Qualifications Profile

Accomplished, innovative, and results-driven Technology & IT Sr. Project/Program Manager, equipped with extensive experience and proven expertise in overseeing and delivering large-scale, enterprise-wide, highly complex projects and programs within scope, quality, time, and budget constraints.

Summary of qualifications:

20+ years of experience in project, portfolio, program management and Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).

10+ years of experience in managing direct reports. Mentoring, and coaching Project Managers, Team Leaders.

10+ years of experience in managing and leading teams in agile environment.

10+ years of experience in Product delivery and Deployment.

5+ years of experience in PMO business processes.

Core Competencies

Project & Program Management Release Management Deployment/Delivery Management Conversion, Integration Management Project / Program Governance Change Management Relationship Management Performance Management Process Improvement Enterprise level implementations Cross-functional team Management Vendor Management Risk Management Outsourcing and Off-shore Management Data Analytics and Functional Design Digital Transformation Resource planning and Budget Management

Technical Skills

Development Processes:

SDLC Decision Review (Stage Gate) Waterfall Agile Scrum Kanban SAFe DevOps

Tools:

MS Office Suite MS Project Google Apps SharePoint Clarity PPM Rally JIRA Confluence

Certifications

–Project Management Professional (PMP) - Certified ScrumMaster (CSM)

–Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL V4) Foundation - SAFe Agilist

–AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (AWS CCP) - Lean Six Sigma Green Belt (LSSGB)

Professional Experience

BMO Harris, IL

Senior Program Manager Conversion/Integration (Merger & Acquisition) 2023 April –Current

Successfully led the conversion of 650K+ Bank of the West credit card accounts to BMO system.

As Credit Card Integration & conversion lead, accountable for providing leadership and end to end oversight of BMO Personal &Business Banking U.S/BOTW work package integration for Go Live Day1 Conversion events and activities.

Primary point of contact for executives, P&BB US project managers, technology partners and business leads.

Partnered with workstream leaders to develop Conversion Day1 minute by minute Playbook Tasks for Mocks, Dress Rehearsal and Go Live events. Led and managed Credit Card conversion activities including TSYS & Master Card.

As a Central Command Center member, worked with cross-function teams to integrate acquired entities and assets efficiently with minimal disruption.

Planned and managed the execution of Playbook tasks with clear activities, milestones, checkpoints and owners for all the events.

Walgreens Boots Alliance, Deerfield, il

Senior IT Program/Release/Deployment Manager 2021 Sep–2023 March

Led overall release management for a $40M major IT program for Walgreens.

Was responsible for managing SW releases, and deployments of next generation of core Pharmacy fulfillment and supply chain systems, at nine robot powered central prescription micro-fulfillment centers (11 additional sites in progress).

Led a team to plan, manage, deploy, and monitor (hyper care) new SW releases and patch release/bug fixes on various fulfillment centers.

Took strategic initiative to develop release/deployment process to manage IT deliveries. Created readiness, deployment checklists, playbooks.

Developed and implemented Change Management Process for the new program in collaboration with multiple internal and vendors work streams members to improve workflow processes. Chairing Change Management Board (CAB) and Go-No-Go meetings for the releases to ensure performance standards meet goals and objectives of the program.

Build and manage partner relationships by sharing information cross-functionally and interacting with direct reports, peers, senior management, and vendors.

Ensured vendors deliver against agreed upon SLAs and overall service delivery of operational activities.

Conducted/led RCAs to identify and resolve systemic issues to prevent them from repeating. Manage problems and issues proactively, including timely resolution.

Developed and mentored team members through on-boarding, open communication, and training.

Schneider National, Green Bay, WI

Senior IT Program Manager 2021 March–Sep

Managed a budget of over $5 mil for multiple IT projects related to Logistics and Security with internal & external dependencies. Used Agile as well SAFe process to manage scrum teams, tools such as Rally for development and Clarity for cost management, budget, forecasting. Was responsible for meeting/delivering against budgetary goals and objectives.

Interacted with cross-functional stakeholders and external vendor to drive IT and business alignment.

Drove overall program and workstreams accountability by implementing delivery reporting metrics.

McDonald’s, Chicago, IL

Senior Project Manager, Data Management 2019–2020

Strategically led a Scrum team of 11 people comprised of 6 onsite and 5 offshore members to deliver a cloud-based data analytics projects including its customer adaptation in support of actual sales and sales forecasting for McDonald, Chicago.

Ensured proper coordination of tasks that included data ingestion and data transformation using Talend as ETL tool.

Coached and trained onsite and offshore teams on project management best practices and Agile/Scrum.

Instituted the Enterprise Project Management Office (EPMO) Center of Excellence (CoE) for project governance and introduced PM policies and procedures which optimized the PM activities, while boosting productivity in the workplace.

Nokia, Naperville, IL

Delivery Leader 2018–2019

Led IT digital transformation project of a near real time reporting tool for product deployment issues with budget of $12M.

Provided functional design guidance in developing dashboards and reports using Power BI. Promoted use of DevOps principle, continuous integration, and delivery (CI/CD) methods for development of the tool.

Initiated the following initiatives that led to positive business impacts:

oSuccessful integration of diverse set of data from multiple source systems, such as Oracle and homegrown enterprise resource planning (ERP) in collaboration with the Analytics Development Team; and

oDefining key performance indicators (KPIs) for process improvement that led to over $1M in annual savings.

Director, Release / Deployment Management 2016–2018

Strategically directed to a global team who were leading end-to-end software development life cycle (SDLC) projects and global deployment of company’s flagship product.

Led Steering Committee for development, integration, and implementation of large-scale, complex SW releases.

Improved the predictability of project/program outcomes by leading the process standardization to effectively manage risks, assumptions, issues, dependencies (RAID), scope changes and quality by defining, implementing, and continuously improving Release/Portfolio Management framework and structure.

Effectively managed the stakeholder’s relationship and executive leadership communications. Provided timely, accurate status report, performance analysis, escalation of risk/issues and recommendations.

Demonstrated adeptness in leading software development efforts using Agile methodology; creating Scrum teams; mentoring team leads; and communicating program progress to stakeholders through sprint burndown reports, iteration burndown reports, and velocity target updates.

Effectively directed and mentored team members, including performance evaluation, provision of constructive feedback.

Spearheaded the successful completion of programs and projects, as well as mitigation of risks in alignment with scope, schedule, and annual budget of approximately $20M, CapEx and OpEx.

Implemented new portfolio/program governance process to support impactful and actionable reporting. Provided functional guidance in design of project metrics, dashboards and reporting mechanisms to facilitate decision-making.

Nokia (Formerly Alcatel-Lucent), Naperville, IL

Senior Manager, Service / Product Support Management 2013–2016

Developed the new Program and Product Support Management Team which included recruiting five new members, defining role and responsibility of the team, and facilitating training and mentoring new project managers.

As first line of escalation for the program, managed escalations from global customers by providing timely resolutions.

Built and maintained strategic relationships with key vendors, such as Sun, Oracle and Red Hat, along with administration of vendor contracts.

Expertly handled service level agreement (SLA) and established new, modified change management process that resulted to 30% operational efficiency improvement of delivery cycle to resolve customer issues.

Manager, R&D Project Management 2011–2013

Oversaw overall E2E performance and successful delivery of global cross-functional program in accordance with statement of works (SOWs) for $12M with 25+ team members, including 8 direct reports from China, France, India, and the U S.

Drove organizational change by coaching and guiding program team’s journey toward Agile integration and adoption.

Chaired Agile/Scrum meetings for sprint planning, daily standups, sprint check-in, sprint review, and retrospective.

Nokia (Formerly Lucent Tech), Naperville, IL

Senior Development Project Manager 2003–2011

Steered efforts in establishing software and hardware new product introduction (NPI), including compliance testing.

Spearheaded overall decision review gates that involved overseeing at-risk program, optimizing quality and schedule of SW deliverable, and providing solutions to client within 12 months instead of 18 months; thus attaining $55M in revenue over five years.

Education

Executive data Science The John Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

Master of Science in Industrial Engineering Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL, USA

Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering Veer Surendra Sai University of Technology, Burla, OR, India

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