Effective and accomplished Service Quality Assurance, Risk and Incident Management professional with a background in IT Service Management (Incident, Problem & Change Management), Project Management (Prince2 & Scrum), and over 15 years’ experience in the telecommunications, financial services & agricultural sectors. Experienced in strategically aligning, leading, monitoring and ensuring quality control, compliance and process improvement to deliver consistently on quality of service(QoS). Technical expertise in product and service management, IT solutions, customer handling experience, process engagement, incident management ensuring faster resolution of major and critical incidents and serving over 10M customers in a global incident handling call center. An excellent track record of fast-tracking resolution of critical incidents and engaging different stakeholders for possible work around during crisis moments. As a patient communicator and effective team leader of high integrity, who leads towards accomplishing collaborative organizational goals. Customer-focused professional with successful career in IT process governance to deliver value to business. Dynamic successful applying problem solving skills and continuous service improvement in busy business environment.
Hi, I’m
Grace Kiguru
Manager, Change Evaluation - Demand Management
Nairobi,Kenya
Summary
Overview
12
years of professional experience
5
years of post-secondary education
Work History
KCB Group
Manager Change Evaluation Analyst
02.2022
Job overview
- Managing +2000 change and deployment activities annually for KCB Group and its subsidiaries
- Enhanced customer satisfaction by resolving disputes promptly, maintaining open lines of communication, and ensuring high-quality service delivery
- Achieved departmental goals by developing and executing strategic plans and performance metrics
- Led change management initiatives to drive organizational transformation without compromising employee morale or productivity levels
- Conducting change impact assessment to evaluate whether delivered changes against set acceptance criteria
- Monitor IT Change Demand pipeline ensuring constraints are identified and flagged for action by relevant stakeholders
- Engage business stakeholders to promote ownership and transparency in change process
- Creating awareness and continuously sensitizing on change management processes, policies, guidelines, and stakeholder roles
- Supporting stakeholders to entrench Agile Change management and monitoring change performance against expected benefits
- Mentored junior team members for career advancement, fostering pipeline of future leaders
- Ensuring systematic report generation and development
- Providing ad-hoc, daily, weekly and monthly timely reports
- Streamlined workflows by identifying bottlenecks in existing systems and proactively addressing these challenges through appropriate solutions implementation
- Reduced operational costs through comprehensive process improvement initiatives and resource management
Safaricom PLC
SOC Engineer Incident Management
05.2017 - 02.2022
Job overview
- Setting up and engaging teams in incident collaboration war room for critical incidents while fast tracking on incident resolution for all incidents to minimize customer impact
- Ensuring service up time of 99.9% SLA as agreed with customers
- Incident, problem, change and risk management on critical incidents and changes while identifying improvement gaps
- Ensuring systematic report generation and development
- Providing daily, weekly and monthly timely reports
- Troubleshoot on customer escalations and resolve or escalate depending on scope (Technical and Customer Support)
- Ensure continuous improvement in quality of service (QoS) delivery.
- Supported customer integration efforts by addressing reported issues promptly and providing technical guidance as needed
Safaricom PLC
NOC Engineer (Billing, MPESA & VAS)
04.2014 - 05.2017
Job overview
- Conducted root cause analyses following incidents, implementing corrective actions to prevent recurrence and maintain service quality standards
- Leveraged monitoring tools such as SolarWinds and Alvaristar to maintain real-time network visibility, enabling swift response times to potential issues
- Pioneer team in setting up NOC Monitoring for MPESA Generation 2 technical operations monitoring
- OAT User acceptance tests for new MPESA G2 platform
- Test case development and user tests
- Dashboard generation for different transaction types
- Alarm testing and generation for different fault simulation scenarios.
- Collaborated with cross-functional teams to optimize network efficiency and establish best practices
- Closed first-time tickets quickly and met resolution volume requirements
Safaricom PLC
NOC Engineer (Core Network Surveillance)
05.2012 - 03.2014
Job overview
- Improved network performance by monitoring, troubleshooting, and resolving complex technical issues
- Conducted root cause analyses following incidents, implementing corrective actions to prevent recurrence and maintain service quality standards
- Monitoring of Network quality and elements Billing, VAS & CORE network elements
- Responsible in ensuring network availability by fast fault diagnosis
- First line fault clearance and escalation of network failures to relevant groups
- Ensuring fast user turnaround time across all service touch points USSD, SMS, Voice, MPESA and VAS.
- Increased customer satisfaction by providing timely resolutions to client-reported issues and concerns
- Supported global network users with connectivity, VPN, and access issues
Safaricom PLC
Data Customer Support - 2222 (Business Enterprise, Wimax, Fixed Data & Fiber)
06.2010 - 04.2012
Job overview
- Managed +300 customer calls per day
- Provided expert technical assistance to customers experiencing fiber connectivity problems
- Developed in-depth understanding of company's fiber products and services, enabling better support for customer inquiries
- Effectively communicate ticket status, service outages and escalate as per established customer support and escalation matrix
- First line fault clearance and escalation of network failures to relevant groups
- Ensuring fast user turnaround time across all service touch points USSD, SMS, Voice, MPESA and VAS.
Education
Hong Kong University of Science And TechnologyChina
Some College (No Degree) from IS Auditing, Controls & Assurance
07.2023 - 10.2024
University Overview
Huawei Shenzhen University Mobile Money OperationsChina
Some College (No Degree) from Digital Finance
04.2014 - 05.2014
University Overview
JKUAT UniversityKenya
Bachelor of Science from Information Technology
01.2002 - 07.2005
University Overview
Skills
Stakeholder Management
undefinedNotable Career Highlights
Notable Career Highlights
- Managed to exceed customer expectations by ensuring delightful services to Safaricom’s 20M+ customers using CRM systems (Siebel, Service Express) which saw me transition to platinum customer supporting one year after joining.
- Managed Enterprise (Safaricom Line 2222) and platinum customers and exceeded their expectations using monitoring tools such as Alvaristar, Solarwinds and Dynatrace.
- M-Pesa Generation 2 NOC technical operations monitoring establishment and OAT (Operational Acceptance Tests) which was one of the biggest IT projects carried out in Africa and the biggest Mobile Money project globally from 2013 to 2015. MPesa is the world’s most successful money transfer service.
- Monitored Safaricom’s Mpesa Generation 2 platform as the pioneer monitoring team working with BCM and Splunk to generate service different dashboards
- Customer obsession and technical expertise in different organizational products has mapped my journey through the organization with different customers and currently has positioned me in a place where the objective is negative service impact reduction on customers.
- Member of the CAB and Emergency CAB approvals as a part of the incident management team.
- Continuous service improvement in conjunction with Problem and Change management via Post Incident Review (PIR).
- Managed team adherence statistics while in Platinum Support pushing the team to its best by always being available for the customers.
- Managed to initiate war room and collaborate teams on restoration of 2 crisis moments on Data outage and MPESA.
- Oversaw a collaboration for service switch over restoration in Thika Data center averting a crisis due to high temp issues at the data center when the chillers were not working.
- Achieved Top performers rating in 2019.
- Oversaw a crisis service restoration after Safaricom PLC lost one of its critical routes to Mombasa MSR causing a countrywide network outage.
- Pioneered PIR (Post Implementation Review) tracking for technology changes at KCB Group to track change benefit and requirement fulfillment causing a over 50% change success rate improvement and closure of PIR items within 2 weeks.
- Streamlining the quality of changes raised by business by identifying process gaps to fast track on incident resolution.
References
References
- Erick Koskei, Manager- Product Configuration, KCB Group, +254 720 700387, Kkoskei@gmail.com
- Joshua Mbugua, Manager, Incident and Service Management, Safaricom PLC, +254 723 585980, Joshua.mbugua@gmail.com
- Wilson Mwenda Ireri, Principal-Revenue Management, Safaricom PLC, +254 724 347931, wireri@safaricom.co.ke
Training
Training
- Lean Six Sigma White Belt (2023)
- ITIL V4 Foundation (2021)
- ITIL V4 Create Deliver and support – CDS (2021)
- Price 2 Agile (2019)
- ITIL V4 Direct Plan & Improve – DPI (2021)
- Scrum Fundamentals certified (2018)
- ITIL PPO (Planning Protection and Optimization) (2018)
- ITI OSA (Operational Support and Analysis) (2018)
- ITIL CSI (Continued Service Improvement) (2017)
- ITIL SOA (Service Offerings and Agreements) (2017)
- PRINCE 2 Foundation certified (2016)
- Mobile Money (M-Pesa) technical operations & maintenance training – Huawei University, Shenzhen (2014)
- ITIL V3 Foundation certification (2014)
- Information Systems Auditing, Controls and Assurance (2023) The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Community Service
Community Service
- CSR Charity and mission activities in children’s homes and slums
- Member of Girl Child Computer Project Discovery, a team that educates girls on computers and technology and volunteering on the Safaricom WIT program.
Timeline
Hong Kong University of Science And Technology
Some College (No Degree) from IS Auditing, Controls & Assurance
07.2023 - 10.2024
Manager Change Evaluation Analyst
KCB Group
02.2022
SOC Engineer Incident Management
Safaricom PLC
05.2017 - 02.2022
Huawei Shenzhen University Mobile Money Operations
Some College (No Degree) from Digital Finance
04.2014 - 05.2014
NOC Engineer (Billing, MPESA & VAS)
Safaricom PLC
04.2014 - 05.2017
NOC Engineer (Core Network Surveillance)
Safaricom PLC
05.2012 - 03.2014
Data Customer Support - 2222 (Business Enterprise, Wimax, Fixed Data & Fiber)
Safaricom PLC
06.2010 - 04.2012
JKUAT University
Bachelor of Science from Information Technology
01.2002 - 07.2005
Similar Profiles
Gumatho SegelanGumatho Segelan
Data Analyst at KCB GROUPData Analyst at KCB GROUP
Delvis KipkemboiDelvis Kipkemboi
Change Management & Data Analytics at KCB GroupChange Management & Data Analytics at KCB Group
David KanyiDavid Kanyi
Audit Manager at KCB Group LtdAudit Manager at KCB Group Ltd