Quality Assurance Project Manager

ASHOK VENKATACHALAM

Aurora, CO ● ************@*******.*** ● 303-***-****

TECHNOLOGY DIRECTOR/SENIOR MANAGER

QUALITY ASSURANCE - PROJECT MANAGEMENT - SERVICE DELIVERY

Recognized senior technical and management professional equally skilled in influencing and implementing

strategic direction for both technology and business initiatives. An innovative leader with a proven track

record of improving service and project delivery by implementing new technologies, systems, methods and

controls to achieve desired results. Expert in relationship building at all levels of organizations. Turn around

specialist, repeatedly and successfully taken control of struggling, over-budget, challenging strategic and

highly visible projects and initiatives. Delivered projects on agreed schedule and budget. Strengths include:

Change Management Quality Assurance Establish SLAs

Project Management Software Development Software Management

IT Strategy Strategic Planning System Improvement/Integration

Process Improvement Agile Methodology Team Leadership & Motivation

Certified: ITIL Foundation

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Kaiser Permanente, Pleasanton, CA 2004 to 2009

Nation’s largest not-for-profit healthcare provider, serving more than 8.7 million members in eight regions.

PORTFOLIO MANAGER – ENTERPRISE CAPACITY AND PERFORMANCE (ECP)

Managed the Service Capacity Management (SCM) team consisting of 20 reports, including Project

Managers, Technical Architects, Developers, and Business Architects, with an operating budget of over $3M.

Engaged and supported a portfolio of over 100 applications. Performed enterprise services to Business

Infrastructure (BI) and Health Plan (HPO) organizations. Major applications included Epic Inpatient and

Outpatient (EMR), KP.Org (Member website), Onelink (Peoplesoft), Diamond (Claims) and NPS (Pricing).

Strategized extensive performance testing strategies that resulted in saving millions of dollars to one

of the largest healthcare electronic medical record (EMR) Epic application implemented across 8

regions.

Improved the overall application stability, end-user experience and service delivery over 40% by

implementing a workable and proven Performance Engineered Life Cycle (PELC) methodology utilized

in application and infrastructure performance and capacity risk assessment s.

Achieved over $3M in cost savings by designing, testing and sharing system resources, rather

than acquiring new hardware, for critical strategic program s (Epic and KP.Org). This was completed

working closely with application vendors (Epic, Perot, Accenture, Oracle), IBM and KP-IT engineering

and operation (UNIX, Citrix, Wintel and Storage) teams.

Attained over $2M in cost savings to portfolio teams and improved project delivery over 50 %, by

designing analytical risk assessments approaches versus traditional testing for low to medium changes.

Optimized critical batch jobs (processing millions of records) elapse time over 40% and achieved

$2.5M in cost savings by leading the technical team in tuning the DB (Oracle and Cache) and IBM AIX

platforms for vendor packaged applications (Epic Bridges interface and Diamond).

Encouraged innovation, standardization and reusable design, development and analysis techniques that

reduced the lead time to deliver agile and traditional projects over 25%.

Accomplished results and customer satisfaction by deploying sustainable engagement strategies and

workable delivery models in alignment with portfolio demands working closely with both IT and business

leadership teams for various patient care systems.

Ashok Venkatachalam Page 2

The Hartford Financial Services Group, Hartford, CT 2003 to 2004

A leading provider of life, auto, homeowners and business insurance, group and employee bene fits as well

as investment products, annuities, mutual funds, and college savings plans serving millions of customers

worldwide.

PROJECT MANAGER - CLAIMS IT

Lead the application integration/development team for the Claims IT Organization by delivering Project

Management, development and quality assurance service offerings. Directed a 15 member team that

included Project Leads, Technical Leads, Developers and Business Analysts. Recruited and built this Claims

IT team in less than 6 months.

Integrated the Claims application with various supporting applications to include RAD (Peoplesoft-FS),

Teleclaim (Mainframe) and Internet Loss Reporting (Web-based) using SDLC approach.

Improved the overall service delivery of initiatives over 30% (by executing reusable test harness

smoke test, system integration and sanity quality check), release management for code deployment and

defect management and configuration management to deliver multiple critical initiatives.

Increased efficiency over 50% and cost savings over $1M by designing and establishing a Center of

Excellence (CoE) Quality Assurance centralized test Lab to conduct both functional and performance

testing.

Reduced the overall testing timeframe over 25% and enhanced application quality by defining,

developing and implementing the Quality Assurance and Project Management methodology. Automated

the core functional scripts (over 200 test cases) and performance testing scripts (over 50 test cases).

Tanning Technology Corporation, Denver, CO 1999 to 2002

Global Solutions Integrator and Consulting Company that developed, integrated and deployed client

technology systems to reduce cost, improve performance and drive competitive advantage.

M ANAGEMENT CONSULTANT- THE HARTFORD INSURANCE

Managed the strategic Claims InKnowvation program. Responsible for the $15M Hartford Portfolio that

included Accounts Management, Billing, Time Reporting, Resource Needs, and Expense Reporting.

Identified new business opportunities while collaborating closely with the Senior Le adership Team.

Executed $30M COTS Vendor packaged claims processing application for Personal lines, Commercial

lines and General Liability that replaced legacy CAS system. Project spanned across 3 years with a team

of over 50 reports.

Successfully completed an end-to-end integrated technical solution for this program that was 3 months

behind schedule. The entire initial rollout to Personal Lines was deployed within 9 months on the agreed

contractual date.

Delivered $1M-6 month project by leading the first offshore engagement in developing and deploying

a web based Internet loss reporting (ILR) website.

Assisted in generating over $15 Million in revenues for Tanning across 3 years by identifying and

supporting various engagements.

1992 to 1998

Maars Software International Limited - SAP Consultant, GEA Energy System (India) Limited - Senior

Engineer Project and Binny Ltd., Engineering Division – Engineer Projects.

EDUCATION

Pursing Executive MBA, Colorado State University

Bachelor of Engineering, Government College of Engineering, India

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