projects, on the program status, risks and change control using dashboards, presentations and meetings to ensure unit objectives are met using excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Responsible for driving, coordinating product lifecycle cross-functional milestones, through regular review meetings, across multiple sites ensuring regular product releases schedules
• Selected, mentored and led 4 Project managers on software development project lifecycle, estimation techniques & quality process based on best practices of agile methodologies for increasing value to customer & company
• Responsible for driving to establish a framework for various agile development across cross-functional streams to build and refine successful software product deliveries.
• Direct responsibility for ensuring successful delivery of solutions delivery program (average yearly budget of 10 million UK sterling pounds), supporting 30+ Telecommunications products and support services for multiple Tier 1 operators across Europe like H3G, Confidential, Confidential, MBNL, BT, Inmarsat
• Successfully managed the program, making it profitable up to 40% margin, by ensuring a relevant requirements backlog update, managing optimally the resource utilizations and sourcing techniques, changing priorities according to demand-based decisions, effective partner engagement, accurate reporting and tracking, proper risk management, through innovation, actively encouraging team participation spread across multiple geographies
• Key driver in creating, maintaining and improving program product development process, procedures and templates driving usage across the teams, by evangelizing & by conducting retrospectives to standardize and optimize dis-functional ways of working.
• Selected, mentored and led 4 Project managers & 15 direct reports, 50+ partner team members on software development project lifecycle, estimation techniques & quality process based on best practices of agile methodologies for increasing value to customer & company

Confidential

Head of Design & Development

Responsibilities:

• Proposed and delivered a new in-house built RAN configuration automation tool, saving customer 500 K GBP in lieu of COTS products, dramatically improving time taken to configure network from 4 hours to 50 minutes.
• Proposed and delivered along with partner providers a new improved web based customer contact center map based service checker application, scaled to support 3000 concurrent agents (up from just 250), drastically cutting time taken by contact center agents to close a customer support call from 10 to 3 minutes.

Confidential

Program manager

Responsibilities:

• Being a key contributor along with Product manager in defining product roadmap & requirements, and also securing the required budget for the common capabilities by presenting business case advantages to the 3 BT divisions namely BT retail, global and wholesale
• Responsible for creation of the e2e program plan across the cross functional groups and also monitoring and controlling progress against that agreed plan including risks, issues identification and resolution.
• Successfully delivered the program within 2 years on time, budget and with required quality managing budget of 6 million UK sterling pounds by setting up the program from scratch, Leveraging multiple partner team strengths, through effective management of partner engagement by leading a team (100+) resources from multiple IT service partners spread across multiple sites, working as cross-functional collaborative agile teams, constant written and verbal communications.

Confidential

Project manager

Responsibilities:

• Delivered the first set of operational tools during launch of the world’s first 3G mobile network in a record time of 15 months from scratch, by selecting and mentoring team of permanent and contractors, by leveraging multiple partner teams capabilities, by initiating projects, getting approvals, tracking them on approved metrics, resolving conflicts and issues.
• Delivered a unified screen for NoC displaying correlated faults and performance, reducing debug times by 50%, saving company 100K GBP in lieu of costly COTs integrations.