Ajay Kumar Sharma
Ph.: 573-***-**** Email: ************@*****.***
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