Harsha Kumara Kapilarathna

I was entrusted as the lead for the revolutionary project undertaken by Netstarter in 2012. This project was for a well known Australian electronic retailer who wished to enhance their online presence and sales by revamping existing e-Commerce platform to provide a better shopping experience for their online customers. It was a novel challenge for me; managing a team of diverse personalities with varying experiences and complex system requirements involving a complex integration with the legacy AS400 system to synchronize products, customers and order details that necessitated strong project management and leadership.

With an extraordinary contribution from the team, I was able to deliver the project successfully; in fact, exceeding the client expectations. It was a triumph accomplishment for Netstarter itself as this was their very first project of enterprise scale and the successful outcome served as a channel to acquire a large number of new enterprise clients with complex project requirements.

Also, I introduced an innovative concept called "pair-testing" to enhance the quality of developer releases by leveraging the collective synergy and complementing skills of testers and developers.

Conceptualized, designed, developed and deployed a "one-stop" video content delivery platform for an Australian start-up.

I was contracted as a freelance business analyst/project manager to deliver and maintain a platform for curated video content for their international audience. I worked directly with the client right from the inception of developing their concept and reviewing UX designs and thereafter worked towards enhancing the platform with innovative product features.

The scope of this project was to deliver a versatile platform to host curated video content from various conferences hosted internationally and enable the users to watch those videos as per their subscriptions and their learning interests.

The challenge included to deliver a decent set of features at minimal cost whilst ensuring the objective of the business model is duly met.

The external team involved in the requirement phase of this project did not accurately document the clients’ requirements and was very late to deliver the outcome of the requirement phase to start the development phase. As a result, the project was poorly structured and had a challenging delivery schedule to meet. The team in-charge for this project lacked direction and was not confident with the project outcome.

As head of delivery, I was able to determine the prevailing inefficiency at the very early stage of the development phase. I then intervened and worked alongside the project manager to rectify the prevailing issues and concerns.

I initiated a review of the requirement backlog to ensure proper prioritization of features and the existence of acceptance criteria to make product features development ready. Then worked together with the team to develop a high-level release schedule, guided them to develop proper sprints backlogs and acted as their agile and scrum coach throughout the project.

As a result of the collaborative effort from everyone, the team got the project back on track and subsequently, delivered the project successfully meeting all of the project requirements as promised to the client.