Golam Md Zubaer Khan
Chateauguay,QC
Summary
Dynamic Program Manager and Technical Leader with over 17 years of experience driving complex, multi-million-dollar digital initiatives across diverse sectors, including Ed-Tech, Transportation, Banking, and Technology. Proven expertise in ensuring delivery excellence through the orchestration of distributed teams, implementation of scalable governance frameworks, and translation of business objectives into measurable outcomes. Specialized in release orchestration, fostering cross-functional stakeholder alignment, and employing risk-driven decision-making strategies within fast-paced, Agile-first environments. Committed to leveraging strategic thinking and technical acumen to deliver innovative solutions that propel organizational success.
Overview
18
18
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
PROJECT MANAGER / PROGRAM DELIVERY LEAD
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Montreal, QC
11.2021 - Current
- Led cross-functional teams to deliver complex projects on time and within budget.
- Developed project plans, timelines, and resource allocation strategies to optimize workflow.
- Led enterprise-scale digital education platform (K-12 learning with AI integration) valued at $8M+ annually, orchestrating delivery across 4+ Agile product teams managing 20+ engineers across multiple geographies (Montreal, USA: Texas/California/Boston/NJ/Minnesota, Pune-India, Dublin- Ireland).
- Developed and maintained consolidated release strategy and timelines for 4 product teams (Student Learning, Assessment, Learning Repository, Audience View), ensuring alignment with business objectives and stakeholder expectations across engineering, product, and executive leadership.
- Planned and executed complex digital platform releases, achieving 95% on-time delivery over 6+ consecutive quarters, reducing end-to-end release cycle time by 30-45% (from days to hours).
- Implemented standardized release frameworks defining go/no-go decision criteria, handoff checklists, deployment windows, and escalation protocols, reducing critical delivery blockers by 25%.
- Established comprehensive release governance frameworks spanning pre-release strategy, quality & risk control, deployment orchestration, production safeguards, and stakeholder communication.
- Instituted structured risk and governance cadences, reducing unplanned scope changes by 20% and improving stakeholder alignment across cross-functional initiatives.
- Designed automated quality gates in CI/CD pipeline with rollback criteria and monitoring/alert systems; production incidents dropped by 40-60% after implementation.
- Conducted risk, impact, and strategy analyses to effectively manage deployment risks; implemented conditional go/no-go decisions based on test coverage, defect severity, and customer impact.
- Managed $8M+ annual program budget, tracking costs, timelines, and resource allocation across 4 teams in a multi-continent environment with rigorous forecasting and variance analysis.
- Coordinated resource planning and interdependencies between teams, ensuring optimal utilization and seamless handoffs across development, QA, DevOps, and operations.
- Developed and published executive dashboards tracking velocity, throughput, release reliability, and risk status; increased leadership visibility by 40%.
- Served as primary orchestrator between engineering, product, business, and executive stakeholders; managed go/no-go release calls, escalation protocols, and risk decision-making with cross-functional alignment.
- Published release notes, risk summaries, timelines, and executive visibility reports; translated technical complexity into actionable business insights.
- Collaborated with security, compliance, and operations teams to ensure all releases met data privacy standards with zero post-release compliance incidents.
- Introduced regression testing automation, increasing QA coverage 2-3x and enabling sign-off in hours vs. days.
- Led Agile maturity coaching and sprint retrospectives, raising Agile delivery scores by 20% and enhancing delivery consistency across teams.
- Championed continuous improvement culture through post-release retrospectives and performance KPIs; increased overall stakeholder satisfaction by 25%.
- Led integration of AI-powered educational features (content generation, automated assessment, personalized recommendations), defining use cases, guardrails, and release strategy with rollout monitoring.
- Coordinated AI feature delivery into teacher workflows; teacher prep time reduced by 30-40%, assessment creation turnaround improved 3x, student engagement with AI-assisted content increased 15-25%.
- SCOPE: $8M+ budget | 4 product teams | 20+ engineers across 4 continents | 3-week release cadence (later 2-week cadence) | AI/ML product delivery
PROJECT MANAGER
VIA Rail Canada
Montreal, QC
10.2020 - 10.2021
- Directed digital modernization and enterprise transformation initiatives, managing full project lifecycle for mission-critical applications with a focus on delivery quality, regulatory compliance, and operational readiness.
- Established and governed Quality Management System, aligning project delivery with corporate and regulatory standards, improving compliance audit scores by 35%.
- Enhanced release governance by implementing standardized checklists, readiness reviews, and escalation protocols, cutting unplanned rollbacks by 25%.
- Managed end-to-end planning, execution, testing, and deployment activities across multi-disciplinary teams; introduced data-driven project performance tracking (defect density, coverage ratios, release readiness metrics).
- Integrated automated quality gates into CI/CD pipeline, reducing escaped defects by 30% and improving deployment reliability by 20%.
- Led cross-functional collaboration among Engineering, QA, Operations, and Business stakeholders to ensure deliverables met service, safety, and compliance standards.
- Served as primary liaison between technology and business sponsors, translating technical progress into risk narratives and actionable insights for senior leadership.
QUALITY ASSURANCE (QA) MANAGER
OneOcean
Montreal, QC
05.2020 - 10.2020
- Led QA and delivery function for maritime risk/navigation software supporting global shipping operations. Established organization's first QA governance framework and automated testing infrastructure.
- Established QA and delivery governance framework defining standards for planning, execution, testing, and release approval across multiple product lines.
- Developed automated testing pipelines using Python (Robot Framework, BDD), reducing regression testing time by 40% and increasing release throughput.
- Implemented predictive testing and synthetic data modelling, preventing late-stage defects and generating $300K+ savings per release cycle.
- Managed cross-functional delivery teams across developers, QA engineers, and offshore resources to ensure milestones were met on-time and within budget.
SYSTEM INTEGRATION MANAGER
Canadian National Railways
Montreal, QC
05.2017 - 12.2019
- Led system integration and automation initiatives for enterprise-scale railway modernization programs, orchestrating seamless interoperability across multiple vendor platforms (Siemens, Wabtec, internal CN systems).
- Developed and executed strategic plans for technology upgrades across multiple departments.
- Led cross-functional teams to implement systems integration projects, enhancing operational efficiency.
- Directed multi-vendor integration programs across design, testing, and deployment for real-time operational systems supporting national rail operations.
- Planned and managed end-to-end system integration lifecycle from requirements definition through UAT and production rollout, ensuring on-schedule delivery within scope.
- Designed and implemented risk-based testing strategies and feasibility studies, reducing critical production defects by 30% and accelerating validation cycles by 20%.
- Strengthened vendor management through standardized reporting and review cadences, maintaining accountability with contractual SLAs.
- Championed data-driven decision-making using defect density, test coverage, and environment stability metrics to guide release readiness assessments.
CO-FOUNDER & CTO
Promozi
Toronto, ON
01.2016 - 01.2017
- Launched e-commerce start-up; defined project goals, built technical architecture, oversaw QA and product readiness, managed budgeting and vendor negotiations.
LEAD QUALITY ENGINEER
Royal Bank of Canada
Toronto, ON
01.2014 - 01.2016
- Managed QA for flagship mobile/digital banking applications; introduced test automation (Perfecto Mobile, Selenium), improving coverage by 40%.
- Coordinated offshore QA teams; conducted performance/load testing.
QUALITY ASSURANCE ANALYST
University of Windsor
Windsor, ON
01.2010 - 01.2013
- Led QA for student portals and research applications with mobile integration.
- Developed and executed comprehensive test plans to ensure software quality and functionality.
- Collaborated with cross-functional teams to identify and resolve defects in applications.
SOFTWARE TESTER
Robi Axiata Limited
Bangladesh
01.2008 - 01.2009
- Performed telecom system testing and SQL-based validations across Huawei, Alcatel, and Ericsson platforms.
Education
Master of Science - Electrical Engineering
University of Windsor
Windsor, Ontario, Canada12.2010
BSc - Electronics Engineering
North South University
Dhaka, Bangladesh12.2008
Skills
- Jira
- Confluence
- MS Project
- Power BI
- Azure DevOps
- Asana
- Miro
- Sharepoint
- AWS (S3)
- Jenkins
- GitHub
- Datadog
- Browserstack
- Log monitoring & alerting
- Robot Framework
- BDD
- Cucumber
- Selenium
- Perfecto Mobile
- HP UFT
- Soap UI
- SAFe
- Scrum
- Kanban
- Lean Six Sigma
- Agile transformation
- Python
- SQL
- Bash
- Gherkin
- JSON
- Excel
- Visio
- Postman
- ServiceNow
- Okta
- Box
- Risk management
- Budget forecasting
- Vendor management
- Project management
- Project planning
- Project scheduling
- Team collaboration
- Project tracking
- Client relations
- Customer relations
- Stakeholder communications
- Budgeting and forecasting
- Scope management
- Project estimation and bidding
- Project scope
- Cross-functional collaboration
- Coaching and mentoring
- Cost control
- Conflict management
- Project closure
- Productivity improvement
- Agile methodology
- Presentations
- Performance improvements
- Meeting facilitation
- Resource allocation
- Customer relations specialist
- Vendor sourcing
- Project regulations
- Root-cause analysis
- Requirements gathering
- Software development lifecycle
- Functional & business requirements
- Verbal and written communication
- Quality assurance and control
- Project development
- Project planning and development
Certification
- Generative AI for Project Managers- PMI
- Talking to AI: Prompt Engineering for Project Managers- PMI
- Project Management Professional (PMP) - Google
- Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO)
- Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe 5 Agilist)
- Lean Six Sigma Green Belt (LSSGB)
- Certified Scrum Master (CSM)
- Certificate on Agile Delivery - Process and Management
Accomplishments
- Recognized by HMH CTO & SVP for outstanding delivery execution and program leadership
- Recognition for effective team management and best practices at VIA Rail
- Awarded RBC Arbie Award for exceptional contributions to mobile application delivery
- Recognized multiple times by CN Rail and VIA Rail leadership for Agile transformation leadership
- University of Windsor: Entrance Scholarship and Alumni Award excellence in academics and extracurricular contributions
Languages
English (Fluent)
French (Basic)
Citizenship
Canadian Citizen
Open To Relocate
True
Security Clearance
Reliability Security Clearance (Government of Canada)
Timeline
PROJECT MANAGER / PROGRAM DELIVERY LEAD
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
11.2021 - Current
PROJECT MANAGER
VIA Rail Canada
10.2020 - 10.2021
QUALITY ASSURANCE (QA) MANAGER
OneOcean
05.2020 - 10.2020
SYSTEM INTEGRATION MANAGER
Canadian National Railways
05.2017 - 12.2019
CO-FOUNDER & CTO
Promozi
01.2016 - 01.2017
LEAD QUALITY ENGINEER
Royal Bank of Canada
01.2014 - 01.2016
QUALITY ASSURANCE ANALYST
University of Windsor
01.2010 - 01.2013
SOFTWARE TESTER
Robi Axiata Limited
01.2008 - 01.2009
BSc - Electronics Engineering
North South University
Master of Science - Electrical Engineering
University of Windsor