Ben Israel

DevSecOps Release Manager

Finance Applications

Creative, adaptable, and cloud-focused IT professional with 11+ years of progressive experience across a broad range of IT functions with specialization in Production Release management for large banks with Agile-based teams.
Professional Experience Read More...
Education Read more...

Skill Set

Agile (Scrum & Kanban)
DevOps
CI / CD (Jenkins)
SQL, BI Reporting
Disaster Recovery
AWS, Azure

Cloud migration
Docker, Kubernetes
JIRA, Confluence, ALM
Change Management
Test Automation (Selenium)
ITSM, ITIL, ServiceNow

About Myself

Seasoned IT Services Professional with 11+ years of overall experience in Change, Release, Build & Deployment Management. Currently, spearheading the release team to effectively plan, build, test, and deploy releases on a fortnightly basis with precision. Effectively filling the gaps between cross-functional and vendor teams paving way for a smoother, and less-chaotic release.

Certified in:

- Project Management

- Scrum Methodologies

- ITIL v4

- Risk Management & Worst Case Scenario Mitigation Planning

Work Experience

From Oct '19 To Present

Assistant Vice President

Credit Suisse AG Risk & Finance

Release Lead, Assistant Vice President

Spearheading the bank’s Risk and Finance application release team to effectively plan, build, test, and deploy releases on bi-weekly sprints while ensuring zero disruption to end users. Effectively minimizing gaps and improving transparency between developers, testers, cross-functional teams and operations by leveraging DevOps tools and Agile strategies paving way for a smoother, and Incident-free releases.

Closely monitoring and coordinating deployment activities and conducting retrospective reviews ensuring misses and issues are fed into the ‘continuous feedback loop’ to mitigate similar risks from future releases.

Key Contributions:

Automated Change Request creation in ServiceNow with a Python-based Tkinter GUI and API which could generate 25~ custom Change requests in under one minute, saving hours of manual effort.
Driven major upgrade of Oracle messaging infrastructure involving 15+ complex data processing and warehousing applications right from planning, testing, deploying, and monitoring.
Created a JavaScript based Jira-tool for developers and BAs to easily be able to follow labelling, versioning, due dates, components in JIRA to efficiently track, report, and release changes to production.
Introduced Release Metrics / KPIs which tracks details such as number of successful and rolled back releases, Rollback testing, Lead time compliance, Go-live schedule and Run book compliance, Incidents related to Release, Dress Rehearsal, Post Implementation Review conducted or not among other parameters.

From Aug '16 To Sep '19

Deputy Manager, HCL Tech.

Deutsche Bank Client

Build and Release Manager

Owned and maintained integrated project schedules to deliver large-scale releases, which included both quarterly feature releases as well as monthly maintenance releases for critical transaction-based applications.

Oversaw the creation and execution of release plans for the cross functional teams, across environments (Dev/Test/UA/RE/Security/etc).

Key Contributions:

Refined the release and DR process for a legacy payment system and considerably reduced required downtime to 7 hours.
Despite a backlog of 5000+ transactions in production system, released a Sanctions and Embargoes application to sensitive regions such as Iran, Somalia, Pakistan without any impact to business operations.
Created a Risk and Impact calculator which based on user inputs calculates Risk of a specific release based on previous releases, incidents and outages etc.

From Oct '14 To Jul '16

LEAD, HCL Tech.

Deutsche Bank Client

Release & Deployment Manager

Deployed application releases into production environment by closely working with the Application and Business owners alongside the release manager. Maintained audit-ready and transparent release repository and managed key information such as build and release procedures, dependencies, and notification lists. Conducted detailed Release Readiness reviews, Milestone Reviews, and Business Go/No-Go reviews.

Produced comprehensive and timely Deployment plans, Run Books and Implementation and Checkout Plans. Conducted Implementation walkthroughs, technical walkthroughs, staging rehearsals, post-implementation reviews to ensure all teams are on the same page, thus effectively minimizing communication gaps.

Coordinated release schedules and resources required depending upon the third-party applications, defect backlogs, planned releases, and infrastructure updates. Strong understanding of the technical know-how to work closely with the developers to understand scope of the release.

Key Contributions:

Automated deployment operations from manual deployment to IBM uDeploy, therefore considerably reducing the operating cost.
Created a new change Approval workflow to avoid unnecessary approvals (and delays), to add mandatory ones.
Introduced 4-eye (doer-checker) verification process to eliminate human error during production deployment.

From Aug '12 To Sep '14

Senior Analyst, HCL Tech.

Deutsche Bank Client

Production Support L2 (Finance applications)

Production support L2 for transaction messaging applications; working with business operations teams, application owners, and other stakeholders to provide a truly lightning fast support to any critical production issues. MySQL reports, Data and ticket analytics, Business intelligence reporting to effectively monitor and run the support team for one of the most demanding set of applications.

Key Contributions:

Created a master-tracker to update, track, and import all known issues as in-depth KB articles.
Developed several automated reports to provide daily/weekly/monthly reports on the number of issues (pending, closed, aging etc.).

Education

Bachelor of Information Technology

B.Tech, Anna University, Chennai.

2009-2012

Advanced Diploma in Information Technology

3-year Diploma, Directorate of Technical Education, Tamil Nadu.

2004-2007

AREA of EXPERTISE

Deployment Management

Release Planning

Scrum Sprint

Linux Administration

Amazon Web Services

SQL & BI Reporting

Shell script

Microservices and Containerization

Server/Database Migration

CI / CD

CMDB Management

Microsoft Azure

Oracle RAC

Change Management

Build Engineering

Vendor Management

Language skills

English: Advanced
German: Basic
Tamil: First language

References

It’s my pleasure to provide this letter of recommendation for Ben. As Ben’s sole direct manager at HCL, I’ve worked closely with him over the past three years, sharing the same open office space the majority of the time. Ben showed excellent communication skills and consistently exceeded company quotas. On a personal level, he’s charismatic and well-spoken, both qualities that have served him well in his role as software professional.

Ravindran SukumaranSenior Project Manager, HCL Tech.

Ben has a very strong grasp of technology. He knows our business applications inside and out and helps relay technical information to technical teams in an accessible way. By closely monitoring the SLAs across our wide range of trading applications, he proactively avoided major incidents and outages in an effective way. Ben makes the most of technology to find new ideas, to provide modern solutions, and drive results.

Gideon Rufus PaulAVP, Deutsche Bank

Ben Israel

Skill Set

About Myself

Work Experience

Release Lead, Assistant Vice President

Build and Release Manager

Release & Deployment Manager

Production Support L2 (Finance applications)

Education

Bachelor of Information Technology

Advanced Diploma in Information Technology

AREA of EXPERTISE

Language skills

References

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