Ajay Anand Venugopal
San Antonio,Texas
Summary
Software Engineer turned Technical Program Manager with strong passion for building products focused on exceeding customer needs with 10+ years of experience in Technical Program Management, Software development, Project Management, Systems Design and Integration.
Overview
20
20
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Senior Business Systems Design Specialist
Valero Energy Corporation
San Antonio, TX
06.2010 - Current
- Drove initiative to successfully improve overall risk management application latency by 20% by working with dev teams to improve API responses and implementing better caching and load balancing techniques.
- Successfully managed and delivered many high visibility projects from initiation to closure with tight deadlines and limited resources to support Valero’s business needs resulting in 15% increase in customer satisfaction.
- Directed the product development lifecycle of Valero Marketplace, an app to buy/sell and bid on items from prototype development to companywide rollout leading to 200% increase in Valero marketplace transactions.
- Held focus group with target users of up to 40+ people over 3 weeks to generate product requirements and features list, prioritized user stories, developed timelines and roadmap for future product release cycles.
- Organized meetings with multiple dev and cross functional teams to brainstorm and develop the appropriate system architecture weighing the pros and cons of different technical options and influenced the final outcome.
- Organized daily scrums to monitor project team progress and tracked defects in JIRA from inception to closure.
- Managed concept-to-launch of commercial retail front-end solution using Agile methodology, enabling real-time monitoring of online customer transactions leading to $20M increase in annual product revenue.
- Created detailed project plans, schedules and WBS and coordinated everyday tasks of project teams; tracked and reported Project status across multiple disciplines to relevant stakeholders resulting in 100% on time delivery.
- Developed high quality metrics and SLAs to track project success leading to company wide acceptance of the developed products and solutions and appreciation from the CIO.
- Interacted with Project Leads, Product Managers, other TPMs, multiple development & cross functional teams to define and deliver complex features.
- Anticipated bottlenecks, provided escalation management, anticipated and made tradeoffs, and balanced business needs versus technical constraints.
- Ensured products met or exceeded customer expectations. Excelled at gathering feedback and requirements; communicating changes to dev teams and overseeing high-quality rollouts to on-time and on-budget conclusion.
- Built Python app to track expenses, process and approve claims leading to 32% reduction in overhead.Followed ITIL Service management guidelines to monitor enterprise wide metrics, turnaround times and SLAs for incident responses and change management at Valero.
- Designed and built large-scale data processing solutions by developing intelligent algorithms and data pipelines that extract, cleanse, classify, merge, and deliver new insights improving sales forecasts projections by 50%.
- Conducted Business Objects workshop leveraging on relevant business data to train and coach 40 business users making them self-sufficient and reducing reporting related support requests by 60%.
- Created advanced and beautiful data visualizations using Tableau to visually track region level sales and profits by drilling down and slicing and dicing of data to answer key business questions and provide actionable insights.
Senior Software Engineer
HCL Technologies
Chennai, India
07.2005 - 07.2008
- Implemented an online policy ordering and management portal for an insurance company and supported the transition from legacy mainframe to a modern J2EE based portal, leading to a 270% increase in sales revenue.
- Developed a loosely coupled SOA based e-Commerce solution in Java for a retail chain improving system scalability and reusability drastically and in the process boosting performance by 80%.
- Built complex tools in REXX language to automate manual file processing tasks thereby eliminating human errors and saving 2000 man hours in the process.
- Managed offshore dev team of 6 consultants, formulated implementation plans, handled complex deliveries by maximizing resource utilization ensuring zero schedule slippage and achieving 97% customer satisfaction index.
- Played a pivotal role on a special team that was handpicked to transform a troubled project into a successful one, thereby contributing to salvage an important client relationship.
Projects at Texas A & M University
Texas A & M University
College Station, TX
08.2008 - 05.2010
- Floorbook (2010) : A social network for professors to share research updates, Q & A Sessions, online chat, document tagging and searching. Java; JSP; AJAX.
- Data Warehousing (2009): Designed Data warehouse, performed ETL to facilitate OLAP analysis, pattern matching and visual analytics to forecast sales numbers and project customer trends. SQL; SSIS; SSAS; SSRS.
- Data Mining : Used SAS enterprise miner and SQL to cleanse, transform and validate data for analyzing patterns in customer churn data for a software company by running competing models. Logistic Regression, Linear etc.
Education
Master of Science - Management of Information Systems, GPA 3.82
Texas A & M University
College Station, TXBachelor of Science - Information Technology, GPA 3.91
Anna University
Chennai, TN, IndiaSkills
- Technical Program Management
- Project Management
- Software Design and Architecture
- Managing multiple projects in parallel
- Leading and managing cross functional teams
- Exceptional organizing skills
- Extremely good at multitasking with the ability to handle and prioritize multiple assignments in parallel
- Detail oriented with the ability to dive deep down
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills
- Requirements Gathering and Analysis
- Programming: Java, Python, R Programming Language, NET
- BI Tools: Tableau, Business Objects, SSIS, SSRS, Crystal Reports, Dashboards, Xcelsius
- Databases: PostGreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, My SQL, P/L SQL, MS Access
- Other Skills: Agile, SDLC, ERP, SAP, Atlassian Jira, HP QC, MS Project
Certification
- PMP (Project Management Professional, Apr 2017
- SAP SD (Order Management), Sep 2015
- ITIL V3, Aug 2009
- Texas State Grant, Mays Business School, 2008-2010
- Sun Certified Java Programmer, Aug 2006
- Outstanding Employee Award , HCL Technologies, 2005 to 2007
Timeline
Senior Business Systems Design Specialist
Valero Energy Corporation
06.2010 - Current
Projects at Texas A & M University
Texas A & M University
08.2008 - 05.2010
Senior Software Engineer
HCL Technologies
07.2005 - 07.2008
Master of Science - Management of Information Systems, GPA 3.82
Texas A & M University
Bachelor of Science - Information Technology, GPA 3.91
Anna University
- PMP (Project Management Professional, Apr 2017
- SAP SD (Order Management), Sep 2015
- ITIL V3, Aug 2009
- Texas State Grant, Mays Business School, 2008-2010
- Sun Certified Java Programmer, Aug 2006
- Outstanding Employee Award , HCL Technologies, 2005 to 2007
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