Prasanna Viswanathan
Verified Expert in Management Consulting
Management Consulting Expert
Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India
Toptal member since September 1, 2025
Prasanna is an operations leader with 25+ years of experience running global delivery organizations across India, Europe, and the US. He holds a PMI-CPMAI™ (Certified Project Management for AI). He's also PMP® and PMI-ACP® certified, with postgraduate AI credentials from the University of Texas and a degree in chemical engineering from NIT Trichy.
Career Highlights
Education Highlights
Certification Highlights
Case Studies
Restoring Profitability on a Multiyear Contract
Driving Success in a Global Transformation Program
Stabilizing a Declining Strategic Account
Driving Quality with the Right First Time (RFT) Framework
Expertise
- ADKAR Change Model
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Delivery Management
- Operations
- People Management
- P&L Management
- Program Management
- Project Management
Work Experience
Senior Director Operations
Mediant Labs
- Built and led an internal services organization comprising six operational functions and 70 team members across PMs, staffing solutions, IT, security, and process and quality, with each function supported by an experienced lead.
- Built the delivery and PMO framework and governance, Business Process Scorecard and Metrics (BPS), QA and defect-tracking processes, and the IT and Security framework. Hired and established all six functions and their respective leads.
- Owned the AI governance lifecycle for internal AI and agentic products.
- Integrated AI into operations by automating weekly capacity and utilization reporting and weekly project reports. Developed agentic AI applications for HR and production environments.
Director
Lionbridge
- Scaled a new line of business 11-fold over five years, generating over $100 million in revenue through strategic offshoring and delivery optimization.
- Spearheaded a global workforce of over 500 engineers and more than 50 people managers across distributed teams to drive performance and collaboration.
- Reduced production readiness time by 70% and increased billable utilization to over 90% through agile transformation and process automation.
- Implemented a centralized governance model to oversee KPIs, service metrics, and cross-regional performance, driving consistency and accountability.
- Transformed enterprise data retention and classification policies and built cross-regional alignment across India, the US, and Europe on privacy compliance frameworks and risk mitigation.
- Built AI opportunity intake questionnaires and a sandboxed evaluation environment for assessing new AI business use cases before organizational commitment.
- Championed digital transformation by implementing intelligent automation, dashboards, and reporting frameworks, driving greater transparency and productivity.
- Partnered with engineering and legal teams to define AI governance policies, implement security controls, and mitigate risks across initiatives.
- Supported multiple audits, including ISO 27001, ISO 27701, and ISO 27017, and maintained evidence repositories to ensure continuous audit readiness.
- Defined and operationalized governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) strategies across business units, strengthening compliance posture and ensuring audit readiness.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Engineering
National Institute of Technology (NIT) - Trichy, India
Certifications
CPMAI
PMI
ACP
PMI
AI & ML for Leaders
University of Texas at Austin
PMP
PMI
Skills
Output Software
Microsoft Excel
Finance
GAP Analysis
Other
Engineering, Delivery Management, Operations, P&L Management, ADKAR Change Model, Project Management, Agile, People Management, Program Management, Capacity Planning, Business Planning, Agile Program Management, Change Management, Business Operations, Operations Management, Performance Improvement, Chief Operations Officer (COO), Continuous Improvement, Quality Assurance (QA), Board Presentations, IT Governance, Risk Management, Compliance, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Organizational Effectiveness, Product Roadmaps, Management Consulting, Data Governance, AI Consulting, Business Communication, Governance Frameworks, Training & Training Content Development, SOP Development, Documentation, Executive Consulting, Strategy Consulting, Metrics, Governance, Client Success, Process Design, Automation, Talent Management, Process Improvement, Analytical Dashboards, Business & Digital Transformation, Quality Management, Key Performance Metrics, Learning Management Systems (LMS), Learning, Training Content, System Integration, Machine Learning, Data Science, Digital Marketing, Workflow Design, Project Management Office (PMO), Legal
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