Nikola Rendulic, Project Manager in Zagreb, Croatia
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Nikola Rendulic

Verified Expert  in Project Management

Project Manager

Location
Zagreb, Croatia
Toptal Member Since
June 26, 2019

With robust communication and leadership skills, PMI-ACP and PMP, Nikola is a senior technical PM, PgM, product manager, and a BA who excels at building performing virtual teams, maximizing value delivery, applying the most effective methodologies, and bridging the gap between business and IT. He is skilled in digital transformations, data and integrations, and cloud computing. Nikola has led strategic projects for Aveva, UPC, EDF, Telefonica/O2, British Gas, Mastercard, Sophos, and Erste Bank.

Project Highlights

Salesforce Native eCommerce Solution
Migrated a tourist website to Salesforce and streamlined the eCommerce and mobile app sales journeys into a seamless UX.
UPC Telecom B2B Digital Transformation (Switzerland)
Served as a recovery PM—stabilizing and delivering a successful project that previously had issues and inadequate governance.
EDF (Electricity de France) Luminus B2C Digital Transformation
Served as a recover PM and took over the management of a B2C project and in months—rolling out a solution with great success.

Expertise

Work Experience

Data and Integrations Product Owner, Business Analyst, Project Manager, and Program Manager

2022 - PRESENT
AVEVA
  • Joined as a recovery project manager to recover the data project within a big digital transformation program and soon became responsible for three delivery teams dealing with consolidating customer and product data and E2E master data integrations.
  • Cleansed a pool of 300,000 customer accounts and established robust data quality, matching, merging, and deduplication processes using market-leading master data solutions.
  • Acted often as a BA/SA to scope and secure designs for different scope items (customer lifecycle, product lifecycle, across Salesforce, MDM, Oracle, and other key systems).

eCommerce Project Manager

2021 - 2022
Toptal Client
  • Joined as a project manager to support the rollout of an eCommerce solution in CEE countries, quickly ramped up the delivery activities on delayed projects, and adopted consumer flows and market specifics.
  • Ensured that the business and engineering teams adopted common tooling and processes and that the governance processes supported the collaboration and quick resolution of any impediment.
  • Gained knowledge about consumer flows, digital ecosystem, components, integrations, rollout, and localization processes to support market teams taking ownership over the required market work.

Senior Product Manager | Project Director

2020 - 2021
Cognism
  • Defined enterprise product offering and roadmap to enhance enterprise marketing and sales processes built on market-leading CRMs, sales engagement, and marketing automation tools.
  • Ensured on-time delivery of roadmap items through managing a team of front-end and back-end engineers, designers, QA, and product owners and data analysis.
  • Established data and value-driven product management practices, including predictable, Agile delivery practices.

Engagement Manager | Digital Transformation Leader

2019 - 2020
Maven Mule
  • Oversaw Agile coaching, driving team enablement and setting personal development goals.
  • Performed a business analysis (as-is and to-be process definitions, requirement gathering, backlog refinement, and prioritization).
  • Defined product roadmaps, created and refined backlogs, verified solution designs (object modeling, system landscape, and API definition), and acted as a product owner.
  • Defined MVPs, drove estimations and planning, and built project roadmaps.
  • Oversaw engagement management and customer success.
  • Managed the delivery of the eCommerce site and acted as a proxy product owner. Drove road mapping, creation, and refinement of the backlog and acted as a scrum master for the cross-functional delivery team.
  • Handled project contracts, budget management, and invoicing.
  • Oversaw the Atlassian suite (Service Desk, Jira, Confluence) setup, administration, and optimization for support services and project work.
  • Defined company processes (marketing, sales, office administration, operations, discovery and designs, development and release management, and finances), and ISO 9001 (QMS) and ISO 27001 (ISMS) certifications.
  • Oversaw marketing and sales operations (email campaigns automation, LinkedIn campaigns, lead and opportunity management, forecasting, and pipeline management).

Senior Technical PM | Managing Consultant | Head of PMO

2012 - 2019
CloudSense
  • Oversaw and ran discovery, design and planning workshops.
  • Managed a professional services (consultancy) team of 60+ IT consultants (developers, SAs, BAs, and PMs).
  • Set and adopted global delivery methodologies (agile, PM policy, BA framework, SA templates, development standards, release management).
  • Served as a recovery director and aided the swift recovery of troubled Salesforce transformation projects.
  • Acted as an agile coach for big programs and quickly built performant delivery teams.
  • Managed resources, portfolios, contracts, and project budgets.
  • Drove creation, refinement, prioritization, and estimation of product backlogs and created the timeline and staffing plans.
  • Translated business requirements into solution designs and technical requirements.
  • Advocated for the adoption of the Jira and Atlassian suite, transparency through Jira reporting and best practices.
  • Handled the Atlassian suite (Service Desk, Jira, Confluence) setup, administration, and optimizations, for support services and project work.

Senior Project Manager | Head of PMO

2009 - 2012
Erste Bank
  • Ran strategic transformation projects, across multiple business units, with multiple vendors and large IT team.
  • Translated business requirements into technical requirements.
  • Managed the project portfolio, ensured the adoption of common PM policy and ensured consistent reporting toward the board on all projects.
  • Drove discovery, design, and planning workshops with business, IT, and vendors.
  • Ran business process analysis and definition of as-is and to-be processes, defined wireframes, together with business and technical requirements.

Product Manager for eChannels

2006 - 2009
Erste Bank
  • Oversaw the delivery of new services on eChannels.
  • Defined product/service roadmaps.
  • Established the business requirements for the IT team.
  • Carried out vendor management.

Developer | Test Manager

2003 - 2006
NetworkStar Kate
  • Composed code in .NET.
  • Developed test scripts.
  • Implemented test automation.
  • Provided end user training sessions.
  • Produced user guides and technical documentation (UML).

Enterprise-ready Product Offering

Defined product strategy for enterprise clients, how products should fit into enterprise client journeys and integrate with market-leading CRMs, marketing, and sales engagement tools. Redefined integration strategy. Secured roadmap delivery.

I managed two agile delivery teams, each consisting of front-end and back-end developers, designers, a QA person, and myself playing a role of a product owner and delivery manager. In the first two months, a new integration strategy was piloted, and a cross-organization agreement reached on the reshaped strategy and roadmap.

Salesforce App for Data Intelligence

Hardened and made user journeys leaner. Minimized client churn. Implemented app analytics to understand product usage. Automated the release process.

I redefined the product roadmap, defined personas, and redefined user journeys. I also managed a team of developers, a designer, and a QA to have both strategic and tactical enhancements implemented to maximize value.

Salesforce Native eCommerce Solution

https://www.foxtrail.ch

Migrated a tourist website to Salesforce and streamlined the eCommerce and mobile app sales journeys into a seamless UX.

For a global self-guided city investigation/entertaining tours company, I led the digital transformation of their sales and order fulfillment processes on Salesforce, and streamlining the E2E journeys across different sales channels and business units.

Tasks Accomplished:
• Driven process workshops, requirements definition and refinement sessions with the client and developers
• In only few months with small relatively inexperienced team built CMS capability on Salesforce,
• Released a new websites and mobile application for client's different business units in different countries.
• Introduced a payment gateway and multi-currency support
• Made the product management processes fully configurable and aligned with out-of-the-box Salesforce practices.

ROLES: Scrum Master | Success Manager | Business Analyst

UPC Telecom B2B Digital Transformation (Switzerland)

https://www.upc.ch/en/business/

Served as a recovery PM—stabilizing and delivering a successful project that previously had issues and inadequate governance.

Before I joined, a very complex and challenging digital transformation project was about to get terminated. After I joined as a recovery PM, we revisited a governance-and-delivery mode and stabilized the project. After a few months, we developed a solution that reached commercial launch. Then a pure agile methodology was used, adding its own challenges as this for the first time, for most of the team members to use agile on such a sophisticated program.

ROLE: Recovery PM

EDF (Electricity de France) Luminus B2C Digital Transformation

Served as a recover PM and took over the management of a B2C project and in months—rolling out a solution with great success.

EDF Luminus digital transformation resulted in fully automated B2C journeys across multiple channels, all on the Salesforce platform.

The project ended with significant success. As a result of the B2C digital transformation success, CloudSense was given a B2B project, an upsell of major licenses, and a longterm support contract.

ROLE: Recovery PM by CloudSense

Salesforce Professional Services Website

http://mavenmule.com

In a very short time and with a small team, rebranded a ISV company, released a modern, responsive web, and set SMM strategy.

This salesforce consultancy company had only two months to handle rebranding and creating a new website, but they didn't want to compromise on the quality.

Tasks accomplished:
• Promptly found the design studio.
• Collaborated successfully with the MavenMule executive team.
• Created the whole content for the new website.
• Contracted the delivery of key components related to web, rebranding, SMM, and SEO.
• Brought the new website to life in only a few months.

Telefonica Germany M2M Digital Transformation

Delivered an M2M digital transformation project in an extremely short timeframe, transforming an E2E lead-to-cash process.

An initial M2M CRM solution was brought into production after only three months. Later overall BSS M2M processes were integrated—resulting in highly automated efficient lead-to-cash processes.

ROLE: Project Manager (PM) and Business Analyst (BA)

Professional Services Transformation (PSA)

200 FTE professional services organization (IT and business consultants) was transformed with a new PSA in only three months.

This project resulted in the introduction of a new PSA solution and integration of a lead-to-cash process for a professional services organization, MIS, and cross-organization real-time reporting on all aspects (profitability, utilization). It also ended up transforming how the sales', services,' and finances' organizations work.

I delivered all of the definition and adoption aspects of the project mostly on my own (requirements, testing, rollout, training) while only 20 MD of external PSA consultants carried out the implementation.

Puma Energy Digital Transformation

Served as a recovery manager—stabilizing the project and achieving a global rollout on time.

The client's vision included a digital transformation of their global B2B business. A Salesforce platform was the solution.

The project included more than 100 consultants (business and IT) globally. As the project ended in trouble, I was asked to recover one keystream. The solution was successfully rolled out after a few months of my involvement.

Corporate eBanking Solution (MultiCash)

Managed and successfully implemented a new eBanking channel for large enterprise group clients.

On this project, I managed and successfully implemented a new eBanking channel that allows large enterprise clients to manage their bank accounts.

Self-service Banking Zones

Managed the opening first self-service zones for a bank, and introduced new self-service devices for retail customers.

Erste Bank originally only focused on ATM machines. As part of the digital transformation strategy, I was responsible for defining and implementing the self-service strategy.

I managed the opening of first self-service zones for the bank and introduced new self-service devices for retail customers (deposit ATMs, non-cash machines with miscellaneous eServices).

eCommerce Global Digital Ecosystem

Launched and managed the rollout of an eCommerce ecosystem into several CEE markets.

Managed two market teams, technical vendors, and digital agencies in the configuration of a global eCommerce ecosystem, solution localization, and integration into the market system landscape.
After a late start, the markets managed to compensate for delays during the preparation phase and started driving the overall digital ecosystem road mapping.

Enterprise Data

Implemented master data solutions, data governance, and data quality best practices for a customer with 300,000 accounts in Salesforce and an extensive product portfolio.

Managed three delivery teams responsible for Salesforce data consolidation and master data integrations supporting lead to cash flows across Salesforce, Oracle, Navision, Zuora, customer portals, and Informatica MDM.
2007 - 2008

Diploma Study in Management (Mini MBA) Degree in Business Administration

University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - Zagreb, Croatia

1998 - 2004

Master's Degree in Telecommunications and Informatics

University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing - Zagreb, Croatia

JUNE 2019 - PRESENT

PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)

Project Management Institute (PMI)

DECEMBER 2012 - PRESENT

Salesforce ADM 201

Salesforce

MARCH 2011 - PRESENT

Project Management Professional (PMP)

Project Management Institute (PMI)

AUGUST 2010 - PRESENT

Project Risk Management

Krauthammer International

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