Gopal S
Chennai
Summary
Dynamic and result-oriented professional with 5+ years of project management experience and 15+ years of IT service delivery expertise. Skilled in infrastructure management, system administration, ITSM processes, NOC operations, and data center operations. Successfully executes complex rollouts, tech modernization projects, and cross-functional initiatives. Proficient in web, banking, and telecom domains with a keen ability to implement best practices for business excellence. Offering excellent project management, multi-tasking and communication skills to coordinate multiple, concurrent projects with competing demands. Makes sound decisions in high-pressure settings and utilize analytical problem-solving skills to troubleshoot and resolve issues. Articulate communicator with strong customer service skills.
Overview
22
22
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Technical Project Manager - Cloud Engineering & Corporate Technology
Upwork Inc(Contractor)
Chennai
05.2021 - 10.2024
- In early planning work with infrastructure, Engineering Managers, and Infosec leaders to facilitate the definition of MVP, estimates, and t-shirt sizing to build out a roadmap
- Work with stakeholders and cross-functional teams to understand business requirements and to deliver business objectives
- Create a work breakdown structure (WBS), identify internal/external dependencies, and risks, and define task effort and duration estimates
- With an eye on success criteria and roadmap, ensure progress and work required are visible and accurate in Advanced Roadmaps in Jira
- Ensure the successful initiation, planning, execution, control, and completion of complex projects through monitoring, tracking, and analyzing project control metrics
- Draft initial charter and project plan, review functional and technical specification documents
- Set up initial systems, governance, reporting & communication protocol, and set up project controls such as risk management, and change management
- Manage the entire RFP/RFI process from initial request through vendor selection, onboarding, and pilot to rollout
- Serve as the single point of contact for the team to the project stakeholders
- Collaborate with stakeholders/product owners for efficient backlog management and drive the success of teams by working closely with them to ensure the success criteria for the initiative are clear, work is visible and accurate in Jira, all blockers are removed, dependencies are clear, risks are being mitigated and issues resolved
- Allowing them to focus more on their overall business and strategy and commitments are not hindered by a lack of Infra resources or expertise
- Ensures projects/programs achieve their targets, keep their schedule, and maintain estimated cost, time, and quality within planned scope
- Ensuring all requests, issues, and inquiries are effectively managed and resolved on time and resources adhere to SLAs/KPIs/OLAs
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate tasks, risks, and scope depth over multiple projects to both technical and non-technical audiences, including senior management, across locations and at various levels
- Review and consolidate project status reports (Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly), communicate regularly, and escalate when project goals are at risk
- Perform all activities related to maintaining successful knowledge management and provide application production support as per process/RACI Matrix
- Identify Process inefficiencies and suggest and implement improvements
- Expert in Jira and Agile principles and practices, with knowledge of SCRUM
- Able to handle both waterfall and Agile execution models
- Facilitates team Agile ceremonies as agreed with Team leadership
- Strive for continuous improvement through retrospectives and follow-up actions
- Helps complete the project closure tasks including lessons learned documentation, issues transition, and project document management utilizing Jira/Confluence
- Contributing to process improvements, innovating project management, and increasing PMO maturity objectives (e.g., standardized tools, templates, and processes)
- Roll out new security policies, ensure adherence, and safeguard company data and systems from unauthorized access and breaches
- Ensure the adoption of best practices in areas such as DevOps, cybersecurity, and cloud infrastructure
NOC Engineer, Incident Manager, NOC Manager, Technical Manager for System Administration
Servion Global Solutions
07.2008 - 05.2021
- Active ticket monitoring, tracking ticket resolution status, notifications, escalations, and communications between the NOC, support engineers, external suppliers, and customers
- Primary Incident Manager during offshore support hours
- Monitor and lead the team technically to resolve hosting System issues and complete scheduled changes on time
- Manage the NOC team with a significant reduction in downtime
- Manage customers across various geographic locations
- Handle infrastructure, application upgrades, and new platform migrations for customers on a Hosted IVR environment
- Facilitate product, platform & process training programs for new team members
- Work with developers and Operations team members to ensure that issues on our Hosting Platform are resolved and that the resolution is appropriately communicated to customers, internal stakeholders, and management
- Monitoring system function and performance, taking corrective action when required
- Establish schedules, create operations manuals, and manage platform deployments
- Delivering Daily, Weekly, and Monthly, reports/Dashboards to the Production Managers and the business users
- Monitor & maintain Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance on issue resolution
- Identify the risks and work with respective stakeholders to mitigate them
- Agree with the Customer on KPIs/Metrics to be used to measure the effectiveness of the Process
- Enable KRA for the resources, track KPIs, and do performance appraisals
- Led offshore system administration team for the VMP (Vulnerability Management) Project and System operations team during severity incidents and resolved the incidents
- Sharing RCA for sev1 Incidents with agreed SLA time
- Project requests from the onshore team are to be acknowledged, classified, distributed, executed and responded to by the Offshore team with the status at the EOD
- Handle Day-to-day operations of the systems team, including managing Dev, Staging, and Production systems, upgrading Firmware/ BIOS, ESXi, VMs, and Operating Systems, and patching Windows, Linux & Centos Servers
- Troubleshooting performance/ monitoring issues reported by NOC and participating actively in Incident bridges when required
Assistant Project Manager
Servion Global Solutions
07.2008 - 05.2021
- Client – Tata Tele Services Ltd
- Led the Contact centre migration from Avaya to Cisco for Tata Teleservices Ltd
- Conducting requirement gathering workshops with business stakeholders
- Support and coordination to deliver PRD
- Prepare and discuss the plan, milestones, and timelines with the customer
- Get signoff on PRD and coordinate with internal teams for design, development, configuration, and testing
- Coordinate with customer business stakeholders for UAT
- Publishing UAT status regularly and conducting discussions between internal teams and customer stakeholders to discuss defects
- Prepare migration checklist, and follow-up internally to ensure completion of pre-migration activities
- Follow up with the customer to get UAT signed off
- Conduct readiness calls for migration and lead migration activities
- Track post-migration issues and ensure early resolution
- Project handover to support team
Incident Manager/ Service Delivery Manager
Servion Global Solutions
07.2008 - 05.2021
- Major Incident Manager Handling Severity Incidents in the Contact Centre Environment for customers of Servion Global solutions across the Globe
- Handled Service Delivery for US customers from offshore
- Led a multi-skilled Incident Management team to reduce downtime significantly
- Owning Major incidents end to end and effective communication with customers, vendors, and Senior Management
- Conducting training for internal and external resources as and when required
- Identifying the risks in the project and communicating with different stakeholders and mitigating them, tracking the resource utilization closely for better capacity planning
- Delivering weekly/ monthly Dashboard and conducting regular weekly/monthly meetings internally and with Customers
- Handling support handovers from various project teams to support teams in the organization
- Primary SPOC for BCP & DR scenarios
- Maintaining day-to-day operations of Infra systems (Windows, Linux, ESX & VMs), and Windows servers
- Install OS, Perform SAT (Hardening of Servers), and release Server for UAT and Production
- Performing Deployments, migrations, and patch management
Engineer Server Management
Wipro InfoTech
Chennai
08.2007 - 07.2008
- Client: Standard Chartered Bank, Chennai
Engineer Helpdesk Management
Wipro InfoTech
Chennai
03.2006 - 08.2007
- Client: Standard Chartered Bank, Chennai
Associate Faculty
Accel Transmatic Ltd (Division Accel IT Academy)
Chennai
01.2005 - 03.2006
Service Engineer
Lashtech Computer Services
Coimbatore
12.2003 - 12.2004
- Client: KG Denim Ltd, Coimbatore
Customer Support Engineer
The professional Technology
Coimbatore
04.2003 - 12.2003
Education
Master of Computer Applications -
School of Distance Education, Bharathiar University
01.2009
Bachelor’s Degree - Computer Technology
Bharathiar University
01.2003
Skills
- Project Management
- Waterfall Methodology
- Agile project management
- Scrum Project Management
- Infrastructure Rollout
- Network Operations Management
- IT Infrastructure Management
- Linux Administration Skills
- Windows Administration Skills
- Infrastructure and Application Migration
- VMware System Management
- Cloud Solutions Deployment
- Data Centre Operations Management
- Contact Center Migration
- Quality Assurance
- IT Service Management Practices
- Remedy, ServiceNow, and Jira
- ITIL Framework
- MS Office, G Suite, and Confluence
- Stakeholder management
- Risk Mitigation
Certification
Certified ScrumMaster (CSM)
Corecompetencies
Communicates constructively with all co-workers, controls emotions in the workplace, and seeks the best possible outcome in all exchanges with others. Strives for clarity in verbal and written communication and works to ensure appropriate methods., Committed to meeting customer requirements and exceeding customer expectations, establishing and maintaining clear and positive communication with customers, and working diligently to resolve customer issues in a timely and efficient manner., Proactively seeks opportunities to improve business results through the highest ethical standards. Self-motivated and able to take on new tasks with minimal direction. Stay focused and set clear commitments and priorities., Thinks, questions, challenges, seeks opportunities for continuous learning and transforms ideas into action, maintains a basic understanding of Business and technology, seeks out tough challenges, and learns from them., Works hard to achieve team commitments, positively influences team, and fosters relationships across groups to achieve team and department goals. Shares work related information readily.
Awardsandaccolades
- Won 'C-Sat' Award in South1 Region for the 4th quarter of 2006-2007 at Wipro Infotech
- Won 'Best Delivery Team' award in South1 Region for the 4th quarter of 2006-2007 at Wipro Infotech
- Won Midyear Award in 2009 for 'Team Excellence' at Servion Global Solutions
- Won the Annual Excellence Award in 2010 for 'Excellence in Customer Service' at Servion Global Solutions
- Nominated for Annual Excellence Award in 2012 for 'Process Excellence' at Servion Global Solutions
- Nominated for Annual Excellence Award in 2013 for 'Process Excellence' at Servion Global Solutions
Previous Experience
- Wipro InfoTech, Engineer Server Management, 08/01/07, 07/31/08, Standard Chartered Bank, Chennai
- Wipro InfoTech, Engineer Helpdesk Management, 03/01/06, 08/31/07, Standard Chartered Bank, Chennai
- Accel Transmatic Ltd (Division Accel IT Academy), Associate Faculty, 01/01/05, 03/31/06, Chennai
- Lashtech Computer Services, Service Engineer, 12/01/03, 12/31/04, KG Denim Ltd, Coimbatore
- The professional Technology, Customer Support Engineer, 04/01/03, 12/31/03, Coimbatore
Personal Information
- Passport Number: R9809382
- Date of Birth: 10/10/82
Languages
Tamil
First Language
English
Proficient (C2)
C2
Accomplishments
- Won “C-Sat” Award in South1 Region for the 4th quarter of 2006-2007 at Wipro Infotech
- Won “Best Delivery Team” award in South1 Region for the 4th quarter of 2006-2007 at Wipro Infotech
- Won Midyear Award in 2009 for “Team Excellence” at Servion Global Solutions
- Won the Annual Excellence Award in 2010 for “Excellence in Customer Service” at Servion Global Solutions
- Nominated for Annual Excellence Award in 2012 for “Process Excellence” at Servion Global Solutions
- Nominated for Annual Excellence Award in 2013 for “Process Excellence” at Servion Global Solutions
Timeline
Technical Project Manager - Cloud Engineering & Corporate Technology
Upwork Inc(Contractor)
05.2021 - 10.2024
NOC Engineer, Incident Manager, NOC Manager, Technical Manager for System Administration
Servion Global Solutions
07.2008 - 05.2021
Assistant Project Manager
Servion Global Solutions
07.2008 - 05.2021
Incident Manager/ Service Delivery Manager
Servion Global Solutions
07.2008 - 05.2021
Engineer Server Management
Wipro InfoTech
08.2007 - 07.2008
Engineer Helpdesk Management
Wipro InfoTech
03.2006 - 08.2007
Associate Faculty
Accel Transmatic Ltd (Division Accel IT Academy)
01.2005 - 03.2006
Service Engineer
Lashtech Computer Services
12.2003 - 12.2004
Customer Support Engineer
The professional Technology
04.2003 - 12.2003
Master of Computer Applications -
School of Distance Education, Bharathiar University
Bachelor’s Degree - Computer Technology
Bharathiar University
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