Ashok Gullapalli

McDonald’s uses the Saba LMS platform for enterprise-wide training for its worldwide restaurants and Corporate. The project is to fetch the Users, Content, and transcripts from Saba into LXP and create Channels, Pathways, and Journeys and create groups to then curate content for the groups for Crew members, Crew Leads and Shift Leads, Department Leads and Owner Operators in the restaurants. The project is underway with the businesses targeted to Go Live in Nov 2024.

• Create a detailed Work stream plan with cross-functional collaboration.
• Create and manage a detailed Project plan.
• Escalated risks and issues early during the project cycle, and drive mitigation plans.
• Conduct Weekly internal and Customer-facing status meetings, and provide detailed project updates.
• Participate in Customer design and Business Process Workshops.
• Create a Governance dashboard, conduct Governance meetings, and provide high-level status updates to Cornerstone and Customer Stakeholders.
• Lead data migration work stream with cross-functional teams in an Agile approach.
• Manage parallel work streams, and communicate inter-dependencies between the projects.
• Manage Issues log, drive ETA and resolution on issues, and incorporate lessons learned into the masterwork stream.
• Anticipate and raise issues and risks, work towards mitigating the risks early during the project cycle, and ensure the sponsors and exec team are in the loop throughout the risk mitigation process.
• Lead Customer UAT and conduct status meetings, work towards timely resolution of issues.
• Create and Execute Production cutover plan based on work items and lessons learned during non-Prod execution.
• Lead Hypercare and hand over implementation to Support.

Cornerstone partner SAI needed their LMS portals to be renamed and migrated to AWS. The project involved 40+ portal renames and migrations, coordinating with internal Cornerstone infrastructure and several cross functional implementation teams.

One of the GE business units migrated from SumTotal to Cornerstone LMS. The project involved integrating Cornerstone LMS with LXP, migrating legacy historical training completions and assignments into LXP and integrating the systems using Nova connector.

Responsibilities:

• Create detailed Work stream plan with cross functional collaboration.
• Create and manage detailed Project plan.
• Escalated risks and issues early during the project cycle, drive mitigation plans.
• Conduct Weekly internal and Customer facing status meetings, provide detailed project updates.
• Participate in Customer design and Business Process Workshops.
• Create Governance dashboard, conduct Governance meetings and provide high level status updates to Cornerstone and Customer Stakeholders.
• Lead data migration work stream with cross functional teams in an Agile approach.
• Manage parallel work streams, communicate inter-dependencies between the projects.
• Manage Issues log, drive ETA and resolution on issues, incorporate lessons learned into the master work stream.
• Anticipate and raise issues and risks, work towards mitigating the risks early during the project cycle, ensure the sponsors and exec team is in the loop throughout the risk mitigation process.
• Lead Customer UAT and conduct status meeting, work towards timely resolution of issues.
• Create and Execute Production cutover plan based on work items and lessons learned during non-Prod execution.
• Lead Hypercare and hand over the implementation to Support.
• Defect tracking using JIRA.

Description: GE uses the SumTotal LMS platform for enterprise-wide training needs. GE is spinning off into 3 business units – GE Aerospace, GE Healthcare, and Vernova. The project is to segregate the LMS system into 3 sites, inactivate and purge the other business data from each site, extract the data, and provide it to each business for archival purposes. The project went with the businesses Go Live in Dec 2023.

Responsibilities:

• Create a detailed Work stream plan with cross-functional collaboration.
• Create and manage a detailed Project plan.
• Escalated risks and issues early during the project cycle, and drive mitigation plans.
• Conduct Weekly internal and Customer-facing status meetings, and provide detailed project updates.
• Create a governance dashboard, conduct Governance meetings, and provide high-level status updates to Cornerstone and Customer Stakeholders.
• Lead scripts work stream with cross-functional teams in an Agile approach.
• Manage parallel work streams, and communicate inter-dependencies between the projects.
• Manage Issues log, drive ETA and resolution on issues, and incorporate lessons learned into the masterwork stream.
• Create aProduction cutover plan based on work items and lessons learned during non-Prod execution.
• Convert Customer content using Adobe Captivate in Scorm format, deploy on the Stage site validate, and move to Production.

Description: SumTotal LMS SaaS platform has been implemented for Sunbelt, Organon, Global Payments, PAE, and UTA.

• Worked with cross-functional teams within Cornerstone and Customer to create a detailed Project plan.
• Kick off the project along with slide deck coordinating with Customer Project Manager.
• Coordinate Process and Configuration workshops.
• Create detailed Data Migration mapping and work plan to migrate customers’ HR and historical training data.
• Create course content using Cornerstone authoring tools and Articulate 360.
• Create Curriculum and training plans grouping course content for targeted training.
• Develop customer reports using SSRS – Bids Studio, Jaspersoft Studio and PowerBI.
• Create a UAT test plan and collaborate with Customer teams to ensure resources are allocated for the UAT testing.
• Coordinate UAT & Issues status calls with Customer, Cornerstone Project, and Support teams.
• Internal triage of issues and ensure issues are resolved in a timely manner.
• Create Governance dashboard, conduct Governance meetings, raise issues and risks early, inform stakeholders, collaborate with cross functional groups, and take mitigation steps.
• Coordinate Go/No-Go touch point meetings.
• Create detailed Production cutover plan and ensure resources are aligned to complete the cutover activities.
• Coordinate smooth post-Go Live and hyper-care activities and hand them over to Support.

Description: A unified Learning and Talent Management dashboard was developed for Spirit Airlines for Managers to be able to view assigned compliance training based on the primary job of direct reports. A calendar shows a list of upcoming Instructor-Led training scheduled. Detailed Learner view shows the assigned training progress for each individual Learner.

Responsibilities:

• Designed the solution with complex Jaspersoft Rest APIs, Angular, jQuery, and Bootstrap.
• Created functional and design documents.
• Developed a complex dashboard to meet customer needs.
• Collaborated with SumTotal and Project team to deploy and test the solution on the Stage site.
• Deployed the solution on Production and support through Hypercare.
• Deploy using Azure CI/CD pipeline.
• Source code control and defect tracking using Azure DevOps and GitHub.

Walmart rolled out the SumTotal LMS solution to Global stores and offices worldwide. SumTotal solution was installed on the Walmart premised environment with Windows web server and database on Oracle. The learning content resides on a centralized server that is served to the store training machines. Employees complete mandatory on the job and compliance training before they attend their job duties.

Responsibilities:

• Working onsite at Bentonville, AR, coordinating their installations.
• Create migration scripts and migrate data of 50 million records from legacy LMS to the SumTotal Oracle database.
• Coordinate with Walmart management teams and SumTotal to effort estimate the web and database hardware.
• Install the pre-requisite software and SumTotal solution meeting Walmart security requirements.
• Collaborate with Walmart QA team to test the application, triage and resolve issues in a timely manner.
• Participate in Governance meetings, provide status updates, identify and mitigate risks early during the project cycle.

Description: SumTotal LMS SaaS platform has been implemented for Abbott Medical and American Airlines. The Customers are on a SumTotal hosted platform that need to be upgraded on yearly basis. The upgrade involves coordinating with SumTotal Cloud Ops, Engineering, Support and Customer teams through a detailed and tightly controlled Stage and Production cutover.

Responsibilities:

• Worked with cross-functional teams within SumTotal and Customer to create a detailed Project plan.
• Kick off the project along with slide deck coordinating with Customer Project Manager.
• Coordinate Process and Configuration workshops.
• Create course content using Cornerstone authoring tools and Articulate 360.
• Create Curriculum and training plans grouping course content for targeted training.
• Develop customer reports using SSRS – Bids Studio, Jaspersoft Studio and PowerBI.
• Create detailed upgrade plan to upgrade Customer’s Stage and Production environment to latest version.
• Coordinate UAT & Issues status calls with Customer, SumTotal Project, and Support teams.
• Internal triage of issues and ensure issues are resolved in a timely manner.
• Create Governance dashboard, conduct Governance meetings, raise issues and risks early, inform stakeholders, collaborate with cross functional groups, and take mitigation steps.
• Coordinate Go/No-Go touch point meetings.
• Create detailed Production cutover plan and ensure resources are aligned to complete the cutover activities.
• Coordinate smooth post-Go Live and hyper-care activities and hand them over to Support.

Harley Davidson implemented SumTotal LMS upgraded from Docent LMS and is hosted with SumTotal Data Center. SumTotal Professional Services team delivered huge complex customizations which they previously had in Docent LMS. LMS is rolled out to both internal HDMC employees and Harley Davidson University for external dealers. They have huge customizations like On Job Training, Recognition Learning Activity Structures, and many other customizations to satisfy their business requirements for internal and external employees.

Role: I was involved in development of the customizations to the product. I created the functional specification with customer requirements, created detailed design documents and involved in development using C# .Net, jQuery, JavaScript and SQL server and release of the customizations. I was then involved in implementing the SumTotal solution onsite at Milwaukee WI, coordinated their Test Plans for UAT testing and helped them with any consulting questions on the product, coordinated with the India team, and resolved issues with the implementation. Received accolades from both the customer and SumTotal Senior Management.

EDS was a Absorb LMS Customer. Absorb LMS was customized to be shown in a window frame of their already existing portal. A customized page was built to be shown in the window frame and deep linking was provided to various screens in LMS. LMS web services were modified to get various data related to manager approvals, evaluations. etc and reports shown in their portal on the data. LMS Notifications was modified to not send and stop any notifications and access EDS web services and send these notifications related data.

Responsibilities:

I completely owned the project deliverables. I was involved during design and development phase to identify many gaps with the customizations and set up calls with customer and onsite IC/PM team to resolve these gaps/issues. The client application was developed using classic ASP, JavaScript, and SQL server. I was involved in UAT phase with the customer to identify, debug and resolve issues for successful Go Live.

Description: Shell International was a new implementation with SumTotal with several customizations like Self-registration for learners to create their own accounts, guest account access. They had huge customisations related to Data sync, data migration and almost every part of SumTotal LMS.

• Defined project scope and objectives.
• Gathered and analysed customer data & user requirements, prepared test plan and test scenarios based on user stories.
• Write functional specifications and Design SumTotal Product customizations based on Customer requirements to User registration, approvals.
• Develop Customization changes based on Functional Specifications.
• Performed Unit testing, and support QA team during testing cycles.
• Support Test and Production deployment.
• Hypercare and ongoing support.
• Worked with globally distributed teams, onshore and offshore, UK, and India.