Muhammad Irfan Ali

Taking care about all the projects in MENA Region

Managing teams of Technology Consultants, Engineers and Technicians for solution designing, implementation and support across UAE.

Responsibilities:
• Understand customers’ requirements and transform them into solution
• Help Sales and account management in Product and solution presentations for the customers
• Help customers in preparing business case/ business requirement documents
• End-to-end Project management following PMI methodologies (Waterfall, Agile/Scrum)
• PMO Compliance
• Prepare regular project status reports and circulating among different stakeholders
• Attend steering committee and regular project status meeting
• Address project issues, risk and change management
• Manage all service delivery to deliver contracted service commitment.
• Primary point of contact for the customer.
• Manage all aspects of service risk, cost and productivity.
• Manage IT service strategy and ensure services are professionally represented to the client.
• Ensure that service level agreements are clearly defined, agreed and implemented with the Client.
• Carry out regular review meetings.
• Reporting and forecasting.
• Act as an escalation point for all service delivery problems.
• Resource management & recruitment.
• Assist with bid management.
• Arrange POC and products demonstration and knowledge sessions with customer
• Attend sessions/webinars related to new products and solutions
• Service improvement.

To ensure a successful delivery of IT projects to customers according to the agreed implementation plan for the specific business assigned by Project Sponsors in order to achieve complete customer satisfaction.
• To diligently report project status to the PMO functions and raises alerts for Senior Management where necessary.
• To undertake assigned Group IT Projects, work along with business, in order to implement new projects into production
• Address assigned project issues until handover.
• Formulate SLA with Business and Technology stakeholders in projects pertaining to new applications.
• To manage technical solution delivery in projects where assigned role is that of technical solution delivery.
• To co-ordinate for in-country activities for Group-driven projects.
• To be the primary contact for locally driven projects with the country stakeholders.
• To understand customer’s business needs and how these needs can be translated into technical solutions.
• To agree customer’s expectations and satisfaction criteria for project delivery and managing internal customer’s expectations accordingly.
• To ensure timely reporting of project progress with appropriate project status and timely escalation of risks and issues to PMO.
• To ensure significant problems are escalated to PMO, Senior IT management and Project stakeholders.

My role includes consulting and project management services to corporate client mainly from the financial sector. I am looking after the portfolio of EMC/RSA, VMware, Citrix, Mcafee, Veeam, Solarwinds, ManageEngine and StealthWatch Lancop. I am also involve in Datacenter infrastructure design and development and upgrades projects.

1. Thin Computing solutions using Citrix & VMware
2. ESM/SIEM solutions, RSA & McAfee
3. Network Management Solutions
4. Penetration Testing
5. Information Security Management Systems
6. Security Audits
7. Datacenter Design/Development
8. Assets Management
9. Two Factor Authentication
10. Backup and Archiving Solutions

Have been involved with various systems integrators as Project Manager for the following:
1. Application of Project Management methodologies
2. Business Application implementation
3. Business blue printing for ERP implementations
4. IT Network and infrastructure implementation
5. Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery Planning
6. Virtulization (VMware & Citrix)
7. Risk Management
8. Infrastructure Security Management
9. Vulnerability Analysis
10. Data Integrity/Recovery
11. IT Delivery & Operations Management
12. Strategic planning and IT Sourcing
13. Team building and management
14. Executive reporting
15. IT Infrastructure building from scratch (Datacenter designing & execution)
16. SIEM, DLP
17. Pre-Sales related activities, includes understanding client's requirements, POC.

I was supervising their Support and Datacenter.

Support: GTML has multiple locations which have more than 700 PCs connected through the FIBER or wireless to the central hub. I am managing the support teams of multiple locations for end users complain and system/network support. We recently introduced online complain logging system through which users can directly log their complain via web.

Datacenter: GTML have 40+ servers for different roles. Microsoft Exchange 2000 (Internal E-mailing), Microsoft SQL 2000 (Business Application), ISA Server 2000 (Internet Browsing), Active Directory (Centralized management), MDAEMONv8.0 (External E-mailing), Citrix Presentation Server v3.0/4.0 (Terminal/Remote Connectivity), BrightStor Arcserve v11.0 (For Network Backup), Trend Micro Antivirus Enterprise suite (For Centralized antivirus control), GFI Languard (For Patch Management), GFI Portable Storage Controller (For centralized data security), Retail Pro (For Retail Business of GTML outlets), Business Object (Business reporting tool), HRMS (Human Resource Management System with payroll), Storage Server (NAS), Acronic Image Server (for fast recovery) and VMWARE GSX server (for server virtulization).
I am managing datacenter team for the smooth operation of all of the above servers. Currently, working on IBM iSeries server for Pakistan’s first Textile Based ERP solution. Also working on other projects: Document Management and work flow, Migration from Windows to LINUX and Storage consolidation.

I am also looking after the purchases related to software and hardware for both support and datacenter related items. I am also maintaining the list of GTML license softwares. Software/Hardware maintenance/renewal/subscriptions are also come under my responsibility.