As a Management Consultant, I am helping organizations to align their business systems for improved efficiency and effectiveness. This involves setting up goals for every function, cascading goals, defining accountability & measures, fine-tuning responsibilities, refining processes, and bringing in effective management reporting and status reviews. Solutions are delivered in sprint mode, to get visible business results immediately. Closed loop feedback systems, alerts and dashboards make these processes agile and super-effective.As a Quality Consultant, I am helping clients to prepare quality road-maps and guiding its execution. Process improvements of strategic importance are identified and rolled out continually.Since 2017, I am also coaching and mentoring middle managers in the IT industry and helping them to make a career leap/transition; also mentoring them for high-impact leadership.

As Head of Operations and Quality, I was responsible for making the business operations smooth and efficient. Several processes were put in place for the same.Key accomplishments are:- Established the required delivery processes for ISO certification – processes for software development, project management and enabling processes. Led the organization to successful ISO 9001:2008 certification in Aug 2014.- Organizational alignment: Standardized the roles existed in the organization; defined accountability, measures of success, skills, empowerment for each of these roles and then mapped to the designations. Processes were defined according to this framework.- Improved the HR processes – Recruitment, induction, training, employee engagement, performance management, career planning, ..to name a few. Complex and time-consuming Annual Performance Appraisals were replaced with continual ‘Feedback & Guidance’ process and a simple annual rating scheme.- Streamlined processes for the enabling functions such as IT, HR, Training, Admin, Purchase, and QA. SLAs were established and tracked with automated systems. Created dashboards for almost all the functions.- Implemented SugarCRM for the Sales function.- Created a collaboration infrastructure consisting of Intranet, Discussion forums, Special Interest Groups, IT Applications, Process Library and Wiki pages. Several open source applications were customized and integrated. - Used ‘gamification’ in quality initiatives; often generated dramatic results in terms of compliance and participation.- Introduced CAPA (Corrective and Preventive Action) process in all functions – resulted in reduction/prevention of defects, issues, metrics variance, non-compliance, and customer issues. Also used it as a methodology to address high priority organizational issues.

Design and develop Balanced Scorecard and Business Dashboards. Sample engagements include- Developed a Balanced Scorecard for an IT organization- Streamlined operations for an SMB and revamped the IT- Developed an IT Scorecard for an IT Head in an MNC organization- Delivery Excellence initiatives in various IT organizations

Championed setting up a consortium of independent consultants, C-Star Consortium that provides a platform for effective collaboration among IT Consultants.

Championed Knowledge Management (KM) for Aricent, the company having multiple SBUs spread across 8 development centers and several sales offices. The objective of the initiative was retention of knowledge, improve business collaboration and promote an innovation culture.- Researched about KM extensively and formulated the proposed approach, team structure, IT / Telecom / Application Infrastructure, budget, roadmap, and the KM processes.- Led the KM initiative in three centers & provided a strong environment for project teams spread across to collaborate on global projects.- Formed large virtual teams of volunteers and championed a few collaboration projects at the organization level.- Established Communities of Practice and knowledge repositories to build up competencies.- Developed a web 2.0 compliant portal for the Global IT with features such as discussion forums, document libraries, blogs, and quick access to the IT applications.

Created an effective quality and productivity platform by establishing contemporary Quality Management System, IT Applications and the Intranet. Managed the functions IT Applications, IT Infrastructure, Business Processes (SEPG), Audit (SQA), and the Intranet. Prepared IT Roadmap, budgets, IT plans and IT Scorecards.Championed several business excellence initiatives such as CMM Level 5, People CMM Level 3, ISO 9001:2000, and CMMI Level 5. Simplified, optimized and automated business processes. Churned out several IT/process improvement/KM projects to drive business efficiency and innovation.- Formulated the IT strategy and the IT policies in alignment with the business strategy and the industry trends.- Standardized the business processes, applications, and the engineering tools across various business units.- Conceptualized, designed, developed and implemented the application iBS (Integrated Business Systems) that embedded most of the organization processes. Users reported about 20 to 40% improvement in their productivity within the first 6 months of implementation. - Headed the organization wide T5 initiatives (to address the top 5 organization priorities) that significantly improved the product quality and customer satisfaction. This used a tailored Six Sigma approach.- Implemented Balanced Scorecard - covered all roles and groups in the organisation; resulted in accountability, transparency and agility apart from better data quality and process compliance.- Automated the processes of IT Resource Management and IT Service Management, resulting in significant optimization of the IT resources deployed and improved service levels. - Led the BS7799/ISO 27001 initiative on Information Security to implement the best practices in IT Governance in the Chennai centre. - Audited the software engineering, project management and the business processes.- Managed vendor relationships (tech. vendors, consultants, service providers and auditors).

Put in place the necessary software development processes and other quality & project management processes to make this start-up company functioning.

Managed several large, complex, leading-edge technology projects for Indian and abroad clients in the domains Finance, Manufacturing and Telecom. Proven ability of achieving service delivery targets & customer satisfaction and of getting repeat-business.Some of the international clients managed include HP, Lucent, Philips Telesoft, SITA, and ABB; Indian clients include Batliboi, Kunal Engg, Neyveli Lignite Corporation, ICI, and Bush Boak Allen India Pvt Ltd.- Did about a dozen software development projects that involved system study, requirements gathering, design, construction, testing and implementation. Most of them involved architecture design, interacting with clients, program management and implementation support. Managed a development team of peak size 50; the largest maintenance project managed was supporting a telecom product of 2 million lines of C code.- Implemented ERP - the largest one was implementing one for an organization involving Head office, factory and about 25 branches.- Championed CMM initiative in TCS-HP Center, one of the first centres of TCS to reach CMM Level 5.