Ashraf Naim

I oversaw approximately 30 developers, testers, and UI/UX analysts across three internal application teams, managing and coordinating updates to off-the-shelf software products with six distinct vendors simultaneously. The project was conducted efficiently and quickly by collaborating closely with the different business stakeholders and skillfully pairing UI/UX designers, programmers, visual designers, information architects, business analysts, content writers, and product managers.

I efficiently trained over 200 engineers in agile practices like Scrum and Kanban, accelerating enterprise agility and leveraging Agile to reimagine customer journeys, product excellence, and innovation.

I introduced the "doing Agile" and "being Agile" concepts. This transformation renewed the overall customer commitment, increased business social networking, and took advantage of the information explosion by using new data analytics. All this helped in making quicker and more efficient decisions.

I trained Agile coaches, Scrum Masters, and product owners to improve their effectiveness and capabilities. I collaborated with managers and team members to create a backlog of KPI improvements to work on over a 12-week program, sharing best practices and insights across the division during this process. Additionally, I introduced the lean and flow principles, the primary metrics to measure improvement.

Some key areas I measured and reported on:
• Work in progress
• Throughput
• Sprint progress
• Impact of user story acceptance
• Effect of adding work into the sprint
• Defect leak
• Capacity utilization
• Estimation variance
• Backlog health
• Commitment reliability

The CIO selected me to revive a high-profile SAP operating system and database migration project experiencing multiple management challenges. I returned the project to its initial scope in six months with no additional resources or budget increase.

I reduced the project's scope and broke it into multiple independent phases, realigning resource involvement and responsibilities to strengthen decision-making and ease the project's complexity. With the CIO's approval, I also delegated the authority to make decisions to directors rather than VPs.

I executed this data migration project on time and within budget, managing a team of ten internal Canadian testers and ten developers from a vendor in the Philippines.

The project required close collaboration between the business team and IT. I encouraged this partnership by implementing Scrum, a framework they continued using for continuous improvement and future releases.

I was parachuted into the project by the VP when only two months were left to deliver the disaster recovery site per audit requirements. I managed to build a cross-functional team using the Agile methodology, completing the site in two months with two-week sprints.

During this process, I deployed more than 85 applications and tested disaster recovery failover by trimming the tail and using aggressive application prioritization. The project was completed on time while meeting all SOX and internal and external audit requirements.

This project involved building a long-standing and cross-functional team to create a data warehouse application built on Netezza, Informatica, and IBM Cognos. Due to the nature of the project, Scrum was adopted, allowing releases to happen every month in an effective and planned manner.

I initiated, planned, and implemented relevant projects and provided high-level support, including problem determination for all SAP security needs within the development, QA, and production phases. I also supervised the design and implementation of new authorization concepts along with business departments and IT stakeholders. Furthermore, I oversaw the SAP user administration on approved procedures, the integration of SoD conformity processes, and authorization validation to meet SOX requirements. Our team obtained clear and concise requirements from the senior management and user community and met all task deadlines assigned.

Along with two SAP consultants, ten developers, and 15 testers, I upgraded SAP from 4.6c to ECC6. This involved number of SAP modules such as FICO, SD, and MM. We first migrated from Windows and SQL Server to Sun Solaris and Oracle, and later, using R3COPY, we upgraded the SAP environment as per SAP recommendation. Some updates were also needed for the SAP kernel, like brconnect and database.

I prepared the whole project plan and, with the help of DBAs, implemented the CA XOsoft scenario, which replicated data on a NAS device. We have implemented both real-time replication and scheduled replication in 40 plants across North America and Europe.

I designed and implemented data archiving processes in many organizations. The primary purpose was to meet NFR and speed up the response time. I supervised four DBAs to script the archiving process for SQL Server and Oracle database.

I did the following for this project:

• Assisted with coach sync sessions.
• Collaborated with the marketing, platform, Joy Mobile, and 3rd-party teams in a coordinated effort to create a backup plan and cutover runbook.
• Prepared reports for senior managers (DTC).
• Identified risks and mitigation strategies.
• Obtained written approval for the migration plan that key stakeholders developed.
• Assisted with the Dry Run's execution.
• Moved from Excel to ADO for better tracking, converting the project from red to green.
• Stepped up and understood my key responsibilities in a short period of time while working on the project.