Service Delivery & Operations, 20 Years
Akash Popli
Delivery Head | Program Director | Digital Transformation | P&L & Account Growth | Global Delivery
About
20+ years running global IT delivery and operations across Capgemini, Wipro, HP and Mphasis. Owned portfolios up to $200M, led teams of 120+, improved margins, stabilized critical operations, and turned strong delivery into new business. The work is simple to describe: take a complex delivery environment, bring control, improve the economics, and make the customer trust the team enough to grow the account — across IT Service Delivery, Managed Services, Digital Transformation, P&L and Program Management, in Energy & Utilities, BFSI, and Pharma & Life Sciences.
What actually keeps me in this work is the moment a team stops firefighting and starts owning the outcome — that shift is the whole job. It's why, alongside delivery, I've spent the last few years building DivineBlissToLife, a coaching practice for technology leaders, drawing on ontology, phenomenology and NLP to work on the behavioural layer that most transformation programs skip. I think of it as a deliberate investment, not a detour: the same discipline that raises application uptime also raises a team's capacity to own hard problems.
Outside the delivery room, I stay close to structured personal-development communities — Landmark Forum and the Career Dwar accountability network — and I'm currently training toward an easy 21km run. Different arena, same instinct: set a real target, track it honestly, and improve the system underneath it.
Now looking for a VP / Head of IT Delivery & Operations mandate that goes beyond keeping the lights on — building a stronger delivery engine, improving margins, leading transformation, and helping the business grow. Target environments: GCCs, global technology organizations, and large managed-services operations.
Delivery Log
- Founded an independent leadership consulting and corporate training practice serving VPs, Heads of Delivery/Operations, and CXOs
- Advised senior technology leaders 1:1 and cohort-based on communication, stakeholder influence, and leading through ambiguity
- Applied Ontology, Phenomenology and NLP to strengthen the leadership and people-capability layer of transformation
- Directed the cloud development portfolio and executive review cadence for two major customers, reporting to the CEO
- Ran microservices cloud delivery across time/cost/scope — daily Agile scrums, per-sprint RCA, executive RAG reporting
- Removed top adoption blockers in data storage, retrieval and worklog auto-suggestion — grew customer outreach 3x, cut cycle time 50%
- Owned $50M+ annual P&L at ~30% margins, delivered 8% YoY cost savings, scaled delivery 0→120 FTE
- Broke into Equinor's Upstream (ESREE) as first-ever vendor — added $15M recurring plus $5M new contracts
- Won support deals from $2M to $15M across Volvo/Polaris, Cattolica, and TINE
- Owned global service levels for IKEA's worldwide portal across multiple vendors with 24x7 monitoring
- Raised application availability 97% → 99.6%, lifting order-processing efficiency during peak promotions
- Designed "Gateway," a global-access solution showcased as a Capgemini case study across other business units
- Built a shared-services factory model — 45 customers across North America, Nordics, UK — €24.5M scope, zero SLA breaches
- Established the transition playbook that made service improvements repeatable across accounts
- Built a self-assessing desktop agent across AstraZeneca's 50,000-machine estate, resolving L1/L2 issues autonomously
- Delivered a unified knowledge platform cutting incident volume 10% and resolution time ~90%
- Led delivery of 6 enterprise applications spanning ticketing, monitoring, and asset management
- Directed a 27-member team as single point of contact for Asia region application health
- Ran the GCC PMO governing onboarding and support within a multi-tenant Remedy environment
- Standardised onboarding governance into a repeatable process across new and existing customers
- Led managed infrastructure services for remote monitoring across 35 business-critical applications
- Transitioned a crisis engagement to India with a 14-member team and no inherited playbook — Mphasis VP award
- Delivered an aircraft-monitoring solution across 7 Indian Air Force Commands — ₹14 crore revenue, "most preferred vendor" status
- Led a 16-member team deploying Siebel CRM and WAN infrastructure for Tata Motors across North India
- Delivered SLA-governed technical support across 31 HP product lines as escalation SPOC
- Recognized personally by HP CEO Carly Fiorina for first-time-fix customer satisfaction gains
Skills
Testimonials
He can read a P&L with an operator's eye, build a roadmap with a product leader's clarity, and earn trust in a room the way someone does after two decades of working across operations, sales, and delivery.
Akash managed delivery exceptionally well and consistently demonstrated outstanding communication, stakeholder management, and team leadership skills.
Akash brings a unique combination of Service Delivery excellence and IT Digital Transformation expertise.
Akash is transparent, principled, and steady — the kind of person who does the right thing quietly and earns trust because of it.
An exceptional leader who consistently delivers results in complex and challenging environments. He brings a strong combination of strategic vision, operational excellence, and people-centric leadership.
Akash operates with the highest level of integrity and transparency. He advocates for doing what is right for the project, the team, and the organization, rather than what is merely convenient.
Akash Popli is an insightful colleague, a person you can trust when you want to be sure that important tasks will be completed in a systematic and precise way.
Akash is very good in public relations and has good leadership qualities. He is technically very strong and very much grounded — a constant learner who believes in continuous improvement.
A thoroughbred professional with a never say die attitude is what Akash is. Technically sound and also excellent communication skills made him one of the star performers always.
He brings order to chaos — transformation work is messy by nature, and Akash's instinct is to organize it. He pushes for speed and outcomes, yet does it in a way that lifts a team rather than exhausts it.
Most leaders sit firmly in one lane — operations, or sales, or product. Akash moves credibly across all three: he'll run a tight, efficient operation, carry a commercial conversation, and think about the product and outcome all in the same breath.