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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

August - 2009 - issue > Woman Achiever

Challenge the Traditional Barriers

Vimali Swamy
Friday, July 31, 2009
Vimali Swamy
She claims to be a bit of a workaholic, juggling multiple business accounts at a given time and wearing several feathers in her hat as a mentor and leader. And yet she is known to shift client calls around her TV timings. "After all, balance is the key to a peaceful life," says Shireen Alam, Director of Program Management at Sapient.

With a bachelor's degree in arts and a major in physics from Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, Shireen first started working with Sapient in the U.S. ten years ago and moved to the company's India office six years back.

"The entire journey has been exciting, challenging and very rich in terms of learning," Shireen reflects. Her roles have included managing multiple projects - from the requirements gathering phase to final delivery of the solutions, ensuring that the projects remain on-time and on-budget. She also gathered extensive project experience providing leadership to project teams, comprising of 10 to 45 members including onshore and offshore internal developers, contractors, client experts, and third party vendors. Currently, Shireen manages projects in the financial services line of business and leads one of the famous accounts at Sapient, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) OpenCourseWare’s Web based content management solution as well as the Web design project for the MIT OpenCourseWare and other clients. Apart from the above projects, her everyday role includes mentoring the middle management on delivery processes and people management. Recently, she has also involved herself in business development, which she finds extremely challenging.

Though having lived and worked in the U.S. for a substantial period of time, her decision to return to India had been a turning point in her career. "Back then, the sole thought of moving back to India was to experience living in India again, as an adult, but today I realize that this decision also helped me greatly in my career by changing my outlook towards many things," Shireen explains.

While shifting her base to New Delhi Shireen had assumed that since she was just moving into another branch of the company, most things would remain the same. However, she soon realized that the two countries were culturally different. "It took me a while to adjust to the slightly different culture, but a conversation with my Senior Manager at that time really helped set me up for success when dealing with new situations. I also learnt that it was important to broaden one's perspective and not move on a one-way track," she says.


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