Sreedhar Balakrishnan

• Developed and implemented comprehensive strategies to improve operational processes and organizational efficiency.
• Collaborated with senior leadership to set long-term objectives for the company.
• Recruited, trained, supervised, evaluated and mentored staff members.
• Identified opportunities for improvement in operational performance metrics.
• Conducted regular meetings with department heads to review progress on strategic initiatives.
• Created detailed plans outlining timelines, goals, budgets, staffing needs and other requirements for projects.
• Assessed employee performance against established benchmarks or targets.
• Implemented systems for tracking progress on key initiatives or projects.
• Cultivated strong relationships with customers by responding promptly to inquiries or complaints.
• Facilitated collaboration between teams by encouraging open communication channels.
• Managed crisis situations to minimize impact on operations and reputation.
• Promoted a culture of innovation and encouraged staff to contribute ideas.
• Analyzed data to inform decision-making and strategic direction.
• Suggested new technologies to streamline processes and enhance productivity.
• Facilitated professional development programs to build a high-performing team.
• Successfully made sure the transition and KT were complete across all portfolios.
• Helped create a QE TCOE team for the customer.
• Created a roadmap for automation for the customer and built/mentored a high-performing automation team, fostering a culture of innovation and continuous improvement that enhanced team productivity by 25%.
• Collaborated with IT and business units to define automation roadmaps, aligning technology solutions with organizational goals and customer needs.
• Helped in building automation framework and automating 80%+ of the customers' regression suite.
• Created a performance framework for the customer.
• Spearheaded strategic consulting deals with small to medium clients.
• Adept with new business development and relationship management.
• Manage global teams across different geographies.
• Present monthly steering reports to the IT and business leadership, which includes CxO and CxO-1.
• Manage projects of different contractual and delivery models.

• Work closely with insurance product/digital partners like Duckcreek, Talkdesk, Whatfix, Novidea, and Invoice cloud to provide digital solutions to insurance carriers/brokers.
• Ensure customer-driven design by meeting with customers to understand their challenges and objectives.
• Implement transformation initiatives like cycle time optimization, hyper-automation to accelerate IT delivery, and speed up Business Product Launches.
• Use analytics and user research to identify opportunities where IT services can be offered to improve user experience.
• Collaborated with sales, delivery, and service teams to manage seamless client experiences.
• Consulted with teams on established best practices and process improvements.
• Ensure customer-driven design by meeting with customers to understand their challenges and objectives.
• Formulate IT key priorities aligning with business objectives and establish realistic roadmaps.

• Owned multiple programs under the insurance portfolio, which accounts for 16M in annual revenue across value streams like Life Products, Global Wealth and Asset Management, Long Term Care, and Digital Transformation. This includes all QA functions, including vulnerability and performance testing.
• Increased the review of the account by 60% in 4 years.
• Work closely with the customer in defining the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and responsible for tracking them.
• Drive extensive automation and mandate in-sprint automation along with DevOps principles.
• Implement transformation initiatives like cycle time optimization, hyper-automation to accelerate IT delivery, and speed up Business Product Launches.
• Directed the implementation of automated testing tools and practices, leading to a 50% improvement in testing efficiency and faster release cycles.
• Create and present monthly steering reports to the business leadership.
• Review and highlight business and technical risks to key Business and IT stakeholders.
• Mentor and challenge the team to bring creative solutions to the project and apply continuous improvement techniques.
• Perform resource planning, tracking, hiring, and forecasting.
• Handle issues, evolving requirement changes by establishing ideas and innovative solutions to business with respect to budget, operational excellence and regulatory adherence
• Established quality metrics and performance indicators that drove accountability and transparency across product development teams
• Manage global teams with 4 direct reports and 75 matrixed team members to deliver projects for the business lines across Life, Annuities, Investments, Retirements and Long-Term Care
• Overlooking as a delivery lead into the Conversion of existing fourteen Life & Annuity Policy admin Systems to a new digital platform
• Infuse new-age technical skills amongst the workforce – including Pair Programming, Extreme Programming, Intelligent Process Automation and Full-stack Quality Engineering
• Formulate IT key priorities aligning with Business objectives and establish realistic roadmaps
• Work closely with teams for driving innovation and process improvements, PI planning events, user demos, scrum of scrums and other agile ceremonies
• Experience managing Data projects/programs using MDM, informatica, ETL, Azure, SQL and Tableau
• Developed and implemented strategies to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and increase productivity.
• Mentored junior staff in the organization's business processes, customer service standards, and quality assurance protocols.
• Identified areas of improvement within existing operations through process analysis and benchmarking studies.
• Created detailed reports on project progress for senior management review.
• Developed long-term relationships with key stakeholders including customers, suppliers, regulatory bodies.
• Conducted regular performance appraisals for direct reports to provide feedback on their work performance.
• Participated in recruitment initiatives by interviewing potential candidates and selecting suitable hires.
• Managed annual budgeting process, including forecasting and financial analysis to optimize resources.

• Responsible for the test management of projects throughout a project’s life cycle
• Also involved in creating structured processes to manage defects right through to resolution
• Monitor and report test execution status to all stakeholders
• Ensuring total adherence to SLAs/KPIs defined for service levels to the customers with focused implementation of process improvements and best practices within support area
• Conducting risk analysis and implementing preventive initiatives to mitigate them
• Work with the business to identify and clean up all Data, redundant and abandoned sites in preparation for the cloud environment migration
• Gathering and updating project materials, completing budgeting, forecasting, project documentation, business flows, and lessons learned documents
• Scheduling and allocating work, providing advice and guidance, and resolving problems to meet technical performance and financial objectives
• Assist in defining and deploying new product development processes and in facilitating the continuous improvement of existing processes
• Liaising between developers and project stakeholders; fostering quality communication between engineering disciplines
• Coordinated delivery of contracted solutions at program level and in full accordance with outlined cost, scheduling and quality terms
• Monitored customer quality metrics and took proactive steps to implement resolutions and restore acceptable levels
• Managed team of 19 employees, overseeing hiring, training, and professional growth of employees
• Provided leadership and direction to team members on tasks related to the development, testing, deployment, and support of software applications.

Analyzing the business needs and participate in requirement analysis, JAD sessions, data modeling, high level design, technical architecture, project estimation and solution feasibility meetings

• Prepare process flow diagrams, service flows, technical responses, conceptual solutions and high level designs
• Coordinate with offshore team for project execution and acted as lead reviewer for low level design, code and unit test results
• Support SIT, UAT, Performance testing, production release and post-production validation
• Developed flowcharts and diagrams to describe and lay out logical operational steps