ATUL ARORA

Contact No.: 646-***-**** ~ E-Mail: ad4vac@r.postjobfree.com

Technical Project / Program Manager

(A-CSM® & Prince2 Certified)

Project Management Program Management Portfolio Management SUMMARY

Seasoned IT Professional with Masters in Applied Information Technology with over 18 years of experience in varied system implementations, business process analysis, change management and application development. An effective leader, transforming teams to meet challenges of ever-changing business landscape. Project Manager (graduated from being a Software Engineer/Developer) who has implemented large-scale cross organization systems with a demonstrated history of expertise in Agile and Waterfall project lifecycle methodologies. An excellent communicator who leverages technical, business, and financial knowledge to communicate effectively with senior executives and cross functional senior stakeholders. Excel in liaising between business, development, and quality assurance areas to achieve quality project completions. Excellent in working within geographically separated virtual teams. SKILL SET

Expertise

• PMO

• Budget Management

• Project/Program

Management

(Waterfall & Agile)

• Stakeholder Management

• Risk and Issue Management

• People Management

• Business Analysis

• Business & IT Process Re-

Engineering

Domain Knowledge

Retail – Finance, Warehouse Management, ERP and Logistics Quick Service restaurants (QSR) – Digital platform (mobile & web), Front end and domain services. Banking - Risk and Regulatory, Foreign Exchange, Money Market and Fixed Income PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Photon Infotech, Atlanta GA : Program Manager July’2023 – till now Provide hands-on Program Management over Next Generation Mobile and Web Application development. The work span across Creative Design, Java based domain services and react native based front end. I work as the project delivery lead for a reputed client in QSR domain.

Responsibilities

- Provide direct hands-on program management. Maintain control over project budgets, resource allocation and utilization, scheduling, documentation, and reporting.

- Key stakeholder in making organization level technology decisions for software development and business intelligence / reporting.

- Works closely with enterprise technology architect to formulate enterprise level system flows mapped to business processes.

- Work within the organization culture to maintain and adhere to project management methodologies.

- Work with business leads/partners to elicit and manage business requirements.

- Create and effective bridge between technical and business teams enabling them to work together and in the same direction.

The Children’s Place, NJ : Program Manager Director May’2018 – July’2023 Provide hands-on project management over enterprise IT projects in SAP, Warehouse Management Systems (WMS), Pricing, ECOM and Infrastructure departments. Lead cross-functional teams to deliver high-value projects on time, within scope, and within budget. Work with IT stakeholders to prepare strategic technology road map and leverage both

“hard skills” of managing project budgets, resources, schedules, and documentation, as well as “soft skills” of people management and verbal/written communications. Participate in maintaining and enhancing standard project lifecycle processes and enable IT teams to execute projects according to standardized methodologies. Actively collaborate in creating and maintaining an effective bridge between Development, QA and Business teams to manage projects and programs.

Key Initiatives – Warehouse Management Upgrade, Coupon Promo Pricing (SAP PMR), Kyriba (Treasury Management), CoStar (Lease Management System), Amazon Direct Fulfillment, SAP Enhancements Management, enabling Apple Pay, infrastructure upgrades and change catalyst for IT teams to adopt JIRA as an Agile framework tool. Responsibilities

- Provide direct hands-on project management (Agile and waterfall model) for key cross-functional enterprise projects. Maintain control over project budgets, resource allocation and utilization, scheduling, documentation, and reporting.

- Understand company’s global/regional strategic and tactical business plans, strategies, objectives, and priorities as they link to the IT organization’s priorities and objectives.

- Key stakeholder in making organization level technology decisions for software development and business intelligence / reporting.

- Works closely with enterprise technology architect to formulate enterprise level system flows mapped to business processes.

- Work within the organization culture to maintain and adhere to project management methodologies.

- Work with business leads/partners to elicit and manage business requirements.

- Create and effective bridge between technical and business teams enabling them to work together and in the same direction.

Sunera Technologies (Client: Deckers Outdoor Corporation, CA): IT Project Manager June’2017 – May’2018 Driving and managing global Retail and Finance projects. Accountable to carry a project from its discovery to production implementation. Worked with project team comprising Functional and Technical leads, ERP and BI Developers, QA and support staff.

Key Initiatives

Implement an enhanced cash application automating customer receipt accounting and a web portal allowing a wholesale customer to view their account and make payments via the portal. Introducing Ship from Store capabilities across all regions by implementing flattening inventory view for Omni channels.

Responsibilities

- Business case validation, vendor selections and project onboarding.

- Preparing and managing Agile Sprint plans (where applicable) & overall project schedule.

- Driving requirements & solutions meetings between technical SME’s and business owners.

- Facilitate discussion between cross functional & technical teams against current and proposed future state system state.

- Responsible for daily, weekly and monthly stakeholder management and communications.

- Responsible for financial (operational & capital costs) forecasting, cash flow estimates, overhead cost reporting and tracking /reporting identified KPI’s for middle and senior level management.

- Creating, communicating and managing risk management plans.

- Preparing an on-demand reporting dashboard for senior management assisting in executive decision making. Wipro Ltd: Project Leader Nov’2010 – June’2017

Worked with multiple clients to provide leadership and effective project / program management to successfully drive initiatives to their logical conclusion. Foster strong relationships with and between functional and technical stakeholders driving projects to success. Provide succinct project/program insights to senior stakeholders/business sponsors enabling them to make required project decisions.

PM Responsibilities (across all clients / projects)

- Responsible for daily, weekly and monthly stakeholder management and communications.

- Responsible for financial (Opex & Capex) forecasting, cash flow estimates, overhead cost reporting and tracking

/reporting identified KPI’s for middle and senior level management.

- Creating, communicating and managing risk management plans.

- Preparing on demand reporting dashboard for senior management assisting in executive decision making.

- Coordinate and facilitate inter project interactions.

- Provide direction and guidance to team members enabling them to execute projects per the PMO standards. Key Projects:

Wipro Ltd, NJ (Client: Kellogg’s, MI): Technical Program Manager Apr’17 – Jun’17 Worked as Technical Program Manager – managing and providing governance for multiple analytics projects. Responsible for all the Big Data based project deliveries under the program. Bridged gap between the business priorities and technical teams by laying down a project portfolio implementation strategy and simplifying project intake process. Wipro Ltd, NJ (Client: TD Bank, NJ): Senior Technical Project Manager Apr'16 – Mar’17 Worked as a Project Manager as part of a large program to deliver centrally located data warehouse solution that will be the backbone of Fed mandated Risk and Regulatory reporting. Wipro Ltd, NJ (Client: Coach Inc, NYC): Project Manager Feb’15 – Mar’16 Worked as Project Manager/Service Delivery Manager managing a team of 20+ members providing production support for SAP modules and IBM Netezza based Data warehouse. Managed Wipro’s team of SAP functional consultants, Informatica, Neteeza Developers, Micro Strategy Report Developers and L1 production support team. Introduced and implemented host of initiatives to reduce the IT support cost. Notably, enforced standard operating procedure documentation and then using it to cross train functional & technical support team members. It allowed to free up the unused team capacity and reduce the head count leading to reduce operating expense. Responsibilities

- Responsible to deliver quality service to manage the 24x7 production support operations as per ITIL framework

- Release management

- Implemented Lean Tenets to reduce defects slippage and ensure quality.

- Enhanced the PMO process by implementing standardized project management processes and promote standard project documentation templates.

Wipro Ltd, India (Client: Citibank NA, Belfast, UK): Project Leader Nov’10 – Dec’14 Citibank FX & MM Back office automated business operation flow. Responsibilities

- Technical Project Manager for Global team cross vendor onshore-offshore team. Project activities span from application development to application migration to a newer platform which deals with back-office settlement process (confirmations, payments and accounting) flows.

- Managed multiple application development projects and upgrades to move from legacy internal built software to newer technology

- Designing and implementing business process mapped IT batches.

- Automating legacy to new system parallel test automation in Core Java. Q3 Technologies, Gurgaon, India: Development Manager Dec’09 - Jul’10 Worked as a software development project manager from end-to-end perspective. Managed a team of 14+ developers covering mix of varied technologies like Mobile Java Platform, J2EE, Core Java, .NET and PHP Lamp stack. Responsibilities:

- Responsible for daily, weekly and monthly stakeholder management and communications.

- Responsible for financial (Opex & Capex) forecasting, cash flow estimates, overhead cost reporting and tracking

/reporting identified KPI’s for middle and senior level management.

- Creating, communicating and managing risk management plans.

- Preparing on demand reporting dashboard for senior management assisting in executive decision making.

- Coordinate and facilitate inter project interactions.

- Provide direction and guidance to team members enabling them to execute projects per the PMO standards. Collect quality data from reviews and tests.

- Ensure adherence to CMM Level 3 quality processes.

- Interacting with technical writers to document, verify and validate product features and functionality

- Pre-sales estimates and quotes.

Other professional experience

RBS India Development Centre: Software Designer May'07 - Sep'09 Key Projects:

High Performing Gateway Adaptors. Coded and maintained software gateway adaptors responsible to connect with multiple virtual markets to bring in the FX and MM price book to traders desk for market making, trading and hedging activities. Software code was written with consideration to have the prices reach traders desk in the least amount time from when it was published in the market. Adaptors developed were against virtual markets such as Bloomberg, ION, Market IT and EBS.

Responsibilities:

• Software designing and development

• Delivering quality and high performing software components.

• Creating stored procedures and Triggers in Oracle Database.

• Involved in Unit Testing, Issue fixing and production support. Core Skills: Core Java, Oracle, Linux

Tools: MS Project, Eclipse and Sql Developer.

IBM India Pvt. Ltd.: Senior Systems Engineer Oct'04 - Apr'07 Key Projects:

Sprint Telecom - Commissioning System (COS)

COS application is Sprint's IT system used to define commission rules for its sales force, calculate commission amounts, and finally publishing reports for the commissions calculated across the users Thomson Scientific and Healthcare - Document Search Engine Suite: This project was about searching the online documents which are available to the customers on 24/7 basis from Thomson’s online library medicine sciences. Responsibilities:

• Creating and managing application handover plans to IBM offshore team.

• Software designing and development – for self and team.

• Involved in the design, development and implementation of windows user interface

• Creating stored procedures and Triggers in Oracle Database

• Involved in Unit Testing, Issue fixing and production support Core Skills: Core Java/J2EE, Oracle, Korn Shell Scripting on Sun Solaris. Tools: MS Project, Eclipse, Callidus' TrueComp (Commission Payout Engine) and Informatica. CERTIFICATION

• Advanced Certified Scrum Master (A-CSM)

• Prince2 Practitioner Certified

TRAININGS

• Coursera’s Python 3 Programming Specialization by University of Michigan.

• Situational Leadership Training at TCP, USA.

• Project Management Certification at Wipro Technologies, USA.

• Project Leader Certification Program at Wipro Technologies, UK.

• Influential Leadership & Difficult Interactions at Wipro Technologies, India.

• Developer Training for Spark and Hadoop by Cloudera.

• Structured thinking program & Agile programming training at RBS India.

• Quantitative Project Management at IBM India.

ACADEMIC DETAILS

2004 Masters in Applied Information Technology (Software Engineering) from University of Sydney

2002 Advanced Certificate in Software Engineering from IBM Authorized Centre for Education (IBM-ACE) 1999 Undergraduate Accounting, Economics & Business Finance Degree (Honors) Finance from Delhi University

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