Gaurav Pandey

Leading Onboarding/Deployment/Migration project, working as a Rollout Coordinator with a team of 15 people aligned to me (direct reporting), a carve-out where we're involved in end-to-end transition.

Being an In-charge of projects from initiation, planning (ensuring technical feasibility) to close, we as a team make sure the work gets done efficiently and satisfactorily. Planning the project process, creating a budget, managing a team or communicating with clients are few of the core responsibilities.

Planning things from execution to delivery by breaking the project into tasks, further breaking down the tasks and subtasks, setting an appropriate schedule for the development of certain deliverables, defining milestones, and highlighting the project dependencies.

Majorly we look after the below:

• Plan and Develop the Project Idea by working with internal stakeholders and external clients to define that concept and create a process to bring it to fruition. This includes setting and managing client expectations, developing a detailed project plan, defining the scope of the project and assigning team members to specific tasks.
• Accountable for every aspect of the project, including leading a team capable of meeting or exceeding client expectations for their vision. If the team needs guidance, training or coaching, it’s our responsibility to set them up for success.
• Monitor Project Progress and Set Deadlines.
• Ensure resource planning (availability and allocation).
• During the project, issues arise that needs to be solved. Us being a lead of the project work closely with the Project Manager(s) in collaboration becomes the first person who clients and team members turn to when something goes wrong, and anticipating any potential hiccups before they happen. Adaptability and problem solving are key to keeping control of a project.
• Report and escalate to upper management as and when needed.
• Create and maintain a comprehensive project documentation.
• Conducting and delivering training & sessions for the team.
• Upon completion of subsequent tasks within a project we’re responsible for evaluating its efficiency and effectiveness. With the data we’ve tracked throughout the process, we begin to identify shortcomings and plan for ways to fix similar issues in the future. This is also an opportunity to highlight what went right, including building camaraderie and rewarding team members who excelled during the project.

Accountability, Adaptability, Clear Communication, Delegation, Forecasting, Leadership Management, Problem Solving, Strategic Thinking, Stress Management are some of the skills that I carry and implement in this role of a Project cum Technology Lead.

Day-to-Day Key Activities & Responsibilities:

Technical Advisor

· Demonstrate working knowledge of the M365 suite + BitTitan.

· Lead with an identity driven security approach based on standard best practices.

Planning Organizing & Executing

· To collaborate across multiple stakeholder teams to drive deployment efforts with Enterprise level clients.

· Lead peer teams and drive best practice sharing.

Customer Focus, Customer Value Realization & Drive for results

· Provide consultancy and act as business value advisers to clients.

· Drive delivery excellence and ensure a high standard of Data Quality.

· Day-to-day operative Rollout planning, and to ensure the agreed quality

· Problem solving for all day-to-day related Rollout issues

· Prepare draft Rollout Project Plan

· Inform all stakeholders about planned Rollout activities (customer, landlord, service provider, ...)

· Planning & Execution (Planning of resources within the Rollout)

· Providing regular forecasts and progress reports for PD/PM

· Identify and analyze risks and most importantly Aiming customer satisfaction

Atos, I was a part of L4 Administration delivering technical assistance to L3 & L2. That being an In-house IT consulting we used to manage the entire infrastructure of Atos Global IT. We successfully delivered the support in different products of Microsoft i.e., Exchange On-Premises 2010 & 2016, M-365 several workloads i.e., Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, Skype for Business On-Premises (2015) & Online, SharePoint Online, One Drive for Business.

Besides, we needed to be very proactive in terms of any change which thought should be implemented, and also to come up with our own strategy to maintain costs for Inventory with various other components i.e., Network, Storage, Computing etc. Designing, Planning for future implementation globally that could include majorly a depreciation or an addition to existing services & features was one of the few critical responsibilities.

Good experience on Incident & Change Management, pretty much well versed with Ticketing Management (Service/Incident/Change/Problem Management), Due-Diligence, Hygiene of Tasks/SR, SLA with various other Parameters.

Daily & Monthly Tasks: -

• Primarily, to ensures that the Disk-Space & Certificate report (Exchange & Skype) is okay.
• Need to check that the Exchange & DAG health report is fine with no errors (Transport Queue, Activation preference, RQL, CQL).
• Need to ensure that the services for SQL Witness, Front End, Backend, Office Web App, SCOM Watcher Node, Director, Mediation and Edge are all absolutely fine, need to check the SQL Management Studio to verify the databases sync status plus Mirroring state.
• To ensure that Pool Fabric State is as expected.
• Dealing with the Incidents & Service Requests (we are using PISA, SNOW & SDM as a ticketing tool).
• Record, classify, route, track, investigate and diagnose Incidents.
• Identify and analyze the cause of incidents and manage problems to closure.
• To share an RCA (Root Cause Analysis) with Incident Manager on a prescribed format.
• Ensure that all changes to IT service components are assessed, approved, implemented, and reviewed in a controlled manner.
• Responsibility and accountability for day-to-day operations and deliverables.
• Ensure SLA Adherence as per contractual commitment.
• Adherence of processes as per Quality management system.
• Mentoring new resources within the team and handhold them to understand the organization’s environment.
• Monthly Patching activity & Roll Out Security Patches for Exchange & Skype servers.
• To be in a call with Stakeholders & Senior Leaders where current changes and future implementations for the environment are discussed. That also includes the area of improvement.

Besides In-house support I was also fortunate enough leading an Onboarding/Deployment/Migration project and working as a Rollout Coordinator in PMI (Post-Merger & Integration)/Transition domain.

While working as a Technical Lead we need to ensure several things from the technical front i.e., Technical Recovery and driving critical incidents towards a graceful closure, dealing with escalations once crossed Tier-2, Handling TRBs, gathering important factors to develop working style of the team and sharing our inputs across all the tech leads to improve the overall site’s performance.

Daily interaction with Microsoft Engineers for following reasons:

• To discuss TRBs, any critical incident (P1), Product limitation instances.
• Follow up on to last shared instances with Product Group Team.
• Discussion of a Road Map.
• To share the work reports for frontline technicians.
• Conducting skill gap sessions for Tier-1 & Tier-2 technicians.
• Most important, delivering Triages and maintaining a record for the same.
• A journey from being a frontline to a tech lead gave me a good opportunity, resulted in exposure and learning in multiple domains.

• Handling the customer’s Broadband escalated technical issues plus any connectivity issues with the satellite connections using internal backend tools like Opal/Supportal.
• Working on a CRM (Trio, Pathfinder) to manages customer’s data on a database with all communication preserved.
• Creating tickets using Remedy following SLA adherence as a part of ticketing management.
• Escalating tickets to onsite engineers using Remedy/Qube/OR portal.
• Prioritizing complicated issues based on several factors and figure out the same on a real time.