Areas Of Expertise:

• IT Program and Project Management
• Scope Definition & Change Management
• Release & Incident Management
• Reconciliation & Conflict Management
• Cost Management
• Risk Management and Ownership

Education:

• Bachelor of Engineering in Information Technology

About Hardik Lakhani

Hardik is a Program and Project Delivery leader who joined Seven Consulting’s Sydney team in March 2022. He has more than thirteen years of experience managing and delivering compliance and digital-based transformation projects across diverse technical landscapes. Highly developed technical and commercial acumen coupled with strong relationship management skills.

What Hardik brings

• Proficient Strong knowledge of Agile & Waterfall methodologies.
• Ability to lead, motivate and develop cross-functional project teams.
• Proven track record of aligning IT strategy with business needs to enhance productivity, efficiency, security, and service delivery.
• Passionate about People Management with the ability to coach and create high performance teams.

Key Clients:

• Westpac
• HSBC
• Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA)
• American Express

Key Achievements:

As Technical Program Manager, Open Banking at Westpac, Hardik led the management and delivery of July 2021 and November 2021 phases of Open Banking features for regional brands (St George, Bank of Melbourne, Bank of South Australia, and RAMS) of Westpac Banking Corporation, involving 20 teams with more than 150 people having annual budget of $40 million. He strategized program delivery by forming teams, delivery plans, and governance to set them up for success. Hardik met with leads from various teams to understand the pain points and challenges, implemented solutions that ensured governance activities like pen testing, operational readiness assessments, EIM governance, etc. were completed on time before the production deployments. Weekly sync-up meetings were scheduled with all the teams involved to ensure everyone was on the same page, key risks or issues were discussed and documented. He took a pragmatic approach to project delivery by making quick decisions during the critical phases of project delivery, managing and mentoring service owners, solution designers, and implementation managers, seeking suggestions for improvements, and keeping them motivated by entrusting them with key responsibilities. Hardik established a defect review and prioritisation process closer to the release to ensure stakeholders were across the open and deferred defects, worked with architects and tech leads to identify areas for improvement, like building roadmaps to improve NFRs, parallel test environments to support concurrent releases, risk management in JIRA integrated with confluence, etc.

As Process Manager, Central COVID Response Team at Westpac, Hardik directly worked with the CFO, General Manager, and other heads of various departments to manage and respond to various data requests from APRA and AUSTRAC related to COVID reliefs that the bank was offering to consumers and business customers. He established a process in three days to review and track the data requests from APRA and AUSTRAC, scheduled daily status meetings with senior management to track the progress, and within 3 months the process was self-sustaining, analysed the existing process in various departments of generating the requested data and identified the areas that needed improvement and optimisation.

As Delivery Lead at Westpac, Hardik managed the economic and financial statistics program phase 2, which was an industry-wide program where all banks were required to submit a set of reports to APRA on a regular basis based on the new reporting standards and specifications set by APRA. Though hired as an Agile Coach, Hardik was asked to lead the AXIOM delivery of Phase 2 of the EFS Program involving 8 scrum teams with an annual spend of $20 million, because of his good work in establishing practices that resulted in high-performing scrum teams. He coached the business teams, new team members, and delivery teams on the fundamentals of agile and the agile framework used for EFS delivery, maintained the EFS program board and steered the conversations in the right directions for the various program ceremonies, mentored delivery team members, and motivated them by entrusting them with key responsibilities.

As Digital Program Manager at HSBC, Hardik managed 4 digital scrum teams involving 35 people with an annual spend of $25 million. He helped stakeholders make priority calls by introducing processes like WSJF and 4 Quadrants and was the single point of contact for any new digital initiatives to be added to the backlog for prioritisation. Hardik kept executive management (including the COO and regional heads) regularly informed on the status of the initiatives via steering committee meetings and was responsible for vendor management for UX design and development.

As Senior Scrum Master, Digital Projects at HSBC, Hardik was the first Scrum Master to join the bank on their Agile journey. He established the JIRA and Confluence structures for the digital portfolio, transitioned the first two teams to Scrum, and delivered multiple digital initiatives on time and within budget.

As Scrum Master and Senior Technical Business Analyst, Netbank Projects at CBA, Hardik managed multiple distributed scrum teams to successfully deliver various Netbank projects involving end-to-end delivery, from database changes and APIs to front-end web applications.