Areas Of Expertise:

• Transformation Planning & management
• Enterprise Change management
• Financial management
• Scope & Schedule Management
• Risk & Governance Frameworks
• Delivery Model Optimisation & Vendor management

Education:

• Bachelor of Information Technology, Maharaja Sayajirao University
• Certified SAFe 4 Practitioner & Scrum Master

About Kunal Parikh

Kunal is a dedicated and versatile senior transformation professional, experienced in developing and executing business strategies and delivering end-to-end digital journeys. He has a demonstrated track record that includes the delivery of challenging, if not seemingly impossible targets. This is coupled with experience in leading transformation programs, system & customer migrations, including delivering significant improvements in Customer Experience in a commercially sustainable way.

What Kunal brings

• A dynamic leader with a talent for mentoring and developing high performing and focused teams, to deliver challenging outcomes.
• Strong commercial acumen and capability to resolve complex business problems across the enterprise.
• Adept at establishing strong stakeholder relationships that extend the vertical spectrum, from C-Level to operations staff and customers.
• Extensive experience in business process re-engineering, offshoring and working with diverse teams across multiple geographies.

Key Clients:

• NBN Co
• Telstra Corporation Limited
• Gilat Satellite Networks

Key Achievements:

As Initiative Manager at NBN Co, Kunal managed the take carriage of System Digital Roadmap (SDR) a $200 million program with the objectives of technology simplification and improved customer experience. He collaborated with the Transformation Director and CIO to conceptualise and plan the E-2-E digital enablement roadmap, established program governance structures, implemented a value realisation framework and deployed enterprise-wide communication strategy. He was responsible for leading and managing the end-to-end delivery of 3 key SDR Initiatives (Data Analytics, Fulfilment Rationalisation and Service Management) with a total budget of $64 million. In his role on the transformation program, he managed over 140 team members across 8 different Value stream agile squads and various Engineering Chapters to support the design, development and deployment of the Initiatives through systematic program increment planning and integrated release trains. He proactively managed risks, dependencies and mitigation strategies across people, process and technology to ensure program success. He was also involved in demand management and resourcing to enable the program. He Interlocked with the organisations business transformation office and impacted domains; and implemented a Value-led approach to transformation by consolidating the value generated by the initiatives in comparison to the identified targets. Where inevitable benefit gaps were identified, he defined and applied treatments to close these and unlock additional value.

As Agile Delivery Manager at NBN Co, Kunal lead the Program Management for the Network Planning & Deployment (NPD) and Analytics and Information Management (AIM) teams to deliver ICT digital and business transformations aligned with strategic priorities and goals. He developed and implemented long-term strategic portfolio planning, define program and portfolio frameworks, established and managed Executive Program / Project governance arrangements, managed and report on Program / Project budgets and risks and manage program / project teams, contracts, contractors, vendors, IT operations and service providers to achieve successful program delivery. He assisted in the setup of Agile Community of Practice (CoP), to enable high-performing cross-functional and multi-disciplinary delivery teams and embed core principles and best practices; and facilitated the adoption of various Agile ceremonies like Daily Stand ups, Scrum of Scrums, Showcases, Retrospectives to allow for effective sprint planning and backlog grooming while leveraging delivery efficiencies through DEV OPS (CI/CD) and test-driven development. During his tenue, he delivered various critical programs for NBN including Data Quality Index Program with a budget of $22M and a team size of 70 and the PNI Cloud Migration program budgeted at $8M and a team size of 95. The Cloud migration program involved migration of over 5000 internal and external users, 480 application and DB servers spread across multiple DCs, 13,000+ Virtual Machines, integration across 30 applications, 8 Vendor teams and was delivered over 5 production drops.

As Senior Project Manager at Telstra, Kunal was responsible for the evaluation and production of new products / technologies (e.g., Data Centre Switching $2.2M, CMI Infrastructure Uplift $3.2M), and providing a wider spectrum of services for internal/external customers, including service definition, planning, architecture/design, and documentation. Providing Proof of Concepts for integrating and augmenting new and existing technologies into the service offerings provided by Telstra. He drove the business, technical and vendor teams to deliver within the specified timeframes and to agreed level of quality and lead these activities by example, managing projects through development and implementation stages according to budget and business plan. Kunal prepared all relevant project documentation, including the Project Scope definition, Project Management Plan, Project Schedule, Project Risks and Issue registers, PM Quality Plan, Implementation and Branch Network Roll out Plan and Post Implementation Review document. He maintained appropriate project governance and management structures to ensure all streams deliver to overall objectives. Identifying project dependencies and working with relevant decision makers to resolve issues that put a project at risk, as they arise.

As Senior Project Manager at Gilat Satellite Networks, Kunal managed the interface handling of day-to-day commercial issues (project budgets, logistics, resource management, insurances, risk portfolio) for multiple concurrent projects with a strong focus on both, service profit and customer satisfaction. His key achievement at Gilat included $135M First Release Satellite Program which included a network rollout of over 50,000 customers. He calculated the Order Income Calculation (OIC) and Risk & Opportunity for each project; Set-up all project controls, ensuring they are in place at project initiation, including risk and issue logs and Change Control, for all bespoke and strategic projects. He managed subcontractor and consultant resources including complex, multi-year fixed price, time and materials, labour hours and cost-type agreements (subcontracts). Ongoing oversight and administration of statements of work and terms and conditions to ensure optimum productivity; reviewed schedules to derive commercial implications or risks; provided input to risk assessment and management of mitigation activities. Kunal also oversaw the change management process and approval of all trends and change orders and conducted lessons learned sessions at key milestones identified within the execution plan in order to drive continuous improvement of the project and processes.