هشام الطوال

1. Leading a team of professionals responsible for support the bank day to day operations by supporting the existing systems in the bank; e.g. internet banking, BPM system. Document management system, Middleware, AVAYA/IVR, Corona, Cognos, Finacle treasury, VISA card, master card, switch, and many others; in total of 100 systems
2. Ensuring that systems are always up to date and in synch with the best standards; in order to ensure a stable production environment that provides the best services to the customers, internal and external, in doing so my team managed so many systems upgrade in terms of application, OS and database; e.g.: corona, cognos, Reuters; Kofax, eDocs, AVAYA, etc…
3. Supporting other projects running in the bank by providing the technical expertise that will ensure a smooth implementation and post go live support, my team members are always the corner stone in any implementation of any project in the bank, ensuring that best practices are catered for and providing full support to other project managers thus ensuring a quality deliverables; examples: internet banking, ERP cloud, BPM, central bank systems
4. In touch with vendors and services provides at all times and keeping a professional relationship with them in order to make sure that they are always available and supportive
5. Supporting and carrying out the bank’s business continuity plans in term of testing the readiness of the DR sides/systems and applications; this has proven useful in some situations in order make sure that business and services
6. Shortlisting and interviewing new candidates in order to make sure that new blood is always available to support the team
7. Ensuring that the knowledge for the production systems support is available and shared between the whole team in order to have a better backup plans, this helped the team to be able to attend their trainings and take their vacations without impacting the overall deliverables
8. Mentoring, leading and hand holding the team in the daily work and working to build the team spirit all the time
9. Interacting with other IT teams, such as ITR&S; network, servers, audit and compliance
10. Interacting with the procurement department for the sake of new projects, vendors, invoices, etc.
11. On a personal level I take pride of managing the data migration team that participated actively in the T24 go live project that finished on the 6th of July 2013; the cut over was successful with 100% GL/PL matching and very minimal user complains in terms of data migration; during this exercise I managed a focused team of professionals that was in charge of
a. Data mapping of all data items from the legacy system to the new system
b. Identifying the gaps related to the data items and communicating them to the proper business owners
c. Building a comprehensive data migration strategy documents per area that describes the mapping rules applied, data cleanup required, transformation rules, exceptions and issues.
d. Building a cut-over strategy for the go live date
12. Prior to that I managed lots of internal development in the banks and managed many small projects and implementations; building interfaces for other systems; implementing the BizFlow BPM along with eDocs and Kofax

Working as a consultant with Accenture was my first experience in the world of IT; such experience has bestowed my first insight upon me into the world of IT professionals and allowed me to appreciate the importance of technology in supporting today’s business and growth
During these 6 years, I worked on five projects in four countries, which allowed me to get exposures to more professionals in two more countries as well due to trainings and short assignments that I attended. Thus adding more to my experience and exposure; during these 6 years I worked on the below projects,
1. Team lead in Saudi Hollandi bank in charge of analysing the running processes in the loans and credit department and suggesting the needed changes on the existing processes in order to enhance the productivity and outcome of the collection team; this exercise produced the blue print of the needed system enhancements and technology changes needed
2. Technical team leader in the initial engagement of an evaluation of a core banking system for one of the company’s clients, got training in India on Finacle, during the time line of this engagement I mapped the data fields in the old system to the data fields in the new system, identified and documented the gaps between the two systems, did effort estimation exercise and came out with the numbers that were used in the final project plan to help measure the total time/expenses for the over-all project
3. In Italy - Milano: working as a team leader; in large engagement with an insurance company named SAI. the project was targeted at automating the entire companies work; my role was a team leader doing follow up, support, time management, task delivery management for a team of developers plus doing technical analysis and code review; also followup on the installation of the needed software on the life servers; softwares included, Apache 14, Dynamo, Java.
4. In Italy - Reggio Emilia: working on an eBanking Solution with CREDEM (Credito Emiliano) in which the bank was targeting to build an interactive website for its old core banking system my role was
a. Developing the technical architecture of the project using the Java programming language (for example: general error logging mechanism, data base connectivity class)
b. Developed a set of C-Unix scripts on HP UNIX used for version control, check-in checkout, differences, and migration to the final testing and production environment.
5. Project Banking Vision: a core banking solution targeting banks in UAE; I was involved in the whole SDLC cycle; from user requirement to development, code review, support testing and after go life support