Senior Director
Northbaysolutions Pakistan Pvt. Ltd. (formerly Cambridgedocs Pvt. Ltd )
Total years of experience :27 years, 3 Months
I joined CambridgeDocs Pvt. Ltd as associate director when it was being converted into two individual companies. On spun off into an organization that works as offshore to http://www.Northbaysolutions.com with Mr. Brian Barker as CEO and my supervisor here. I filled the gap when Irfan Virk was getting busy with GVS (Game View Studios ). I am Currently, heading a team consisting of Senior Managers, Projects Managers, QA Manager, IT Manager. Headed administration function at the time of acquiring new office space and its complete end to end setup. Also responsible for salary reviews, hiring and promotion decision. Finalizing CAPEX for transforming various company objectives to reality also comes under my domain.
Achievements:
• Enable growth of colleagues from 90 to 200 by establishing the core team structure in SM, PM and Technical Leadership group
• Managed delivery Project delivery growth from 4 to now over 20 project at one single time
• Expand QA team from 10 resources to now a 30 plus resources, to be expanded to over 50
• Added more managers to senior management team for making future growth possible
• Kicked off NBS-University initiative to take corporate training to universities, this is in progress
• Established GD department for ios game development from three resources to now around 12
• Achieved 100% growth with 84% billable resources by addition of resources at various levels
• Agile methodology implementation across the board
• Online assignment matrix for timely and proper resource booking and bench report for executive management
• Established procurement protocols in the company
• Established IT support department to next level of expertise and service level
• Streamlined all IT support issues using proper ticketing system and SLA definitions
• Worked with senior management on hiring of most key resources for the organization
• Successful establishment and execution of NBS-Academia outreach program
• Streamlined various internal capacity building programs and introduced moodle as internal LMS
Projects Managed:
1. Siebel CRM - Askari Bank Limited
Askari Bank Limited is one of largest commercial banks in Pakistan. Siebel Finance CRM was implemented across 400 branches, two call centers and various customer care centers across Pakistan. The main objective of the project was to enable unified services interface to the customers across channels and to provide a consolidated view of the customer in order to enable cross selling and up selling capabilities of the bank.
Keeping in view needs of the bank, project was divided into two phases; first phase of the project would cover services associated for all assets and consumer liability products. In phase 1, in addition to services credit origination, opportunity tracking, application processing workflow and approval decision making was covered. In this same phase integration with various hosts systems was enabled using EIM and in second phase, some of the interfaces were managed using EAI and connectivity with hosts systems using IBM middleware will be established. Implementation of marketing, smart scripts, need analysis, call reports and proposal & presentations was completed.
My role in the project covered identification and coordination with all the stake holders of the project, status reporting, cost tracking, invoicing, team building and over budget control. My main strength was the ability to setup, manage and direct data migration team for smooth data requirements development, messaging, cleansing, transformation and staging before the actual data loads into the system after required number of mock data loads.
2. PeopleSoft CS - Lahore University of Management Sciences
LUMS implemented Admissions, Student Administration, Campus Self Service and Grade Book. Integrations with external admissions processing systems, grading application and SAKAI were developed and implemented at the university.
3. Project Maker, a Project Planning and Tracking Tools for PMI Lahore Chapter
As a PMP expert, I provided consultancy to the team in the areas of Scheduling, Costing and Earned Value Analysis.
4. PMO Motorola Offshore Projects
My responsibility was project governance and utilization of project management methods for governance and monitoring of the project.
5. PeopleSoft CMS Higher Education Commission of Pakistan
The Higher Education Commission has been set up by the Government of Pakistan to facilitate the development of indigenous universities to be world-class centers of education, research and development. Through facilitating this process, the HEC intends to play its part in spearheading the building of a knowledge-based economy in Pakistan.
I was Project Manager during implementation of PeopleSoft Campus Solutions at two independent HEC - Universities.
Systems Ltd. (SEI CMMI LEVEL 4) Lahore, Pakistan, July 2006 to April 2007
The first software house in Pakistan, internationally operating as Visionet Systems Inc., and has established itself as a key player in critical areas of focus in the United States, providing services and products to a growing list of corporate clients that features several names from the “Fortune 500”.
As a Project Manager, was responsible for project initiations, project planning, costing and resource budgeting, scheduling, and execution along with weekly financial tracking etc.
http://www.netsoltek.com
LeaseSoft, a suite of four software applications, is an end-to-end solution for the lease and finance industry. The four applications under LeaseSoft have been designed and developed to be highly flexible and are capable of dealing with multinational, multi-company, multi-asset, multi-lingual, multi-distributor and multi-manufacturer environments.
I was responsible for implementation of project worth of USD 2.5 million by Toyota Leasing Thailand Limited, one of the largest captive finance companies operating in Asia-Oceana region. With over 15 locations across Thailand, 500 systems users and a portfolio of over 400, 000 leasing and finance contracts. This has been so far the most challenging implementation, seeing that this was first site being implemented for Toyota and strategically very important for future business from Toyota Leasing. First challenge was cultural differences, second challenge relationship management with Toyota’s top management that was a made up of American, Japanese and Australian origin and experiences. The biggest change management challenge was association of existing users with an application built using RPG/COBOL. It took us a while to transform user, help them unlearn existing application and made them get used to windows and mouse experience. These three challenges are only a few that we experienced throughout the implementation phase, other challenges were managed, mitigated and transformed into another step of success as the project went by.
Lone Star Technologies was established in March 2003 in Pakistan as in-house offshore development house of
Underhill and Associates for development of a software product for sales planning and contact management.
Responsibilities included total local operations management, process improvement, architecture of the application, client management (both on shore & off shore), team management, project management, human resource planning, team building, and logistics planning.
Achievements
• Established Systems Support and Network Operations Department
• Established QA department
• Re-structured the team formation for the whole organization
• Managed company growth from 3 resources to 40 resources
• Dumped the application developed onshore in last three years, got a totally new fresh look application in just eight months’ time using .NET technology
• Improved operational efficiency of the whole organization by reviewing and changing the processes
KAPS, a California based systems Software Company, develops software systems and provides consulting services to corporate clients in the United States. My focus was towards client need analysis, proof of concept prototyping, software system development, and post deployment support functions.
Project Manager - Staff Engineer
Responsibilities included client management (both on shore & off shore), team management, project management, providing design and architecture level support to various project teams, and providing technical support for business development such as requirements analysis, specs generation, effort estimation, project costing etc. Other responsibilities include human resource planning, team building, and logistics planning.
• Successfully delivered projects for fortune 500 clients within allotted time and budget
• Managed project risks and issues, and spearheaded the continuous improvement of the development process
through post-release meetings.
• Played a pivotal role in resource planning of the company.
• Developed detailed project plans, monitored progress, reported on project status and managed the project scope through change control process.
• Implemented best in class project management practices and developed a risk based planning approach for development and QA to accelerate the delivery dates for major product release.
• Instituted formal requirement analysis and design reviews with sign-off from the business.
Project Manager - Principle Software Engineer (June 2000 to June 2001)
Responsibilities included client management, team management and participation in system analysis and design and manage the development cycle:
• As a Project Manager, helped develop large scale, mission critical applications for Fortune 500 US clients.
• Conducted a study on value chain business process in HP for ASIC purchasing from foundries across the world.
• Successfully delivered Korean version of the project
Offshore Team Lead Oracle Financials Implementation for Government of Guam:
As a team lead, managed team of functional and technical resources involved in implementation of GL, AR, AP, FA and other modules of Oracle Federal Financials suite of applications. The biggest challenge in this project was capacity development, especially when this was the first implementation being done from Pakistan. This meant without any expertise available, management of repeated mistakes by the team. Adding all of this resulted in high pressure environment with a team that needs support and encouragement plus the management that is looking for results and continuously adding pressure. The project was delivered within timelines and budgets.
Offshore Team Lead Enhanced Driver’s Licensing System, New Mexico State:
This project was first contract signed by Techlogix in US. A quality delivery meant more business and failure in this project would mean huge loses in project revenues.
I was selected as team lead for this project for being an industrious, motivated, consistent and dynamic go getter at the very start of my career. Not only I delivered according to expectations, Techlogix also delivered enhancements and solution to other the states as well later on.