Tian Foo Chou

The program started with a single scrum team of five members: a solution architect, senior engineers, and a lead UX designer. Within four months, a micro-frontend prototype framework was built and showcased to the customer, which helped secure further funding and ramp up the development team. The program eventually consisted of five teams, numbering up to 40 cross-functional personnel.

This program was centered around using Jira and Confluence as a single source of truth. Relying on this source of truth, I successfully drove continuous improvements via a data-centered approach to program status and progress reporting. Additionally, I reconciled a fixed price, scope, and schedule project against employing agile methodologies. This allowed the team to deliver product releases incrementally at least every quarter from the 6th month onward.

The client extended the entire team’s engagement beyond the original tenured period based on outstanding results achieved in our first year.

Wirecard acquired Citibank’s APAC merchant acquiring portfolio of 20,000+ merchants in 11 different markets. They hired me as a technology program lead to initiate the technical migration planning and design.

I worked with a team of cross-functional specialists to baseline and prioritize the product backlog for migration, balancing the technology buildup roadmap and expected business values projected on merchants’ historical financial performances. After realizing that the support and service management functions were unprepared for the forthcoming technology solution deployments, I also volunteered to become the operational readiness lead.

Within two to three months, I built up another cross-functional set of expertise to drive a business process mapping and gap analysis exercise. Subsequently, I introduced agile methods and techniques to iteratively build and implement process changes and corresponding measurement metrics in parallel with the incremental technology solution rollouts.

Within the next four months, we successfully launched and supported the minimum viable product in four markets. My contributions resulted in my promotion to head of service management for Asia Pacific.

This national payment switch was built on a legacy product platform over the course of 20+ years. It has integrations with all major card networks and payment schemes and 30+ bank hosts at different degrees of commercial arrangement. It also supports 20+ variants of POS-acquiring message formats.

The original migration project was meant to migrate the full legacy solution to a newly constructed product solution platform. When I was brought in for recovery, the project was three years behind schedule and had a severe budget overrun.

Collaborating with the customer, I led a team of cross-functional specialists to formulate and propose a recovery plan. The team re-baselined the project scope and obtained approval from the customer to decouple risky dependencies that do not necessarily contribute to intended business outcomes. The team implemented a 6-month surge strategy of rotating deployments of 20 technical consultants on-site to help the customer achieve a quick-win milestone.

We won support from the customer to close out the original contract and continued our engagement under new terms and SOW. After 1.5 years, we successfully delivered the committed solution and the customer’s desired business outcomes.