Kavitha Ganapa, Project Manager in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
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Kavitha Ganapa

Verified Expert  in Project Management

Project Manager

Location
Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Toptal Member Since
July 5, 2018

Kavitha loves technology and leverages it to solve business challenges/problems and to create a positive impact. Kavitha has been in the IT industry for 15 years and comes from a very strong technical background. She has demonstratable expertise in Agile software development and process improvement initiatives in a variety of roles (program manager, scrum master), ample experience in solution architecture and championed client engagement.

Project Highlights

Health Benefits Outsourcing Platform
Led the development and maintenance of a benefits outsourcing platform that connected variety of users and partners.
Data Analytics Platform
Served as a program manager for a data analytics platform.
Finance and Accounting Platform
Led the delivery of a finance-and-accounting platform that hosted 40+ clients.

Expertise

Work Experience

Digital Technology PM

2018 - 2019
Misk Foundation
  • Successfully led the team to deliver a portal for a government that provides subsidies to its citizens; also helped the team to migrate the portal from AWS to a different environment.
  • Worked with multiple vendors across the globe to ensure services are delivered as per agreement and met the business needs.
  • Built portal functionalities that included eligibility processing check, approval for sponsorship, and payment processing.
  • Worked with the business team to hash out the requirements; challenged the business and technical requirements and provided recommendations and suggestions as needed.
  • Created RFPs, led the complete vendor selection process, including services agreement signing.
  • Took up and led an initiative to drive cost optimization through the program which reduced the cost by 52%.
  • Set up and streamlined Agile development processes and supervised the team to ensure the team was productive and work was delivered as expected.

Systems Development Director | Associate Director | Delivery Lead | Solution Architect

2012 - 2018
Cognizant Technology Solutions
  • Led the delivery of AI-and-analytics projects for strategic accounts. Ran managed services for teams as high as ~200, serving the accounting-and-financial-services tower and was previously serving the learning services unit with multimillion-dollar contracts.
  • Implemented Agile methodology in various projects/programs and worked as a scrum master/scrum coach.
  • Successfully improved productivity and efficiency by implementing new processes and/or improving the current processes. For a team of 69 people, I put a Kanban process in place, and for a global team of 25 people, I have put in processes for effective Scrum of scrums and ran two Scrum teams. The Kanban team showed an improvement of ~35% in productivity (time taken to resolve a ticket) and for the scrum teams, CSR improved from 2.5 to 3.5.
  • Led innovation-and-transformation initiatives for productivity improvement, application hardening, and revenue generation for a client.
  • Championed all aspects of program management, delivery excellence, operational excellence, continuous service improvement, opportunity identification, client engagement, and cost savings.
  • Successfully led colleagues and subordinates, achieving the highest BES score in the sector for 2014.
  • Set the vision, IT strategy, and road map for the team to be ready for the next generation of technology.
  • Gained ample experience in solution architecture and proposal submissions; was considered a turnaround specialist in moving accounts to profitability from loss.

Program Manager

2012 - 2012
ACS of India Pvt. Ltd (a Xerox Company)
  • Successfully handled the global responsibility of successfully delivering multimillion-dollar programs.
  • Set up and ran a learning services center of excellence, key clients included EY & Credit Suisse.
  • Ran a portal CoE encompassing building and supporting various portals including the corporate website, content management, SharePoint, Jira, and more for the whole organization.
  • Initiated and drove process improvement, operational excellence, delivery excellence, and continuous improvement initiatives to organization's success.
  • Served on the leadership team to vet the strategies and align them with the vision.
  • Supervised a team of 15.

Senior Systems Development Manager

2007 - 2012
Affiliated Computer Services, Inc. (a Xerox Company)
  • Worked as an integrated product technology lead serving the service engineering division of General Motors.
  • Managed and led multimillion-dollar programs to successfully manage teams offshore and onsite. These programs include providing integrated print services, portal development, SharePoint implementations, data migrations, and digital transformations to various clients.
  • Collaborated with GM teams from Germany and in Michigan.
  • Received an award of ”Exceeds Expectations” for the programs delivered which is a first for the team.
  • Worked as an application services manager at the city of Carrollton (TX, USA) by managing a portfolio of 44 applications that were critical for the city to run.
  • Managed the key applications including utility billing applications, GIS, Kronos, portal, and more.
  • Made the key decisions involving strategic changes in IT.
  • Led the BI team for Ernst & Young and contributed significantly to stabilizing the team and winning the renewal of the contract.
  • Set up the offshore team and implemented lean techniques which provided productivity savings of $70,000 YOY.
  • Led various sized teams from 12 to 25.

Development Lead

2004 - 2007
Benefit Concepts, Inc.
  • Started as a QA and then moved up the ladder to become a developer, Oracle DBA, and then to a development lead.
  • Led the application development and maintenance of an in-house Benefits Outsourcing platform that connected variety of users that include Employer HPAs, Plan implementation Specialists, Employees and modules included Plan Setup, Rider Setup, Claims processing, Payment processing, Bank Integration, Customer support. This was a high availability (24/7/365) platform that served around 51 clients and approximately 5 million users.
  • Analyzed the business requirements, planned for upcoming releases, and designed and developed the enhancements.
  • Led the effort in automating operational tasks in settlement processing and MICR printing thereby garnering cost savings and operational efficiency.
  • Supervised a team of four developers and three QAs.
  • Served as the development implementation lead and Oracle DBA. They had requested the platform be built to be very similar to this in terms connecting a variety of users/partners and HA portal which required that I worked in a specific time zone and understand healthcare terminology. The platform is now part of Wage Works.

Health Benefits Outsourcing Platform

Led the development and maintenance of a benefits outsourcing platform that connected variety of users and partners.

Helped build a benefits outsourcing platform that connected a variety of users that include employer HPAs, plan implementation specialists, employees, and modules which included plan setup, rider setup, claims processing, payment processing, bank integration, and customer support.

This was a high availability (24/7/365) platform that served around 51 clients and approximately 5 million users at the time.

Data Analytics Platform

Served as a program manager for a data analytics platform.

This data analytics platform provides business users with a critical analysis specific to their business unit. We set up a data analytics platform to help clients drill down for additional analysis/inputs. The platform would consume data of all types, process it, develop algorithms for meaningful insights, and provide visualization/dashboards. The integral part of the platform is to pull data from various data sources and integrate into it.

Data integration and field mapping were done using IBM integration and Dell Boomi tools.

As needed, the data was migrated to different environments to gather meaningful insights.

The team under supervision consisted of approximately 90 members.

Goals Achieved:
• Won proposals worth 2 million in a quarter.
• Increased the revenue from $300,000 to $700,00 month per month, with the highest per month being 1 million per month.
• Achieved the highest profitability reached ever at 59%.
• The platform enabled the client to realize a savings of close to ~10 million per year across applications on the data analytics platform.

Finance and Accounting Platform

Led the delivery of a finance-and-accounting platform that hosted 40+ clients.

This finance-and-accounting platform provides clients with the ability to set up their business processes pertaining to finance and accounting from purchase orders to the invoicing process. The platform has abilities to customize workflows, notifications to client teams when certain conditions are met, reporting, document versioning and archiving, integrations with other systems for reconciliation, and other process-related steps.

The team under supervision consisted of approximately 130 members.

Goals Achieved:
• Became the preferred partner for the clients and scored over a four on a scale of five in a client satisfaction survey.
• Improved client onboarding rate.
• Reduced client implementation time.
• Achieved profitability of more than 35%.
• No SLAs were violated.
• Through continuous service improvements, garnered productivity savings of ~25%.

LMS Platform

Set up and led the LMS platform development, implementation, support, and BI teams.

Learning services are incredibly critical to ensure team's compliance for the advisory, assurance, and assessment towers. The employees—the ones in client-facing roles—may be suspended if not found compliant.

The team built, supported, customized, and implemented LMS platforms for major clients. The platform included building learning maps and customized workflows for learners and administrators.

BI CoE for LMS was set up to provide vital insights to the clients. The team, under supervision while offshore, consisted of 67 members.

Goals Achieved:
• Became the preferred partner for the clients and scored over a four on a scale of five in a client satisfaction survey.
• Achieved profitability of more than 47%.
• No SLAs were violated.
• Implemented Lean Six Sigma in BI CoE and saved $70,000 YOY.
• Through continuous service improvements, garnered productivity savings of ~35%.
• Consolidated the command centers and realized a savings of ~300,00 YOY.

Subsidy Grant Platform

Successfully led the team the delivery of a governmental portal that provides subsidies to its citizens.

Goals Achieved:
• Set up and streamlined development processes and supervised the team to ensure productivity and timely delivery.
• Worked with the business team to hash out the requirements.
• The key portal functionalities delivered include an eligibility processing check, approval for sponsorship, and payment processing.
• Challenged the requirements and provided recommendations and suggestions as needed.
• Created RFPs and led the complete vendor selection process, including services agreement signing.
• Worked with multiple vendors across the globe to ensure services are delivered as per agreement and met the business needs.

Portal CoE

Built and led a portal center of excellence that focused on building and supporting various portals using CMS and SharePoint.

Goals Achieved:
• Ran a portal CoE encompassing building and supporting various portals including the corporate website, content management, SharePoint, Jira, and more for the whole organization and clients
• Led and delivered many Sharepoint initiatives that included:
a) Upgrade of Sharepoint 2003 to 2010 across the organization.
b) Build a BU-centered portal using SharePoint to hold collateral and portfolio of services for each BU.
c) Designed and built an internal portal using the SharePoint portal that held vital information for India offices.
• Expanded Portal CoE to provide CMS, web development, and SharePoint services to external clients.

RPO Configuration

Led and architected the 4.5 million RPO configuration project for the service engineering tower of General Motors.

RPO was a critical project for GM because it would streamline the operations in the service engineering at the service centers. RPO enables customers to choose production option codes, and these codes will need to be configurable and serviceable.

The team consisted of 14 members.

Goals Achieved:
• Earned an "Exceeds Expectations" award for my work on the program.
• Delivered the program on time and well within the budget.
• Built an adaptable architecture which made it easy to absorb additional changes into the program without reworking.

FSA Buydown

Led the technical architecture and implementation of FSA Buydown to meet government regulations and ensure compliance.

FSA buydown is a very complex implementation which involved changing the way FSA claim reimbursement happens. This solution allows employees/clients to be able to buydown an eligible claim with an ineligible one. It included various paths which led to approved or partially approved claims. The implementation was immensely successful, with no issues at all.

The project team, including the QA, consisted of eight members.

Goals Achieved:
• Ensured that there were no architecture-related bugs.
• There were no post-production issues.
• Less than five changes were needed (as the architecture was reasonably adaptive).
2001 - 2003

Master's Degree in Computer Science

University of Texas at San Antonio - San Antonio, TX, USA

1997 - 2001

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science and Engineering

Andhra University - Visakhapatnam, India

JULY 2017 - PRESENT

Certified Big Data and Hadoop Developer

Edureka

DECEMBER 2015 - PRESENT

ITIL® Foundation Certification

Axelos

FEBRUARY 2014 - PRESENT

Certified Scrum Master

Scrum Alliance

DECEMBER 2011 - PRESENT

Green Belt

Xerox

DECEMBER 2007 - DECEMBER 2020

Project Management Professional (PMP)

PMI | Project Management Institute

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