Manish Gulati

• Served as primary interface between business channels and internal departments, aligning needs of sales and finance departments with customer service realities. Helped identify business direction for multi-phase implementation of cloud initiatives on the Salesforce.com platform.
• Responsible for managing through entire lifecycle, a portfolio of projects, 5-10 at a time, ranging from $500K to $ 0 M to transition on-premise applications to cloud for mortgage servicing, retail banking, retirement planning & financial advisory, wealth management, insurance services departments.
• Organized and managed teams involving business and IT champions and major user constituencies, to determine current challenges and future goals for their departments to supporting maximizing overall return on investment (ROI).
• Formed multi-departmental roundtable to discuss optimizations to address departmental weaknesses.
• Managed teams of business SMEs to document business requirements and functional steps required to meet the stated business objectives. Experienced with utilizing a variety of tools to gather business requirements such as workshops, surveys, site visits, business process descriptions, use cases, scenarios, task and workflow analysis.
• Collaborated with internal system architects, data architects, infrastructure team members and consulting service providers to define and explore business challenges, creating technical roadmaps based on findings. Led several team discussions to analyze and mediate conflicts between business and system teams comprising of up to 125 team members.
• Managed professional services performed by vendor partners (SFDC architects/consultants) to ratify design for most optimal solutions for integration across Salesforce platform apps with other source systems. Ensured documentation of changes to the design and implementation of Salesforce.com platform.
• Managed scrum ceremonies such as sprint planning, retrospectives, stand-ups and team velocity tracking. Also responsible for test planning, release planning, deployment planning, and user training and communication efforts.
• Responsible for reporting and communicating with internal and external customers to report project status to Senior VPs/CXO levels in organization.
• Interfaced with internal IT development teams to integrate new technologies, streamlining use of existing systems to reduce operational timelines by 70%.
• Wrote and updated numerous online and hard copy training manuals used within company and at remote offices.
• Defined and managed feedback loop, integrating customer complaints and suggestions into future programmatic changes.

• Orchestrated a portfolio of several projects at a time within strict timeframes and budget constraints to support business model changes required by the Affordable Care Act such as product implementation of downmarket ASO product, Women's preventive services benefits and maternity mandates for all health plans, 80/20 Medical Loss Ratio, transition to POP to PCPM sales commissions model.
• Ensured accurate management of project budgets, forecasts and actual expenses within the portfolio management system while adhering to effective change control procedures and processes to maintain control on scope, schedule and cost
• Managed budgets ranging from $ 0.5 M to $ 8M per project and team sizes of up to 225 team members on a single project.
• Responsible for activities including detailed business requirements gathering, systems planning, resource management, sizing, sprint planning, release planning, architectural design, SIT and UAT testing, operational readiness, issues and risk management, deployment and warranty
• Responsible for ensuring documentation and approval of project artifacts through entire SDLC (e.g. business and system requirements, use cases, GUI and screen, interface designs, functional specifications and system design specifications, release plan, SOPs and user training guides, product documentation updates etc.)
• Responsible for constructively challenging business units on their assumptions of partnering with senior business leaders to improve efficiency through adaptation to new systems and processes
• Developed and cultivated lucrative relationships with both new and existing clients through effective communication and exemplary interpersonal skills.
• Assisted business managers to monitor adoption rates and respond as needed (e.g., additional training sessions, communication, system modifications, etc.)
• Responsible for facilitating buy-in on complex handshakes between system areas and business areas.Delivered informative, well-organized presentations

Bluecross & Blueshield

Led and managed efforts for strategic planning, implementation and quality for several large-scale technology projects. Projects included integration of consumer driven healthcare into the company portal and other initiatives such as Section 508 compliance, Healthy Indiana Plan(HIP) amongst others.Worked with moderate guidance to track project budgets, schedules, software, hardware and labor costs and report project progress and performance while managing a very agile set of requirements.

Dell Corporation

Responsible for end-to-end planning and implementation of Online Customer Stewardship portal - Project scope involved creation of Datamart (from existing Dell Datawarehouse), ETL design and architecture, design and implementation of Business ObjectsTM interface (including universe and front-end design), for Dell Corporate Customers to access their Purchase, Service and Quality histories. Staffed and managed project team members, defined roles and responsibilities and facilitated conflict resolution. Facilitated identification of business and technical drivers for the project using Dell’s Horizon Project Management Methodology in a dynamic and innovation-oriented environment. Responsible for managing project critical path and eliminating project risks, adhering to policies and procedures in a multi-stakeholder environment.

Pearson Education

Successfully planned and executed two major and one minor application releases to introduce high availability on Pearson Education’s flagship portal product with over 2 million users (students/ teachers). Worked with co-project managers, engineering managers/leads, operations managers/leads, quality leaders, product managers (Business), and their teams using scrum methodology.Contributed to process re-engineering and enforcement in a dynamic environment including - Service Request Management, Availability and Capacity Management, Change Management and Incident Management. Responsible for driving enhancements to standard operating procedures and tools to improve efficiency, remove roadblocks, increase quality to handle explosive growth.

Wells Fargo Bank

Led the efforts of feasibility analysis, task planning and resource planning, vendor contract management (Oracle Professional Services for use of Shareplex) for “tech-refresh” of Siebel CRM System to use Oracle RAC on Linux. Managed end-to-end activities; initiation, planning, resource management, budgeting, purchasing, coordinating architecture design and technical specifications activities, controlling and monitoring hardware and software acquisition, implementation and testing for multiple implementations of COTS solutions.

• Led and coordinated the efforts of a team of 5 people for design and development of an "email middleware" system using the JavaMail API. This system provides the architecture for delivery of value added hybrid mail services from the client’s portal.
• Conceptualized and implemented the e-shopping section of the website, using EJBs. As independent technical contribution, reviewed and enhanced the client's proprietary XML-based metadata repository for Application objects.
• Conducted design and code reviews for the "network monitoring web-service", a custom web interface application to the network failure backend. This was done in light of the stringent QoS requirements of 99.5% or greater availability. Worked Java as a consultant to the Java Core design team.
• Conducted comparative analysis of the replacement system for performance, scalability, reliability and maintainability capabilities on several client applications.

• Conducted "Feasibility study and proposal preparation" for the Client (P&O Nedloyd) for use of emerging Web technologies in the "Help module" of ATLAS (A Database Application linked to global databases of the client managing geo-tracking of vessels and containers).
• Independently designed, developed and deployed the "Browser based Help System" using XML, Java Servlets, Oracle Forms. Was responsible for migration of two project modules of the project to the J2EE Platform.
• Web-enabled the "Batch Request Facility" (A separate project of the same client), using Oracle ATS Framework (A framework for Java Server Side programming, HTML Templates etc. Managed performance Tuning and optimizing Network Performance of the ATLAS Application- an extensive Data Warehousing application.