Ahamed Shihab

IT Service Delivery Manager with 17+ years of experience with Industry stalwarts, working for globally competent Fortune 500 clients, I come with varied experience in management of end-to-end project delivery in the IT Infrastructure Support space, handling finance, people management, 
client relationship and opportunity management. My communication and ability to present and listen will be an added bonus in any client facing environment where understanding the business is as important as technical ability to translate the business requirements

An overall IT experience of 17+ years with the last 1+ year at L&T Infotech  as an Associate Director for the Cloud and Infrastructure Support stream.

5+ years at Cognizant Technology Solutions, performing the role of a Program Manager handling 20+ client accounts generating an average yearly revenue of close to 20 million USD.  As Engagement Delivery Lead, I was accountable for the operations, delivery and the financial management of the accounts. I am accountable for the Revenue forecasting, budgeting, margin commitment and the customer profitability, with year on year Margin Improvement targets as well.
As part of Delivery responsibilities, I have to ensure the Contractual obligations are met and delivery excellence related guidelines are adhered to. This involves primarily, the following key activities:
-A good understanding of the SOW that has been signed with clear contractual obligations. Ensure we have the required obligations documentation that helps track all the delivery and non-delivery related
commitments.
- Understand the scope of support and identify scope creeps and work with the client to ensure the scope is documented in an amendment on the SOW or if it is a distinct scope, then work with the accounts team and client to propose a CR with appropriate cost and revenue implications.
-Ensure the SLA and OLA agreements are met and ensure all KPIs are documented and adhered to as well.
-Establish processes and protocols to capture the metrics and have meaningful presentation of data. Ensure adequate analysis of data happens on a routine basis.
-Review and participate in the Weekly, Monthly and Quarterly Status calls or governance calls as necessary
-Establish an agreed communication channel with the client stakeholders and have weekly/fortnightly connects as required
-Engage in any escalations from the client and facilitate the RCA and corrective action planning.
-Identify and spur the team towards automation through diligent data analysis to identify low hanging fruits for immediate optimization. Engage in Lean Six Sigma frameworks and analysis to identify the top contributor areas for significant ROI for improvements.
-Handle the staffing requirements for the project, anticipating ramp downs and ramp ups for effective management.
-Adhere and ensure teams adherence to timelines for the organization related activities such as Go perform milestones, financial milestones etc.
- Ensure the DEX POC for the team is in-sync and routinely follow up for compliance on Risk, Issue and BCM planning.
-Establish 1-1 connects and skip level discussions with the team.

The roles I am playing are as below:
o People / Team / Resource Management: Planning and staffing appropriate skilled engineers for the requirements, establishing a clear hierarchy. Mentoring and coaching of team members with
timely performance feedbacks for optimal results and progressive development.
o Delivery Management: Enable team to deliver on agreed upon services and meet or exceed all agreed service levels and key performance indicators. This includes Major incident involvement
with leadership, communication assistance, Continuous improvement initiatives, staffing, financials including Forecast and margins analysis with optimization efforts.
o Customer Relationship Management: Develop and run an effective and successful governance with customer and Cognizant stakeholders while building and sustaining collaborative relationships and confidence with customer stakeholders
o Operational Support for budgeting, resource allocation, invoicing, utilization, and timesheet/expense approvals.
o Assist business development teams with validating material for RFP, case study preparation and presentations to customers/floor walks.

As Service Delivery Manager, I was involved in Delivery Management on Infra support projects such as:
o Citrix support team delivering end-to-end Citrix, XenApp, and NetScaler support for a US based Financial/ Tax Product Company.
o DevOps team handling product deployment, skilled on Jenkins, Maven, GIT and Chef/Ansible.
o L3 Network Administration team and a Windows Server administration team for a technology giant.

1 year has been in the role of Delivery Manager for a project of a 150+ Application/Infra Support team providing NOC support to the largest cable and broadcast company in the world. The role involved Project
management, people management, client interactions and metric presentations on stakeholder meetings. The key KPIs achieved were quality of delivery with 70% automation with standard CSI initiatives.
 1 year was in the capacity of the Service Delivery Manager for the Database Administration tower for the same client, leading a team of 30+ DBAs, across Oracle, MSSQL, Mongo, Cassandra, MySQL technologies.
Key achievements being noise reduction from 80% to less than 10% and automation through true remediation at almost 50%
 Handling an 8 member team of IIS Admins and AWS developers as an add-on responsibility, primarily handling PM responsibilities and client communications.

10+ years at Accenture with 3+ years as an Associate Manager managing a team of 40+ as the Service Delivery Lead, and 2 years had been as a Team lead and Project Manager of teams ranging from 9 members to 62 members, managing Application Outsourcing stream as well as Systems Integration. I have
been performing PM tasks such as Metrics and Dashboard updates, Staffing processes, Risk/ Issue Management, Documentation and adherence to Accenture Standards and process. I also have good knowledge of Earned Value Management, Agile Methodology and CMMi practices. I have also provided
limited technical inputs on the projects as well.

5 years has been in the capacity of an Oracle DBA with installation, configuration, trouble shooting and administration of Oracle8i/9i/10g/11g RDBMS and RAC on various flavors of UNIX like HPUX on hp-RISC-11i and AIX on IBM Platforms. Experience in administration of UNIX based applications; sql loader
based and batch processing applications.

A graduate in Computer Applications with a BCA degree from Bangalore University. I have graduated with an aggregate percentage of 83%, or 8.3 CGA in the program. I have also completed my certification in ITIL v3 Foundation and Oracle OCA Certification.