Mohamed Zouaghi
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
Medina, Al Madinah Province, Saudi Arabia
Toptal member since June 12, 2020
An ex-Googler and PMP-certified, Mohamed is a skilled technical project manager and agile coach with 18 years of experience in Digital Transformation. He's worked as a full-timer with three Fortune 500 companies: Google, ADP, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Mohamed's successfully managed projects in 10+ different countries related to multiple areas such as digital transformation strategy, Smart City, ERP implementation, ITSM, eCommerce, app performance monitoring, and QA automated framework.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile Transformation
- Digital Strategy
- ISTM Service Desk
- Middle East
- PMO
- QA Automation
- Team Management
- Technical Project Management
Work Experience
Smart City Senior Advisor
Madinah Region Development Authority
- Wrote the City portal RFP, which was designed to support a franchised approach for the City services.
- Led a team composed of a senior product manager and a business analyst to perform a benchmarking of the best City portal and applications.
- Performed an assessment to evaluate the current City Explorer application and the possibility of developing it further to include more features related to customer engagement.
Digital Transformation Manager
Rua Al Madinah Holding
- Elaborated on the digital transformation strategy of RUA, a PIF subsidiary, including the mission and vision, roadmap, the operating model and governance, the technology foundation, and the change management plan. The roadmap included 80+ projects.
- Led three projects related to the digital transformation and digital maturity assessment to keep the digital strategy up to date.
- Led the data and analytics team to build the data platform and the Unified Performance Dashboard for the whole organization.
- Designed and submitted the yearly CAPEX and OPEX budget of the Digital department for three years.
- Established and led the Digital PMO function, which governs all Digital Projects with an average of 30 digital projects per year.
- Led the implementation of the Enterprise Service Management program for eight different departments based on the Jira Service Management/Confluence eco-system.
- Based on Confluence, I designed the internal portal used by around 500 employees on a daily basis.
Smart City Senior Advisor
Madinah Region Development Authority
- Joined the team as Smart City senior advisor and established the business analysis function, which wrote all requests for proposals (RFPs), business requirements documents (BRDs), and statement of work (SOW) for 20+ smart city projects.
- Wrote an architecture integration guidelines showing the guiding principles that should be followed by all vendors involved in the smart city projects.
- Coached the team on the Agile principles and set up the tools (based on ClickUp) for them to deliver the projects based on Scrum methodology.
- Designed the Smart Parking platform, which was developed by a vendor based on a low-code, no-code platform.
- Acted as project director for the Smart Street Light project, involving the deployment of LoRaWAN devices on 80,000 street poles of Madinah City.
- Wrote the BRD related to the "Lost & Found" application, part of the Smart City program.
- Wrote the RFP related to the City Explorer application, which was developed through a low-code platform.
Agile Project Manager
Arribatt
- Served as the technical project manager of the KOTC (Kuwait Oil Tanker Company) fleet monitoring project—ensuring delivery by managing a team of six technical consultants (technologies: SiteScope, Operations Bridge Manager, Network Node Manager).
- Worked as the technical project manager of the Motorola configuration management project for IT services in Oman—overseeing the project initiation and planning phases.
- Wrote a number of high-level designs for fleet-performance-monitoring projects.
Agile Project Manager | Agile Coach
Advanced Technologies for IT
- Established a vision and strategic plan for the Saudi company between 2020 and 2023.
- Worked as a member of the company executive board and led several efforts related to business development topics and strategical decisions.
- Set up a Jira service desk automation environment which handles customers support contracts from end to end.
- Acted as a senior technical project manager and established a DevOps culture within the team which succeeded to automate the orchestration and monitoring of applications running within Google Cloud Platform and Amazon.
- Acted as a PMO manager and established PM best practices within the company based on PMP PMI principles and agile values. My role was to establish all process and to elaborate technical and procedural documents.
- Served as the agile coach for multiple scrum teams—ensured the training and mentoring of scrum masters, product owners, and scrum team members.
- Ensured that all Odoo ERP projects were managed and delivered the highest level of quality while respecting the scope, schedule, and costs. It had more than 200 Odoo users.
- Wrote RFP responses to several projects and provided both project management and technical proposals.
- Fulfilled the role of a product manager for the company's HR product. I ensured the development, the marketing, and project delivery of the HR implementation projects.
- Project sponsor of a Saudi mobile app which links requesters to advisors so they can chat and have live conversions. I secured and supervised the needed resources and defined the appropriate technology stack along with leading customer relationship.
Agile Project Manager
Automatic Data Processing
- Built-up from scratch the center of excellence QA program and team and put in place quality management services delivery to internal R&D product development teams for Southern Europe based on agile concepts.
- Interacted with lead developers and product owners on a daily basis to align QA automation product roadmap, requirements, and timelines which kept KPIs under control.
- Served as the agile coach for the QA CoE team and introduced, trained, coached several team members to scrum and agile concepts.
- Served as the project leader of test automation based on Java, Selenium, Serenity BDD, and Jenkins.
- Implemented coding best practices based on GiFlow, code reviews, and pull requests using Bitbucket.
- Served as the cross-border manager of eight QA and software engineers between Tunisia and France.
- Designed and developed an automated testing framework that covers web-based application automated testing. The framework is integrated within a CI software product and is based on Java, Maven, Jenkins, Selenium, Cucumber, and Serenity BDD.
Senior Operations Engineer
- Set up and led—as technical program manager—a physical fleet health life cycle program from scratch aiming to improve hardware anomaly detection and handling within Google Datacenter globally. I wrote all technical and project documents.
- Contributed to Python coding quality by writing and reviewing 350+ Google codebase and was a member of the Python Readability Certifier board (This team certifies Google engineers so they can write and submit their code to Google code repository).
- Designed and developed monitoring solutions, dashboards, and reports that aimed to keep all defined KPIs under control (based on Google Cloud Stack Django/Python, Google Cloud SQL, Bootstrap, and Kubernetes); used Google Data Studio.
- Mentored and coached junior team members on both technical and functional aspects; was rewarded by regional operations director for the mentoring and coaching quality.
- Served as the active member of the Google interviewers team, assessed hardware, Linux, networking, and Data Center knowledge, and performed 60+ interviews. Elected as “EMEA Hiring Hero” by the Google Recruiting team in Deccember 2014.
- Delivered presentations, tech talks, and training to a global and regional audience (e.g., “hardware network troubleshooting”, ”maintenance activity lifecycle”, “SQL crash course”, “coding in Google”). Founded the Google Belgian Coding Club.
- Provided monthly and quarterly analytical reports related to maintenance activity to Google directors and top management audience.
- Optimized assets and resources across multiple projects and maintenance operations—ensuring SLO compliance in the EMEA region.
- Designed and coded several tools and services based on Python, Google Cloud SQL, JavaScript, Bootstrap, and Kubernetes. Served as a team lead of three engineers.
- Wrote and participated in writing postmortem reports which describe and analyze Google infrastructure incidents along with enumerating learned lessons and future mitigation plans. Reports were read and commented by Google VPs.
Technical Consultant
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
- Worked as an HP cloud systems and HP Blade systems consultant and designed effective and appropriate solutions to several HP African customers.
- Served as the technical lead within a service delivery team of HP networking, server, and storage products.
- Provided a number of pre-sales consulting, technical guidance, hands-on assistance, and technical issues and served as the point of contact for mission-critical HP customers.
- Designed and delivered a number of projects with the following technology stack: HP 3PAR, Hitachi, HP storage, HP-UX, HP Monitoring software solutions, VMware, and HP-UX High Availability Cluster.
Project History
Elaboration of Digital Transformation Strategy for Saudi PIF Subsidiary
https://www.ruaalmadinah.com/Wrote the RFP related to the project, including all the deliverables that should be delivered by the awarded bidder. List included Deloitte, KPMG, and BCG among others.
Succeeded in making a savings cost of USD 1.2 million on the RFP related to the project: Elaboration of Digital Transformation Strategy and Initiatives playbook. The project was delivered successfully on time and within the allocated budget.
Implementation of Enterprise Service Management based on Jira Service Management
Designed the enterprise service management of a 500-employee company involving eight different departments.
Managed a team of three team members and two vendors to design, plan, and execute the service management processes of eight different departments. The system manages around 5,000 tickets per year and is hosted in a private cloud based on Oracle OCI. The ecosystem included Jira Service Management, Confluence, and Jira software.
Establishment of Digital Project Management Office (PMO) for Saudi PIF Subsidiary
Established the digital project management office responsible to govern the projects related to the digital roadmap (80+ projects).
Managed two PMO specialists to establish the Digital PMO by defining the processes, operating model, and the tools to be used by 10+ project managers from three different departments. The Digital PMO processes were fully aligned with the overall Enterprise PMO and included both Agile and Waterfall methodologies.
eLearning Platform Product Manager
Succeeded to pilot a team of 10 cross-functional developers to build up an eLearning platform in less than two months. The platform has generated 500k in less than a month and has a potential of growth of 500% times in the upcoming six months.
I managed a team of 10 elements composed of back-end developers, mobile developers, designers, and QA engineers. I also established the training programs and trained the product trainers.
My team succeeded to produce eight gradual versions with sprints of two weeks.
My responsibility was to produce the product roadmap, to formalize epics and stories, and to follow-up with the team on a daily basis.
Technology stack: Python, Flutter, Big Blue Button, virtual rooms, and Jenkins.
Project Management of an ERP System Implementation for a KSA University
Managed the project from the discovery phase until the project delivery—respecting budget, schedule, and scope along with delivering a workshop session to all university employees to help them ramp up with the new system.
From the integrator side, I managed a team of two business analysts, three developers, one designer, and one DevOps engineer (during the execution of all project phases). From the customer side, I worked closely with six different teams in order to deliver the final product (a full ERP consisting of HRMS, accounting, and supply chain) along with the integration of five university systems.
eCommerce Website
Managed the launch of digital services of a Saudi company which allowed them to increase their benefits by 400%.
I managed a team of four members to design and build an eCommerce website from scratch in six weeks. The website was so successful that it allowed my client to earn 1 million in the 1st 10 days.
Technologies: React, PHP, Laravel, MySQL, Bootstrap
Fleet Infrastructure Monitoring
Managed a project that implemented 100% of the application monitoring which gave the client (a major Kuwaiti petrol player) full visibility on the infrastructure, allowing him to drastically improve his incident management process.
I managed a team of six senior consultants that implemented the full-stack monitoring of over 20 applications in a duration of six months. The microfocus products included the following SiteScope, Operations Bridge Manager, Operations Bridge, and Network Node Manager.
Maintenance Dashboard for Google Employees
Launched and managed the maintenance dashboard used internally by a team of 800 Google maintenance team members—allowing them to increase productivity by 40% and to decrease logistics mistakes by 20%.
I managed a team of three developers to design, develop, and release multiple versions of the maintenance dashboard used internally by Google maintenance team worldwide.
Technologies: Google Cloud SQL, Python, Django, Kubernetes, Bootstrap
BI Project Management Dashboard
Managed the project and built a project management dashboard that facilitated the effective control of multiple project costs, giving visibility to project directors on the whole project portfolio and allowing more efficient resource management.
I designed and managed the building of a solution based on Jira, Talend, Rundeck, PostgreSQL, and Google Data Studio. The resulting dashboard allows project managers and directors to follow project costs in real-time along with individual team-member time tracking for every project.
QA Automation Framework
Designed and managed the building of the QA automation framework which improved HR application testing process and allowed to speed up release process by 300%.
I trained and managed a team of seven QA engineers that built a QA automation framework that runs more than 200 test scenarios every night following a fully automated setup.
Technologies: Java, Selenium, Serenity BDD, Cucumber, Jenkins, Bitbucket
Education
Master's Degree in Computer Networking and Telecommunications
University of Carthage - Tunis, Tunisia
Certifications
Change Management Practitioner
PROSCI
Project Management Professionals (PMP)
PMI
Skills
Tools
Jira, Google Docs, Confluence, Project Management & Work Tracking Tools, Google Workspace, SQL, Git, Google Data Studio, Jenkins, Odoo, Slack, Oracle ERP, Asana, Trello, Microsoft Power BI
Paradigms
Behavior-driven Development (BDD), Agile Project Management, Testing, B2B, Agile Product Management, Scrum, Agile, Kanban, UX Design, Change Management, API Architecture, Organizational Change Management (OCM)
Platforms
Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Ubuntu, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), WordPress
Industry Expertise
Government, Healthcare
Other
Project Management, Python, Test Automation, Scrum Master, GitFlow, QA Automation, Data Centers, Technical Project Management, Middle East, EMEA, French-English Translation, French-Arabic Translation, Technical Hiring, Technical Reports, Technical Consulting, User Stories, Requirements, Portals, IT Project Management, Documentation, Technical Documentation, IT Operations Management (ITOM), Product Management, Team Management, Estimations, Technical Leadership, Waterfall Methodology, Program Management, Strategic Planning, Project Timelines, Software Development, Jira Administration, Projects, Workflow, Vendor Selection, Technical Program Management, Agile Transformation, Digital Project Management, Project Scoping, Dashboards, Project Delivery, Business Process Automation, Business Analysis, Feature Backlog Prioritization, Reporting, Futures & Options, IT Strategy, Conflict Resolution, Digital Strategy, IT Management, SaaS, User Experience (UX), Product Design, SaaS Design, Business Communication, Feature Prioritization, Sprint Planning, Project Budget Management, Agile Project Management, SQL, Business Analysis, Technical Business Analysis, Data Reporting, System Integration, Sprints, Coding, Databases, Communication, Continuous Improvement, System Architecture, Programming, Atlassian Plugins, Automation, Digital Transformation, Training Workshops, Digital Transformation Program Management, Training Materials, Training & Training Content Development, Technical Delivery Management, Workflow Automation, Django, Selenium, MySQL, Application Monitoring, Human Resources (HR), eCommerce, Risk Management, People Management, IT Service Management (ITSM), Business Intelligence (BI), ISTM Service Desk, APIs, QA Testing, Mobile Apps, Arabic-English Translation, Product Delivery, Agile Coaching, Project Planning, Educational Portals, Knowledge Management, E-learning, Project Management Professional (PMP), Project Tracking, Project Estimation, System Integration, Request for Proposal (RFP), PMO, Project Management Office (PMO), Software as a Service (SaaS), Organizational Design, Data Analysis, ERP Implementation, Data Engineering, Software Documentation, Consulting, PMI, Resource Management, Stakeholder Management, Jira Administrator, PMO Development, Agile Program Management, Procurement, Process Optimization, Workflow Automation & System Integration, ClickUp, Process Improvement, Market Research, IT Automation, PMO Maturity Assessment, PMO Governance, PMO Processes, Enterprise Service Management, Workflow Optimization, Innovation, Business Process Analysis, Learning Management Systems (LMS), Data Analytics, Business Risk Assessment, API Integration, Discovery, Java, Video Conferencing, Product Development, Product Owner, Laravel, Mobile, Social Media, Certified Project Manager, Smartsheet, Learning, Cloud, Flutter, WebRTC, Learning Management Systems (LMS), Technical Product Management, Startups, Payment APIs, Discovery Workshops, Backlog Management, API Integration, CRM APIs, New Product Development, Operating Models, Mobile Applications, Technical Writing, Business Transformation, Business Process Improvement (BPI), IT Contracts, Vendor Management, Employee Benefits, Data Architecture, Low Code, Product Roadmaps, Digital, Roadmaps, Data, Jira Service Management, Operating Expenses (OPEX), CAPEX, Leadership, Data Analytics, Analytical Dashboards, Business Requirements Documentation (BRD), Benchmarking, Product Benchmarking, City Portal, Team Leadership, Auditing, Customer Journey, Customer Engagement, User Engagement, Workshops, Workforce Management (WFM), Structure & Organizational Design, Technology Solutions, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Game Development, CI/CD Pipelines
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
Share your needs
Choose your talent
Start your risk-free talent trial
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring