Mohana Gopal
Verified Expert in Project Management
Project Manager
Kuala Lumpur Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Toptal member since February 14, 2022
Mohana is a certified PMI Project Management Professional (PMP), Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP), Agile Hybrid Project Pro (PMI-AH-MC), and an experienced scrum master, Professional Scrum Master (PSM-1) certified. She holds a bachelor's with honors in computer science and an MBA with distinction from UEL, UK. She has 7+ years of experience as a technical project manager leading IT security, AI and ML, omnichannel contact center solutions, and digital asset management projects.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile
- Certified Project Manager
- Change Management
- IT Project Management
- Jira
- Kanban
- Scrum Master
- Technical Project Management
Work Experience
Scrum Master | Product Manager | Project Manager
Woven by Toyota, Inc - Dojo
- Orchestrated end-to-end scrum ceremonies for the secure foundations (secure devices) department, ensuring continuous delivery and cross-functional alignment across technical workstreams.
- Instituted a rigorous document management and control process, standardizing Confluence publishing workflows via GitHub source control to guarantee stringent document versioning and integrity.
- Authored comprehensive business requirements documents (BRDs) for the Automated Certificate Lifecycle (ACL) and Hardware Vending Machine (HVM) initiatives, to secure the budget and resource allocation for the projects.
- Presented a strategic proposal to the Security Council to consolidate trust architectures under a single Trust Anchor and Model, directly addressing current operational pain points which the implementation of the ACL project.
- Proposed the formation of a specialized workgroup focused on crypto-agility, positioning the 'Woven City' infrastructure for long-term quantum resilience.
- Collaborated with department leadership to systematically track, evaluate, and report key result (KR) progress, furnishing the executive team with transparent metrics concerning project health and team performance.
- Strategized the cross-functional product roadmap, prioritizing the development backlog for multiple concurrent workstreams to ensure on-time delivery of mission-critical features.
Project Manager | Scrum Master
Woven by Toyota, Inc - Cybersecurity
- Moved from the product security to the secure foundations team to manage projects from multiple work streams, comprising Code Signing, Secure Boot, and PKI.
- Architected and documented a bespoke Scrum framework tailored to integrate diverse, distinct workstreams into a single, cohesive scrum team, improving cross-project synchronization.
- Engineered a centralized Jira project board for multiple workstreams, establishing a 'single source of truth' for tracking deliverables across the secure devices portfolio.
- Consulted the team to define high-impact objectives and key results (OKRs), establishing the necessary metrics to quantify technical progress for executive-level reporting.
- Orchestrated ongoing progress tracking and reporting of KRs to leadership, providing data-driven visibility into project health, risks, and milestones.
- Spearheaded the recovery of a distressed project; performed a formal RCA to resolve underlying issues. Managed critical escalations and customers' expectations, ensuring the project met its key milestones.
Program Manager | Scrum Master
Woven by Toyota, Inc - Cybersecurity
- Optimized team velocity by implementing Jira automations to eliminate administrative overhead and leveraging JQL-driven data insights for precise capacity planning and sprint reviews.
- Spearheaded team adoption of organizational OKR by establishing KR definition, measurement guidelines, and facilitating quarterly planning sessions to ensure aligned, quantifiable key results.
- Partnered with team leadership to engineer custom metrics and estimation tools, successfully quantifying output and providing visibility into the 'value-delivered' of complex workstreams.
- Authored a comprehensive user journey framework for Woven City product teams, streamlining the security review onboarding process in preparation for the successful Beta release.
- Tracked the progress of the vendor's delivery of the Woven public key infrastructure (PKI), involving foundational works for building the Certificate Authority (CA) and Intermediate CA (ICA) infrastructure.
- Led English-to-Japanese translations and GitHub publication to boost accessibility for Japanese speakers.
Project Manager | Scrum Master
Woven by Toyota
- Spearheaded the customization and implementation of Scrum and Scrumban frameworks, optimizing team throughput for secure SDLC workstreams and accelerating delivery cycles for incremental projects.
- Engineered data-driven estimation models to quantify effort and output at scale, while automating documentation workflows to ensure transparent sprint-over-sprint progress.
- Led strategic roadmap development, collaborating with product owners. Curated high-priority items for weekly execution.
- Managed change request lifecycles for high-risk proof of concepts (PoCs), mandating and facilitating critical security reviews to mitigate exposure across untrusted network endpoints.
- Provided expert guidance on Scrum values and principles to scrum masters and product owners, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and servant leadership.
- Managed security info database for Woven City for the Product Security team, ensuring data integrity and accessibility for stakeholders.
Project Manager
Kloudynet Technologies
- Joined the team as a project manager to deliver Microsoft Enterprise Solutions for clients in telecommunications, finance, public services, transportation, market expansion services, education, and many others.
- Set up the workflow for driving IT projects and security and compliance projects.
- Collaborated and jived ideas with the founder and CEO from time to time on strategies to run lean teams to effectively utilize the available resources while building the team's skillsets to align with the business roadmap.
- Doubled up as the release manager for the DevOps team for development projects consisting of a solution architect, UI/UX designer, and developer.
Project Manager
Hayden AI Inc.
- Joined the team as an offshore project manager (PM) to carry out data capture for a local transportation project. However, management decided to utilize my skills as a PM to coordinate the team to deliver a minimum viable product (MVP).
- Liaised with the local transportation company and coordinated with the local team for data capture using smart sensors and computer vision to detect bus lane traffic violations.
- Delivered an MVP that reduced traffic violations, improved traffic efficiency, and reduced congestion caused by traffic violations.
- Implemented an automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) to provide car plate numbers in the video snippets as an evidence package.
Project Manager
Microtel Technology
- Managed and delivered a cloud-based contact center solution for a bank in the Philippines as an external project manager with the support of a team that spanned across Malaysia, India, and the Philippines.
- Conducted the requirement elicitation exercise and drew up the requirement traceability matrix. Ensured timely delivery of the system design document to kick-start the project's execution phase.
- Utilized Microsoft Teams as the primary collaboration tool to carry out project milestone activities, such as user acceptance testing (UAT) and training.
- Managed the executive stakeholders' expectations with regular and timely updates and escalation when required to avoid delays and expedite showstopper activities.
Project Manager
Microtel Technology
- Delivered all projects assigned and ensured team compliance on all established deliverables, milestones, and success criteria for the project delivery.
- Prepared comprehensive project plans and statements of work (SOWs), incorporating estimates on effort, project assumptions, and out-of-scope items.
- Ensured that the project stakeholders were kept informed on the project progress status, issues, and risks on agreed frequencies and formats.
- Established the processes and tools for remote project support and delivery. Reviewed the efficacy of the established procedures from time to time to ensure all intended purposes were met and improvements were made to address gaps identified.
Project Manager and Head of Support
Gamlite IT Sdn. Bhd
- Joined the team as a technical writer, got promoted to a project coordinator in two years, and left the company five years later as a project manager and head of support.
- Assisted the project manager and chief resident engineer in a cross-functional team setting as the project coordinator in managing all communications, project documentation, issues, and statuses of all items in the WBS.
- Responded to requests for proposals (RFPs) and drafted proposals for project prospects and tenders. Oversaw the preparation of documentation required for project bids and post-project support.
- Prepared a broad scope of documents, including system design specifications, business requirement documents, user manuals, training manuals, user acceptance test cases, project reports, and meeting minutes.
- Attended and participated in monthly steering committee meetings and maintained records of project deliverables and acceptances.
- Prepared all correspondence with the client and contracted consultants and vendors. Maintained the stakeholder communication register as one of the project requirements.
- Assumed the role of a document controller and stored the documents electronically and in hard copy for the project team. Ensured that accurate information was distributed throughout the organization, on time, and to the people who needed it.
Helpdesk Lead
Privasia Technology Berhad
- Joined the team as a level-1 helpdesk but was promoted to the head of the helpdesk in three months.
- Established the workflow processes to manage incident tickets, ensuring monthly reports produced for a client were relevant and insightful.
- Conducted regular training for new hires and refreshers to promote and emphasize the importance of following the established processes.
- Reduced the overall volume of incident tickets. Improved the helpdesk key service-level agreements (SLAs), like response and call handling times.
- Provided canned email responses. Built and populated the knowledge base with articles for frequently occurring or known issues to improve the first call resolution (FCR).
- Developed the standing operating procedure (SOP) documents for the helpdesk to manage the various support channels, such as the email, desk phone, walkie-talkie, and mobile phone, before the handover to my successor.
Service Desk Analyst
CSC Malaysia
- Assigned to work on two separate accounts during my tenure. The first was with BHP Billiton Ltd. (an Australian mining company) and the second was AON Hewitt (Insurance broking company from the US).
- Provided the first level of IT support via telephone and email and supported most of the client's business applications that were under the ambit of CSC.
- Strived to achieve the first call resolution (FCR) targets by resolving issues handled and ensuring tickets raised are properly documented for colleagues to pick up if escalated.
IT Helpdesk
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
- Assigned to work on the Shell IT account to provide Level 1 helpdesk support.
- Attended to calls from Shell IT employees and gave best efforts to resolve issues within the given SLAs that determine the agent's performance scorecard.
- Practiced active listening to analyze and correctly interpret the inquiries or issues raised before attempting to resolve the query or issue.
- Provided accurate and prescribed solutions to issues, ensuring all pre-defined quality measurements were met. Escalated the calls as per the guidelines if the need arose.
Onsite Trainer and Support
ExxonMobil
- Accompanied the project roll-out team across the country and conducted training to station dealers and cashiers on the new point of sale (POS) systems.
- Trained the cashiers on using the POS function and end-of-day sales reconciliation in a go-live environment upon cut-over to the new system.
- Carried out training for the station dealers the next day on the back-office functions, which covered stocks and financial reporting.
- Provided post-implementation hardware and software support during the one-week post-deployment stabilization period.
IT Consultant
Swasti Software Services (Self-Employed)
- Designed and authored training materials, job aids, and user guides for custom-based applications.
- Conducted ad-hoc training programs for clients. Training programs were customized to meet the business needs.
- Managed a team of developers in delivering a web-based solution or product, ensuring it met the user requirements.
- Conducted discovery sessions with the client to assess and understand the pain points of the business and the expectations of the solution to be delivered.
- Managed the delivery of the project end-to-end, ensuring minimal or no slippage in time, scope, or cost.
IT Lecturer
Informatics College
- Conducted lectures under the UK NCC Diploma and Higher Diploma programs.
- Graded students on their mid-term and final-term papers.
- Supervised students' final year projects, providing them guidance on how to prepare the documentation and manage their time accordingly to ensure timely delivery of their project proposals, systems design documents, test plans, and final reports.
- Conducted evening classes or corporate training programs for working adults on courses like C, Java, Visual Basic, and HTML.
Project History
Toyota Woven City
- 100% — Building the complete map of secure devices product landscape
- 100% — Defining the deliverables of the PKI project
- 100% — Defining the deliverables of the Secure Devices Project
The organization lacked a single trust anchor, leading to potential issues like fragmented identity, increased attack surfaces, and interoperability failures. The primary challenge is the “Trust Silo” problem, where verifying authenticity requires managing multiple, often conflicting, root authorities.
• Implementing a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) provides the digital trust necessary to operate securely in a connected world. Its business value shifts security from a “gatekeeper” role to a business enabler, allowing us to scale operations, automate compliance, and drastically reduce the risk of catastrophic breaches.
• As we were dealing with onboarding a diverse collection of devices onto the PKI platform, a product roadmap was necessary to strategize our implementation plan with the available resources and minimize disruption to ongoing development works by the IoT product teams.
• Operational efficiency and scalability, automation of certificate issuance to devices
• Risk mitigation and brand protection
• Regulatory compliance and audit readiness
• Strategic business enablement
SaaS-hosted Contact Center Solution for UNICEF Malaysia
Initiated and got the buy-in from the organization and the client to move from a predictive to an adaptive Agile approach to the project delivery, giving value fast and early to the client and the flexibility to strategize on their service offerings.
I managed a team of five people and helped them improve their self-management skills when delivering increment solutions. The project was delivered in two-week sprints. The first increment involved the delivery of a telephony module that allowed the contact center to switch over to the new system effortlessly with no impact on operations. We delivered the CRM components in the subsequent releases.
AI-based Chatbot for an Energy Company
Fulfilled all deliverables and closed this project successfully six months after I inherited it while it was stalled in the execution phase for more than three months due to some ongoing issues. The payment was released without any disputes.
A pilot chatbot project was initiated to enhance a local energy company’s support services and procurement shared services. Users of the AI-based chatbot were to be authenticated via an active directory. The deployed chatbot was expected to reduce the volume of support tickets raised for password reset requests by employees for specific SAP systems, respond to FAQs, and provide the status on purchase requisition inquiries.
An SAP consultant was contracted to deliver a specialized service building on the SAP integration module that was to be the middle-point of communication between the developed chatbot and the client’s back-end SAP Materials Management (MM) module.
The project was stalled for about three months due to communication gaps among all parties in the project.
Upon onboarding as the project manager, I sat down with all project stakeholders to understand the issues at hand, prepared a responsibility assignment matrix (RACI), and ensured everyone involved was aware of their responsibilities. I conducted weekly checkpoints to track progress and flag potential issues and risks. Executive stakeholders were kept informed on the progress and the project was successfully closed off in six months.
SaaS-hosted Contact Center Solution for a Telecommunications Company
Delivered the project end-to-end and managed the change requests that came from the client midway through the project with minimal conflicts and impact to the project budget and timeline.
The client’s contract with the previous service provider was coming to an end and they wanted to make a change.
The project deliverables include a cloud-based omnichannel, telephony, webchats, emails, social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp, and a contact center solution with CRM system integration. The CRM system contains the client’s existing customers and their subscribed plans and serves as the contact center’s support ticket and reporting system. The solution delivered is designed to handle inbound interactions and outbound calls, which is specifically crucial for the sales lead generation team.
A business analyst carried out the requirement elicitation and documented it for the client’s sign-off. Two teams were allocated to work on this project, the contact center solution team and the CRM solution development team.
Education
Master's Degree in International Business (MBA)
University of East London - London, United Kingdom
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science
Science University of Malaysia - George Town, Malaysia
Certifications
CompTIA CySA+
CompTIA
Professional Scrum Product Owner I (PSPO I)
Scrum.org
Microsoft Certified Security, Compliance and Identity Fundamentals
Microsoft
Change Management Specialist (CMS)
Management and Strategy Institute (MSI)
Professional Scrum Master Level I (PSM I)
Scrum.org
Agile with Atlassian Jira
Atlassian University
Agile Hybrid Project Pro | Micro-credential
Project Management Institute (PMI)
Certified Cloud Practitioner
AWS
PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)
Project Management Institute (PMI)
Network+
CompTIA
Security+
CompTIA
ITIL Foundation Certification
Axelos
PRINCE2 Foundation
Axelos
Project Management Professional (PMP)
Project Management Institute (PMI)
Skills
Tools
Jira, Microsoft Project, Project Management & Work Tracking Tools, Confluence, Slack, Google Workspace, Google Forms, GitHub, Toggl
Paradigms
Agile Product Management, Scrum, Change Management, Agile, Agile Project Management, Agile Software Development, Agile Workflow, PMBOK, Kanban, Organizational Change Management (OCM), Requirements Analysis, Waterfall Delivery, PRINCE2, XP
Industry Expertise
Building & Construction, Construction
Other
Coaching, Project Management, Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), IT Projects, Business Communication, Leadership, Planning, Risk Management, Scrum Master, Stakeholder Engagement, Resource Management, Stakeholder Management, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), Microsoft Office, Documentation, Project Coordination, IT Project Management, Technical Project Management, Technical Writing, Project Management Professional (PMP), Estimation & Planning, Project Planning, Certified Project Manager, Program Management, Agile Program Management, Project Tracking, Project Reporting, Project Scheduling, Technical Requirements, Software Project Management, Work Breakdown Structure, Certified ScrumMaster (CSM), Issue Management, Startups, Product Owner, Agile Coaching, Team Management, Business Requirements Documentation (BRD), ITIL, Managed Services, Jira Administration, Metrics, Project Planning & Execution, Team Coordination, Networks, Writing & Editing, IT Service Management (ITSM), Reporting, Document Control, Proposals, Software Documentation, Scrum Coaching, User Stories, Security, Jira Query Language (JQL), Communications Management, Hybrid Project Management, Requirement Traceability Matrices, IT Security, Incident Response, Incident Management, Technical Support, IT Business Analysis, PSM-1, SaaS, Request for Proposal (RFP), Communication Management, Japanese-English Translation, Web Development, Backlog Management, Scope of Work (SOW), Dashboards, Artificial Intelligence (AI), AI Chatbots, Unified Threat Management (UTM), Cybersecurity, Product Ownership, Product Management, Pair Programming, Product Roadmaps, Project Budget Management, Objectives & Key Results (OKRs), Process Flows, Stakeholder Alignment, PKI, Secure Devices, Field Service Management, Vendor Management
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