Ajay Kumar Sharma

Ph.: 573-***-**** Email: acsqeq@r.postjobfree.com

Profile Summary

A Project Management (PMP) and ITIL (V2, V3) certified Project Manager with more than 14 years of IT industry experience. Major responsibilities include leading efforts in various domains Banking, Retail, Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, Education, Insurance and State Government.

Program and Project Management, Program Management Office (PMO)

Defining & Executing Service Management strategy, Roadmap and Execution for (IM, PM, Change, Release, CMDB, Asset Management, SRM)

Process Design and Implementation, GAP analysis based on ITIL leading practices

SDLC Documentation

Defining and execution of test strategy test planning, testing scope, and testing activities. Lead Business/User Acceptance Testing and End-End Application Testing.

Vendor’s /tool’s evaluation

Managing Onshore- Offshore support model (India)

SAS 70/ SAE 16 Certification

Payment Processing, Authorization, Settlement and Tokenization.

Agile Methodology

Certifications

PMP (Project Management Professional)

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) V2, V3 Foundation

ITIL V3 Intermediate SOA (Service Offerings and Agreements) and SO (Service Operation)

ISO 20000 Audit.

BSM (Business Service Management)

EA (Enterprise Architecture Fundamentals) Penn State University

MCSD (Microsoft Certified Solution Developer)

M.B.A (Southampton Business School. UK)

Work Experience

State Of Michigan

September 2015 to Present

Bank Of America (NYSE: BAC)

April 2013 to August 2015

Lowe’s Companies (NYSE: LOW)

Dec 2011 to March 2013

Quaero/CSGS (NYSE: CSG)

June 2011 to Nov 2011

PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC)

Nov 2010 to May 2011

Lowe’s Companies (NYSE: LOW)

Sep 2006 to October 2010

Client Lowe’s Companies (Infodat Intl)

Apr 2005 to Aug 2006

British Gas

Dec 2002 to Nov 2004

Learning Universe Pvt. Ltd (www.eGurucool.com)

March 2001 to March 2002

Expertise

Process Skills: PMO, ITIL Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Configuration Management (CMDB), Asset Management, Service Request Management, Payment Processing, SAS 70/SAE 16, SCM (Software Configuration Management)

Project Manager Skills: Develop, manage, and update project work plans. Lead working groups. Issue management, Presentations for Senior Management, Facilitation of project team meetings between business and technology teams. Managed diverse projects simultaneously, assuming leadership throughout all phases of the project and working collaboratively with team members to ensure successful completion of project goals. SDLC Documentation: BRD, BSD, HLD, process, and procedure documentation. Test strategy, test planning, test plans, test cases, and defect analysis., Good exposure to Agile methodology.

Applications: MS Office, MS Project, Visio, BMC Remedy 7 and 7.5, 8 (Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, Release Management, CMDB and asset management), CA service Centre, PMG, NewScale, Bigfix, Sunview (ChangeGear), AJB, Authorization, Settlement, Tokenization, Switch. HP Quality Center, Clarity, MS Project, Sharepoint.

Professional Experience

State Of Michigan (Lansing, MI) September 2015 to Present

Project Manager Change Management and CMDB Implementation

Define the Strategy to implement Change Management and Configuration Management.

Identify and document existing processes and tools.

GAP Analysis.

Identify resource required, Interview and assemble project team.

Develops project Charter, Scope and objectives.

RACI Matrix

Provide guidance and support to team members

Bank Of America (Charlotte, NC) April 2013-August 2015

Project Manager SACM Improvements/ Rewind/ITSM Program

Circuit Management Process, Mapping of Remote Access Solutions(VPN, RDC, Citrix, Good, Easylink)

SACM Remedy Improvements/ SOR Program.

ITSM Strategy design, CMDB implementation.

Service Catalogue/Technical Catalogue design and implementation.

Drive and Develop Project Scope, Project Plan and required project deliverables/documentation

Weekly Reporting to senior management

Lead multiple teams to achieve project goals

Designed On boarding process for Vendor Resources(IMAR)

Release Management Factory Model.

Managing the Control Rooms.

Actively managed the work efforts of multiple resources.

Directed both internal and external resources to achieve business solutions within project guidelines.

Collaborated and communicated with other project managers and leaders to coordinate cross-project initiatives and activities.

Identified and eliminated obstacles to solution plans, business goals or implementation.

Managed project risk through comprehensive mitigation assessment and planning techniques.

Initiated and maintained reporting relationships with project stakeholders including team members, peers, managers, customers, vendors, and other affected departments to coordinate efforts across multiple business units and ensure continuous efficient management of projects.

Remedy 8.1 Implementation.

Lowe’s Companies (Mooresville, NC) Dec 2011-March 2013

SSA Payment Processing Upgrade Project

This project is aimed at implementing a solution for the Finance systems to enable the Payment processing organization to meet the industry standards and be PCI compliant, which includes changing the current authorization, settlement and tokenization processes. The solution will enhance Lowe’s ability to reconcile credit and debit card transactions daily at the detail and fiscal month end level, manage all payments including chip cards, Credit Cards, Debit Cards, Checks etc, and provide a secure, compliant, workflow-based settlement, reconciliation and funding system.

Responsibilities

Managed project planning, project kickoff meeting, customer communications, and deliverables and stakeholders expectations.

Working with the IT Leadership team on resourcing, issues, risks and budget for the projects under this program.

Managed resources on matrix environment from different departments and locations.

Managed various Stakeholders including customers, management, vendors

Implementation including configuration and customization of AJB software

Communicated weekly project status to the PMO

Completion of project implementation documents as necessary per project: project charter, project schedule, scope document, risk management plan, implementation issues & task log.

Oversee design of monitoring solution design end to end

Involved in Architecture design Hot-Hot for authorizations

Co-ordinate between development, testing and infrastructure teams.

Responsible for relationship with Acquirers/Payment Processors for establishing connectivity and seamless testing between Lowe’s and the Acquirers Data Centres. (Chase, Amex, BlackHawk, Certegy, GE, SVS, Discover, AJB)

Define the scope of testing within the context of various releases.

Define test strategy and test planning.

Define the scope of testing within the context of coming release.

Coordinate with offshore testing team for quality of deliverables.

Estimation and prioritization of work, work assignments and resource planning

Preparation of Test Plan, Test Strategy document and Identifying test scenarios.

Manage defect triage meetings.

Release Manager

Responsibilities

Evaluation of SCM (Software configuration Management) tools (Serena, IBM Clear Case)

Responsible for defining strategy to implement SCM.

Responsible for GAP analysis between best practises and Lowe’s existing development practices

Providing release management support and oversee software quality control for the Lowe’s Testing Center

Coordinate with IT PMs to verify content and participation into software/hardware releases and the testing teams to ensure consistent promotions into test environments

Developed release and change management standards, processes and controls to ensure transparent, and consistent deployments into testing systems

Responsible for assisting in the coordination, issue resolution, and testing progression for three large-budget, cross-functional releases (over $100M)

Provide guidance to developers, testing and configuration/release teams in the preparation of code delivery, environment usage, and test phase planning

Reports from Quality Center for defect management reporting

Lead defect triage meetings.

Involved in Functional, Regression, UAT testing

Involved in Backend testing for Holiday Readiness Project by Creating and executing test cases related to backend changes made by the developers.

Involved in Black Friday & Thanksgiving testing activities

Quaero/CSG (Charlotte, NC) June 2011 to November 2011

Project Manager Process and Quality

This initiative involves getting the organization ready for a SAS 70/ SAE 16 Certification

Responsibilities

Identify and Define SAS 70 Control Objectives

Work with auditors to finalize the control objectives

Define roadmap and project plan, resource plan to meet the audit deadline

Define and document policies and procedures around Incident Management, Change Management, Release Management and Asset Management

Selection and implementation of appropriate tools for Incident and Change Management

Involved in complete Testing life cycle including, writing Test Plan, Test Cases, executing test cases and documenting test results.

PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) Nov 2010 to May 2011

Project Manager Client MassMutual: ITSM Strategy and Implementation

This initiative involves studying the current IT Operations environment and defining a roadmap and strategy aligned to ITIL V3 best practices

Responsibilities

Define ITSM Strategy and Roadmap

Evaluate current Incident, Change, Release, CMDB & Asset management processes

Created “As is” and “To be” system documents to show the current and proposed State.

Defining Incident, Problem, Change, Release Configuration Management and Management Process, Roles and Responsibilities

Project Planning, Resource Planning and Sizing, Task Allocations, Duration Estimations, and Communication Planning

Presentations to senior management to get necessary buy in

Define and decompose IT services, Build CI and attributes model.

Build Straw Model for identified services

Vendor evaluation for selection of ITSM suite (BMC, HP & CA)

Define the scope of testing within the context of various releases.

Define test strategy and test planning.

Define the scope of testing within the context of coming release.

Senior Associate: Client Kaizer Permanente:

Service Request Catalog implementation

This initiative involves building the Service catalog for all request-able IT services. Responsible for gathering business requirements, building Service Design and Service Definition documents for the in scope services.

Responsibilities

Project Planning, Resource Planning and Sizing, Task Allocations, Duration Estimations, and Communication Planning

Work with/presentation to senior management to get necessary buy-in

Creation of service scoping documents

Creation of service design package templates

Work with different stakeholders to populate the service design package

Define and decompose IT services

Work with the development team to move the in-scope services to production

Sr. Associate: Client Pfizer: Service Request Catalog implementation.

This initiative involves helping the client identify a tool that meet their needs of providing IT services to all users globally. This tool will be the single point of entry for all of Pfizer colleagues and contractors to request and track their service requests. Second phase of this project involves building a job methodology based on ITIL and Six Sigma that will help IT service providers to document their services in accordance with best practices. This methodology provides step by step guidance to document their services and identify areas of improvement and help transition/build these services in the catalog

Responsibilities

Project Planning, Resource Planning and Sizing, Task Allocations, Duration Estimations, and Communication Planning

Work with/presentation to senior management to get necessary buy-in

Work with different stakeholders to populate the stage gate documents

Work with the development team to move the in-scope services to the HP Service centre tool

Lowe’s Companies - Mooresville, NC (Wilkesboro, NC) April 2005 to October 2010

Domain: Retail

Lowe's Companies, Inc. (NYSE: LOW) is a U.S.-based chain of retail home improvement and appliance stores. The chain now serves over 14+ million customers a week in its 1,717 stores in the United States, Mexico and Canada. Lowe's Companies, Inc. is 44 on the Fortune 500 list. Both globally and in US, Lowe's is the second-largest hardware stores chain.

Key Projects

Project 1: BMC Remedy upgrade from Ver 7 to Ver 7.6 Role: Team Lead

Through this upgrade, Lowe’s aims at taking advantage of major user-interface enhancements and new capabilities of Remedy 7.6 that will increase productivity, improve prioritization, and reduce errors.

Responsibilities:

Leading and championing ITSM strategy,

Conducting process and data workshops to demo ITSM 7.5 features

Capturing business requirements for IM, PM, CM, RM, SRM and RKM

Defining the training strategy and plan for all of Lowe’s IT users

Provide Change Management training to over 1500 users

Defining and implementing change management policies, procedures and work instructions

Define Product & Operational Classification values to fit the new structure

Project 2: Service Request Management Proof of Concept

Role: Team Lead

The objective of this project was to choose a vendor/tool that meets Lowe’s requirements including scalability of the tool, integration to other ITSM Modules, easy to build services and providing a seamless, easy to use interface for end users for making service requests

Responsibilities:

Conducted Proof of Concept’s (POC) for Service Request Management Tools with the following Vendors: NewScale, PMG, Kinetic Data and BMC

Conducted workshop with Business users to evaluate offerings of different vendors

Project 4: Configuration & Change Management Implementation using BMC Remedy 7

Goal of Configuration Management was to provide a logical model of the IT infrastructure by identifying, controlling, maintaining and verifying the versions of Configuration Items.

Definition of Configuration, Change Management process, policy, scope, processes and procedures, roles and responsibilities, communication plan and training plan

Provide training to 1500 IT users

Configuration Management

As-Is Assessment of Configuration Management capabilities across the organization to understand and document business requirements, Building CI & Attributes Straw model

Implementation of BMC Atrium CMDB and its integration with various sources

Configuration Management educational workshops

Change Management

Identify gaps between home grown tool and Remedy Change Management solution;

Defining the training strategy and plan for all of Lowe’s IT users

Defining and implementing change management policies, procedures and work instructions

Project 5: BMC Marimba & BigFix Software Distribution & Patch Management Tools Proof of Concept (POC)

Conducted Proof of Concept’s (POC) for Software Distribution & Patch Management with BMC Marimba and BigFix

Conducted gap analysis of vendor offerings and Lowe’s requirements

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