DEEPAK PAVITHRAN, PMP, CSM, SAFe

deepak.pavithran@gmail.com +1 949 510 1304

§         Highly successful IT Professional with cross cultural experience in the areas of program management with 14.5 years of experience in large multinational IT services & Retail services organizations

§         Managed programs with a budget up to USD 12 million per annum

§         Currently working as Program Manager (Delivery Manager)

§         Insightful experience in Project Management activities including Project Scoping, Estimation, Planning, Risk Management, finalization of Specifications, Customer/Stakeholder Management, Resource Management and Quality Management of the product / software

§         Client facing experience with multiple fortune 50 companies in retail, health care, tax domain for 7 years

§         An effective leader with proven abilities in leading teams during the project phase and guiding team members and enabling knowledge sharing among the team. An innovative and motivational leader with a pragmatic hands-on approach

§         Reliable record of success in the project management and review engagements, with an ability to recognize business objectives, foresee the solutions, develop approaches, estimate resource and deliver projects on time and within budget

§         Excellent hands-on experience in Clarity, Open Workbench, MS Project

§         Expertise in analyzing business improvement/expansion suggestions

§         Excellent interpersonal skills in written & oral communications, client relations and negotiation

§         Certified PMP, CSM and SAFe (Scaled Agile Practitioner)

§         Deep exposure to Global Delivery Models (Onshore/Nearshore/Offshore)

 

UST GLOBAL                                                                                                     SEP 2000 - PRESENT

 

Program Manager/Senior Manager (Fortune 5 Company)

April 2012 - Present

 

Job Responsibilities:

·         Key Result Area

·         Gross Profit Margin, Program revenue to the tune of USD 12 million pa

·         Partnership strategy

·         Overall performance and benefits

·         Creation and enforcement of standards / policies

·         Outreach to new opportunity areas

·         Trend monitoring, Risk assessment, Status Reporting

·         Sets the priorities for the program, major strategies, and handles cross-organizational issues

·                       Selects among recommended strategies, discusses and resolves routine issues, and ensures that engagement objectives meet customer’s business needs

·                       Prepares periodic report on program status, issues, and risks and presents in meetings with customer

·         Jointly responsibility for success of engagement with Customer

·         Work with Sales team in bringing new opportunities

·         Owns and manages (Profit and Loss) P&L for the entire division

·         Conducts joint periodic program projections for 30-60-90 day

·         Reviews periodic program metrics and takes necessary action

·                       First level for issue escalation and resolution on the overall program from Consultant organization

·         Attend periodic engagement status review meeting and daily / ad-hoc meetings, as required

·         Oversee the strategy to move projects into the Managed Outcome mode

·         Manage PMs and provide delivery oversight

·         Manage team of 80-100 including onshore and offshore

·                       Manage scope, schedule, effort, cost, change, risk, issue, communications, deliverable acceptance and escalation process

 

Leading Retail Company – Benefits Year End & Year Begin (Fortune 5 Company)

 

Aug 2011 – Mar 2012

 

This project was done as part of benefits annual enrollment. Year End & Year Begin project aims in effectively changing the new plans introduced during annual enrollment. These changes will also reduce the cost in plan administration as well as the plan benefits and offer more choice to the associates. This project has direct impact to 1.5 million associates across the globe.

 

Job responsibilities:

As an Onsite program manager, I was involved in the following activities

 

·         Preparing project management plans in collaboration with project managers, periodic reports and other records as per requirement.

·         Managed the overall budget of 5 million USD per annum.

·         Mapping client requirements and providing them best solutions involving evaluation and definition of scope of project and finalization of project requirements

·         Managing the overall benefits program; allocating resources; recruiting & guiding team members during the project till final delivery

·         Holding review meetings to monitor progress of the project as per schedule / budgets, and ensuring timely completion and delivery of the project to the client.

·         Tracking the project profitability (P&L)

·         Managed team of 85 working at different geographical locations

·         Coordination with Onsite PM’s, POC’s and Offshore Project Leads

·         Weekly Reviews and Status reporting to Senior Management and PMO

·         Responsible of performance monitoring and appraisal reporting associates

·         Participate in Account Wide initiatives, Process improvements etc. leading to better client satisfaction

 

Leading Retail Company – Infrastructure Portfolio (Fortune 5 Company)

 

Jan 2010 – July 2011

 

Upgrade and deploy Windows 7 OS across all workstations and laptops to simplify workstation imaging and management, enhance security and access controls within the corporate environment and to keep the company running on supported operating systems.

 

Job responsibilities:

As an Onsite portfolio manager (program manger), I was involved in the following activities

 

·         Managed 8 projects with annual run rate of 7.5 million

·         Win the customer confidence in Infrastructure portfolio in less than 3 months

·         Managed profit & loss account and ensured a consistent margin of profit

·         Managing the overall Infrastructure program; allocating resources; recruiting & guiding team members during the project till final delivery

·         Holding review meetings to monitor progress of the project as per schedule / budgets, and ensuring timely completion and delivery of the project to the client

·         Managed team of 70 working at different geographical locations

·         Coordination with Onsite PM’s, POC’s and Offshore Project Leads

·         Weekly Reviews and Status reporting to Senior Management and PMO

·         Responsible of performance monitoring and appraisal reporting associates

·         Participate in Account Wide initiatives, Process improvements etc. leading to better client satisfaction

 

Leading Retail Company – HIPAA Encryption (Fortune 5 Company)

 

Feb 2009 – Dec 2010

 

This project was done as part of US compliances to protect the patient data that is sent from stores to central data repository and from store to store. The socket connections were changed to web services as part of this project for around 15 different applications. This was a multi technology/platform project.

 

Job Responsibilities:

 

As an Onsite senior project manager, I was involved in the following activities

 

§         Actively involved in walkthroughs and meetings with the development team to discuss related issues.

§         Lead a team of around 45 for strategic application development initiatives, End-to-End Deployment and Infrastructure.

§         Setting reasonable, challenging and clear expectations for people, and holding them accountable for meeting the expectations.

§         Managing personnel, schedule & lead meetings, sell appropriate ideas to business partners, access department needs and educate personnel in the effects of projected system changes.

§         Managing the overall schedule to ensure work is assigned and completed on time and within budget.

§         Identifying, managing and mitigating project risk.

§         Identifying, tracking, managing and resolving project issues.

§         Coordinated the rollout of the application to the different application areas. This involved a great deal of communication and coordination with the users. The critical programs were also piloted out in a few stores at a time before the actual rollout.

 

 

Leading Wholesale Company – Internationalization

 

April 2008 – Jan 2009

 

This project involves the modification of the legacy programs to enable online business in Canada. The old system was designed in such a way just to support US business. The most important task here was to ensure all legal laws and tax calculations are correct. The data flowing from website has to be processed after reaching the legacy before moving to all the reports.

 

All the changed modules were unit tested and later integrated and integration scripts were executed. Final round of system testing was done before handing the application to users for user acceptance testing.                                         

 

Responsibilities:

 

As an Onsite senior project manager, I was involved in the following activities

 

§         Actively involved in walkthroughs and design meetings with the development team to discuss related issues.

§         Leading a team of 40 for strategic application development initiatives, End-to-End Deployment and Infrastructure.

§         Managing personnel, schedule & lead meetings, sell appropriate ideas to business partners, access department needs and educate personnel in the effects of projected system changes.

§         Involved in test planning like identification and definition of test conditions, test scenarios and test cases.

§         Documented the identified bugs and tracked them to closure.

§         Coordinated the rollout of the application to the different application areas. This involved a great deal of communication and coordination with the users. The critical programs were also piloted out in a few warehouses at a time before the actual rollout.

§         Helped the client in creating the test environment for the execution of project.

§         Involved in creating the user acceptance test cases for the users.

 

 

Leading Wholesale Company - Warehouse and Depot Maintenance

 

Feb 2006 – March 2008

 

This project involves the maintenance of programs involving warehouse and depot details. The project was executed for a leading wholesale company in US. The project has many phases in its course. The TLOG phase is an enhancement on some of the existing programs.  This project incorporates the new Item Work File, Tender Work File, Item Production File and Tender Production File and replaces the logic related to the corresponding old ones. The changes include handling the old and new file fields and taking care of the type and size changes between the old and new file fields. It also involves the handling of the structure difference between the old and new files, refining the existing logic to fit in the new change and creating two similar logic paths for the old and new files were incorporated.

 

 

Responsibilities:

 

As an Onsite senior project manager, I was involved in the following activities

 

§         Managing personnel, schedule & lead meetings, sell appropriate ideas to business partners, access department needs and educate personnel in the effects of projected system changes.

§         Represented the Production Planning & Control; involved in sorting out of production related issues and interacting with Onshore & Offshore Support Team in resolving the same.

§         Communicating directly to the client to understand the requirements and to discuss the database design.

§         Providing the client with solutions for various design related issues.

§         Actively involved in system testing, and supported user acceptance testing of the accounting application.

§         Coordinated the installs.

§         Leading a team of fifteen members.

§         Extensively involved in the quality assurance and quality control activities.

§         Performed parallel testing on the applications worked on and ensured timely delivery.

 

 

Leading Wholesale Company – IDIM – Cigarette and Optical Testing

 

Sep 2005 – March 2006

 

IDIM cigarette and optical project calls for modifying the existing programs, creating new programs and creating/updating new back end files to fulfill the functionality as mentioned in the design specifications. From the buyers/ICS point of view, the changes for the item description, item maintenance, warehouse sign, link types and maintenance options should be visible for group items. The purpose is to bring departments Tobacco and Optical into the item setup process.

The scope of the project includes formulation of test strategy, creation of master test plan, user acceptance and integration script preparation, integration script execution, report of defects observed during testing and metrics. Also coordinate with the users the system and user acceptance testing.                                         

 

Responsibilities:

 

As an offshore senior project manager, I was involved in the following activities

 

§         Lead a team of 20 members.

§         Actively involved in walkthroughs and conference calls with the development team as well as onsite team to discuss related issues.

§         Took lead role in design meetings with the client and provided solutions for various design issues.

§         Helped the team in developing test cases and performed manual testing such as positive testing and negative testing.

§         Conducted functionality testing, integration testing, regression testing and system testing during the various phases of the project using the automated testing tool, TestBench.

§         Involved in test planning like identification and definition of test conditions, test scenarios and test cases.

§         Prepared and executed test cases according to the schedule and documented the test results in test execution documents.

§         Documented the identified bugs and tracked them to closure.

§         Coordinated the rollout of the application to the different application areas. This involved a great deal of communication and coordination with the users. The critical programs were also piloted out in a few warehouses at a time before the actual rollout.

§         Helped the client in creating the test environment for the execution of project.

§         Involved in creating the user acceptance test cases for the users.

 

 

Leading Wholesale Company – Operations Automation

 

May 2004 – Aug 2005

 

The purpose of this project was to automate the accounting jobs that are currently being manually submitted by the operators. The focus here was to move the jobs into IBM Advanced Job scheduler. The jobs were analyzed to identify the dependency relations before scheduling the jobs.                                          

 

Responsibilities:

 

As the project manager and business analyst, I was involved in the following activities

 

§         Took lead role in design meetings with the client and provided solutions for various design issues.

§         Identified the jobs that need to be automated and moved to Advanced Job Scheduler.

§         Prepared an analysis report of the impacts and the value addition to the client.

§         Leading a team of 30 for strategic application development initiatives, End-to-End Deployment and Infrastructure.

§         Actively involved in system testing, and supported user acceptance testing of the accounting application.

§         Actively involved in Applications Performance Monitoring, Change Management Process Improvement and Business Continuity Planning.

§         Coordinated the program installs.

§         Extensively involved in the quality assurance and quality control activities.

§         Performed parallel testing on the applications worked on and ensured timely delivery.

 

 

 

Leading Wholesale Company – Engineering Tasks

 

Jan 2003 - April 2004

 

This project involves the development of prompt programs to facilitate easier data entry in critical input fields used in all the user interface programs. The program also handles language translation required for users in different regions.

 

Another important task in the project is to replace the LDA values with procedures to ensure better readability and easy maintenance of code. Other tasks include removal of unused or redundant code from programs after proper analysis.

 

Upgrading of programs was done where the attributes of file fields are changed. It involves analysis of existing programs and modification of the logic to handle the new fields.                                         

 

Responsibilities:

 

As the project lead and QA engineer of the project, I was involved in the following activities:

 

§         Analyzing the program flow and creating Visio documents for the same.

§         Design, Coding, and testing the programs.

§         Prepared test documents detailing various approaches and steps for testing the different modules.

§         Executed the test cases, documented the test results and prepared the defect tracker for the defects found. Also ensured proper closure of the identified defects.

§         Supported integration and user acceptance testing.

 

 

Software Used:

RPG/400, ILE RPG, CL/400, TURNOVER, HAWKEYE, DB2/400, SQL/400, PDM, SEU, SDA, Query/400.

 

Leading Wholesale Company - Application Infrastructure Upgrade

 

April 2002 – Dec 2002

 

This project involves the upgrading of the Accounting and Inventory systems of a leading wholesale company in the US. The major tasks under this project include Warehouse Field Expansion and Buyer Field Expansion. It also includes the creation of external database interface programs to handle the extensive use of major files in the application programs.

 

Warehouse and Buyer Field expansion involves changing all the files to include the expanded warehouse and buyer fields and making necessary code changes in the application programs to make it compliant with the new database field sizes.

 

External database interface programs are used to incorporate selection screens for important user input fields. This task includes identification of fields that requires selection screens and creating programs for the files pertaining to these fields.

 

Responsibilities:

 

§         Prepared the business requirements and documented the same, created the design documents based on that and handed to the development team.

§         Creating the Visio document for the database structure and program flow.

§         Rewriting the programs with the new database.

§         Documented the identified bugs and tracked them to closure.

§         Coordinated the rollout of the application to the different application areas. This involved a great deal of communication and coordination with the users. The critical programs were also piloted out in a few warehouses at a time before the actual rollout.

 

Software Used:

RPG/400, ILE RPG, CL/400, TURNOVER, HAWKEYE, DB2/400, SQL/400, PDM, SEU, SDA, Query/400.

 

 

Modularization

 

Sep 2001 - March 2002

 

The project was done for a UK based logistics company. Project involved breaking up of 2 huge monolithic programs into several smaller modules for easier maintenance and scheduling and to reduce network traffic.

 

 

Responsibilities:

 

As an analyst, I was involved in the following activities

 

§         Communicating directly to the client to understand the requirements and to discuss the design.

§         Analyzing and debugging the existing programs as well as new programs to compare the functionality while testing.

§         Actively involved in parallel testing and system testing. 

 

Software Used:

RPG/400, CL/400, THENON, DB2, SDA, RLU, DFU, QUERY/400

 

Leading Wholesale Company – Lawson Upgrade

 

April 2001 - Aug 2001

 

This project was done for a leading US based retailer. US Technology provided the client with an upgrade of its HR Module, from Lawson 6.1 to Lawson 7.2. The objective of this project was the conversion of all Lawson programs from version 6.1 to 7.2. The onsite and offshore development centers provided support on Quarter- End and Year- End operations of the client. Enhancements were also made to some of the existing programs.

US Technology was responsible for upgrading the Human Resource Module within the Lawson ERP Package.  Initially, US Technology worked with end users and the operation staff to provide business continuity on all applications. US Technology provided a 24 x 365 support to the customer, using onsite and offshore resources. US Technology provided on-call (pager) production support, bug fixing for any production defects encountered, handling of ad hoc requests, implementation of enhancements and any development of new applications.

US Technology was also heavily engaged in analyzing business processes for potential process improvements.

 

Responsibilities:

 

As the QA Engineer of the project, I was involved in the following activities:

 

§         Design, Coding, and testing the programs.

§         Prepared test documents detailing various approaches and steps for testing the HR and Payroll modules.

§         Executed the test cases, documented the test results and prepared the defect tracker for the defects found. Also ensured proper closure of the identified defects.

§         Supported integration and user acceptance testing.

 

 

Software Used:

Lawson, RPG/400, ILE RPG, CL/400, ILE CL and DB2/400.             

 

 

Accounts Management system

 

Dec 2000 – March 2001

 

This was a web-based project, which was intended to automate the Accounts Management System for a US based company. My task was to update the database with data from Word Document and Excel Sheet directly. The Word Document and Excel Sheet were first uploaded to the server and then data in the respective documents were written to the database accordingly. The developing platform was ASP. Oracle was the back end.

 

Responsibilities:

Module Lead, Preparation of design specifications, Screen Designing, Creation of Dataflow Diagrams & Test Plans, Coding, Reviewing, Testing and Research.

 

Software Used:

Front end-ASP (VB Script, JavaScript), Back end-Oracle.             

 

 

Intranet 

 

Sep 2000 – Nov 2000

 

This is a web-based project, which aimed at integrating the different departments under a desktop. This could be described as a secured internal website where all employees have access based on their roles and designations. It comprised of 11 modules of which I was a part of 4 modules. The project provided ample opportunity for unit testing, integration testing and system testing.

 

Responsibilities:

Module Lead, Preparation of design specifications, Screen Designing, Creation of Dataflow Diagrams & Test Plans, Coding, Reviewing, Testing.

 

Software Used:

Front end-ASP (VB Script, JavaScript), Back end-Oracle.             

 

 

§         Bachelor of Technology in Mechanical Engineering, Kerala University (1995 -1999)

§         IBM Certified Specialist eServer iSeries RPG ILE Programmer

§         Certification in PMP, CSM and SP

§         Service Delivery Management

§         Software Project Management

§         Global Delivery

§         Program Management

§         Portfolio Management

§         Resource Management

§         Financial & Budget Management

§         Agile Methodologies

§         SDLC

§         Business Development

§         Consulting

§         Vendor Management

§         Project Management Professional (PMP)

§         Certified Scrum Master (CSM)

§         Scaled Agile Practitioner (SP)

§         i-Series (AS400)

§         Testing