Summary
Overview
Work History
Education
Skills
Accomplishments
Professional Highlights
Certifications
Technical Skills
Timeline
Generic

NEERAJ THAKRAL

Summary

Results-driven Senior Management Leader with 15 years of expertise in driving technology and business projects and portfolios. Proven track record in leading large-scale initiatives with budgets exceeding $5M and Agile coaching. Adept at optimizing processes, implementing PMO best practices, and aligning technology solutions with business goals. Skilled in fostering collaboration, building high-performance teams, and leveraging data-driven insights for decision-making excellence

Overview

16
16
years of professional experience

Work History

Director, Program and Portfolio Management

RINGCENTRAL
05.2022 - Current
  • Lead and mentor global team (US, EMEA, Asia) of PMs and Scrum Masters to deliver critical business and IT strategic programs.
  • Perform portfolio management, roadmap development, annual planning, budgets, capacity planning and forecasting, and drive Steering committee and QBR meetings
  • Enhanced PMO processes, resulting in a 20% increase in on-scope project success rate; sourced centralized PPM tool.
  • Enforce rigorous adherence to industry-standard ALM, SDLC, and ITLM lifecycle processes, and compliances/data governance policies.
  • Manage staffing, team priorities, resource utilization, appraisals, training, and enhance team productivity and morale.

Senior Manager, Business Technology Programs

WELLS FARGO
06.2020 - 04.2022
  • Served as trusted strategic partner/liaison between Consumer Small Business Banking, Digital ecommerce business leaders and IT Portfolio leaders, aligning IT services with business value; developed annual roadmaps, planned and monitored budgets, and promoted a culture of collaboration.
  • Built new project intake mechanism via ServiceDesk, improved productivity 30% while reducing operational costs by 15%
  • Led projects for Enterprise apps migration to the cloud, AI/ML for Digital, ATM fraud prevention, LMS and MongoDB setup.
  • Awarded multiple “Shared Success” awards from executive leadership for achieving 100% timely service delivery via proactive risk identification and obstruction removal.

Senior Consultant, Program Management

RODAN AND FIELDS, SAFEWAY, FIRST REPUBLIC BANK
06.2017 - 05.2020
  • Translated product roadmap and vision into concrete functional programs and projects for the IT domains of E-Commerce, Retail stores, pharmacy, consumer banking, supply chain, and ITSM, spanning across local and Azure/AWS hybrid cloud data centers.
  • Drove migration of critical applications to IaaS/SaaS platforms to support International business growth and high availability.
  • Led high-risk projects like warehouse order management upgrade, integrating transportation management, Azure hybrid and private cloud setup, stores wireless network upgrades, 4-step checkout, and end-user UX experience enhancement.
  • Developed processes for lifecycle management of infrastructure, applications, and databases, vulnerability and patch management, production deployment and rollback plans, UAT/QA testing, change controls, and accurate documentation.
  • Enhanced process improvement through gap analysis; implemented SDLC KPIs and provided RAG/metric reports to executives.

Senior Manager,Technical Operations

RESTORATION HARDWARE
09.2013 - 04.2017
  • Managed global team of PMs, DevOps, Release train, Engineering, and MSPs; oversaw bi-weekly sprint releases and production support.
  • Achieved $2M savings through strategic negotiations, SLA optimization, and efficient vendor management.
  • Launched new websites, integrated middleware, optimized web page load time, implemented membership program, co-branded credit cards, loyalty programs, targeted promotion project, personalization and real-time end-user monitoring.

Senior Technical Lead-ECom Infrastructure and Ops

WILLIAMS SONOMA
04.2008 - 09.2012
  • Led global teams comprising DevOps, SRE, Middleware, and Release Management for Agile software delivery using SDLC process.
  • Pioneered the company's first VMware-based virtualization and Private cloud solution for the entire IT infrastructure.
  • Provided reliability, security, and consistent support, maintaining 99.9% uptime for five high-volume e-commerce websites.
  • Led the implementation and enforcement of company security policies and compliance procedures, including PCI, and SOX.

Education

Bachelor of Science - Computer Technology

University of Bombay
Mumbai

Skills

  • Strategy Thought Leadership
  • Innovation
  • Vendor Management
  • Risk Management
  • Process Improvement and Standardization
  • Roadmap Development
  • Compliance and Governance
  • Business Operations and Strategy
  • Stakeholder Engagement
  • Analytical and Critical Thinking
  • Budgeting and Forecasting

Accomplishments

Facilitated $4M savings in a year through licensing and usage cost savings, consolidating enterprise applications, restructuring corporate procurement, and improving workflows and automations.

Reduced costs by $500k YoY by systemizing global regulatory compliance management and merging salesforce instances within 6 months; increased cross-functional groups administrative efficiency.

Boosted PMO efficiency, leading to a 20% increase in project success rates, implemented a centralized portfolio and project management tool, improving project tracking and reporting.

Championed adoption of advanced project management methodologies (Agile/hybrid), resulting in a 15% reduction in project delivery time and a 10% decrease in project costs; converted multiple projects from waterfall to Agile Scrum/Kanban model.

Strengthened relationship and saved $1M+ by renegotiating contracts, SOWs and service level agreements with vendors and MSPs, and enabling process improvements and support models.


Professional Highlights

  • Spearheaded development and execution of multi-year, multi-million business and technology roadmaps and initiatives, aligning IT with business goals and OKRs; resulted in a 40% increase in productivity, efficiency, and $2M annual YoY savings.
  • Delivered complex programs across Fortune 500 ecommerce, digital platforms, retail stores, customer relationship management solutions, and supply chain, achieving significant milestones in new GTM product/website launches, UX/UI enhancement, integrations, browsing, checkout, order process and SEO.
  • Facilitated complex projects within the finance and banking technology domains, spanning core banking, payment processing platform, fraud detection and prevention, and improved user personalization experience.
  • Led critical oversight of 24x7 global IT operations across Fortune 1000 companies, emphasizing operational excellence in data security, scalability, resiliency, reliability, and uptime.
  • Demonstrated expertise in PCI compliance, payment system, data encryption, SOX, ITIL, and PII, GDPR and CCPA regulations.
  • Setup, trained, and mentored support teams of PMs, DevOps, TechOps, and SREs; contributed to a 20% reduction in turnover.

Certifications

Certified Scrum Master, PMP, CISSP, AWS SA-Associate, CISA, CCSP

Certified MCP, MCSE, CCNA, HP Server Technologies, Linux/Containers

Technical Skills

Project Management (MS Project, MS Office Suite, GSuite, Smartsheet, Clarity, Jira, Confluence) 

Collaboration (Confluence, Wrike, Sharepoint, MS Teams, Slack) 

SDLC (SVN, JIRA, Bamboo, Jenkins, Git, TFS, Agile/Scrum/Kanban) 

Ticket/Bug Tracking (Remedy, Zendesk, JIRA, Service-Now)

Cloud (VMWare, AWS, MS Azure, Google)

Technologies (Java, Tomcat, .Net, Apache, Weblogic, JBoss, Salesforce)  

Timeline

Director, Program and Portfolio Management

RINGCENTRAL
05.2022 - Current

Senior Manager, Business Technology Programs

WELLS FARGO
06.2020 - 04.2022

Senior Consultant, Program Management

RODAN AND FIELDS, SAFEWAY, FIRST REPUBLIC BANK
06.2017 - 05.2020

Senior Manager,Technical Operations

RESTORATION HARDWARE
09.2013 - 04.2017

Senior Technical Lead-ECom Infrastructure and Ops

WILLIAMS SONOMA
04.2008 - 09.2012

Bachelor of Science - Computer Technology

University of Bombay

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NEERAJ THAKRAL