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Tackling public sector governance is challenging. In complex systems, a modern approach to accountability and transparency is essential, requiring significant expertise and efficiency.
Outdated computing technology, or legacy systems, must be modernized to ensure compliance and provide value to taxpayers, though challenges may arise.
Ammar Bhaisaheb, a notable expert on program management and cybersecurity, points out the complexity of such a step: “One of the unique challenges is the business continuity right through this transformation. Let me give you an example. When we are moving from the old system to the new system, there is always the risk of, ‘How would the business continue? What if the new system doesn't work? When should we transition from the old to the new system?’”
As an accomplished Senior Engagement Manager and Program Management Leader, Bhaisaheb is used to working with such complexities and can answer these questions with clarity. He leads transformations in both the public and private sectors, contributing to the industry through his work on large-scale regulatory transformations.
To him, the approach has to be focused and targeted on one goal: aligning technology implementations with organizational outcomes. This is especially true when navigating regulated environments, where reliability and security are the top priorities.
Bhaisaheb says there are many blockages and risks, but while it is “risky,” he believes it can be “very rewarding,” acknowledging: “It’s more important that systems become more unified against all odds, especially when they start with fragmented processes.”
Public sector regulation is about setting “the rules of the game.” It applies to businesses and markets, public safety and health, financial systems, and public services. Without it, systems could easily collapse, leading to unchecked damage and exploitation.
For example, in areas such as healthcare licensing, incident reporting, and compliance oversight, multiple disparate applications require staff to navigate multiple logins, perform manual data entry, and complete redundant checks. Many old systems do not have the capacity to work together in many areas.
Bhaisaheb says: “This fragmentation not only slows down service delivery to hospitals, long-term care facilities, and other providers but also increases the risk of errors, delays in approvals, and higher administrative costs for both regulators and the public they serve.”
Many public sector agencies also often function through outdated, siloed applications that rely on manual or paper-based workflows. Regulations, documentations and archiving systems are usually outdated and unusable.
Bhaisaheb says: ‘Companies still use such systems despite the inefficiencies they’ve created: administrative burdens, for example, are increased, and timely service delivery to providers is hindered.
‘Sometimes, such delivery is life-or-death delivery, after all, that is needed in hospitals and long-term care facilities. If licensing, incident reporting, and compliance processes are abandoned, efforts are duplicated, and delays are doubled.”
He adds: “When agencies must enforce standards across large populations, these inefficiencies compound, straining resources and limiting the ability to adapt to new regulatory requirements or emerging needs.”
Bhaisaheb has observed these challenges directly through his work, leading modernization efforts in regulated environments.
As a pioneer in modernization, he has years of experience, during which he learned that building modeling tools didn’t just require deep technical expertise. It also required strong leadership skills to lead the project to success.
Soon enough, his contributions led him to work on the multi-million-dollar Medicaid Information Technology Architecture (MITA) overhaul initiative. Here, Bhaisaheb led the overhaul of the state’s healthcare diagnostic coding and claims reporting, successfully managing the high-stakes transition from a legacy system to the federally mandated ICD-10 code.
With Bhaisaheb’s experience, the transition meant more than simply “updating codes” — it was transforming public health infrastructure for vulnerable populations.
Without such transitions, disrupted access to care can damage lives. With a redesign, Bhaisaheb played a role in protecting data integrity, mitigating risks, and improving analytics. He analyzed the impacts of HIPAA standards on legacy Medicaid-related systems, identifying data discrepancies and supporting updates to meet regulatory demands.
Bhaisaheb acknowledges the crucial work he does, saying: “The organizations that I support are nonprofit, NGOs, and hospitals. So whenever we have major milestones or go-lives that could impact the NGO's day-to-day work, it's really stressful. If something goes wrong, it could affect their lives and how they work. So that's something that keeps me up at night during those go-lives and the implementation, just because of the impact that they have — and because they're not perfect.”
This consideration and stress encourage Bhaisaheb to keep going and to strive for almost perfection in everything he does. This meticulousness eventually showed in his landmark work with Global Systems LLC, where he managed the multi-million-dollar Regulatory Services Systems Modernization program for the Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC).
His work included overseeing the Texas Unified Licensure Information Portal (TULIP), which shifted licensing and reporting from paper-based methods to an online Salesforce Government Cloud system.
The paper-based legacy system was prone to risks of errors, delayed reporting, and weak audits.
Bhaisaheb transformed outdated regulatory applications into one unified platform. He oversaw 30+ cross-functional resources, including architects, analysts, developers, and vendors, while establishing agile methodologies tailored to government constraints—facilitating daily scrums, sprint planning, and retrospectives.
Bhaisaheb remembers this time well, noting: “One of the projects that I did for one of our clients was merging 20 different applications into one single system that we built for them. So, solving for that, solving for so many users, stopping using 20 applications and coming to one system, it was a lot of work, a lot of complexity, and that's one of the aspects that I love to solve.”
Modernizing legacy systems, however complex, was easy with Bhasaiheb’s grit.
That calculated ROI is a feat, especially given swamped archiving and resource constraints. Bhaisaheb’s approach helps make everything easier for anyone who might benefit from driving real results. It led to inquiries from other states and a citation as one of the models to replicate. In West Virginia, his work was cited in an inquiry to develop a one-stop-shop permitting solution: a unified system that can handle permits, licenses, and approvals.
And it was through Bhaisaheb’s success with the Texas Health and Human Services Commission that this approach was considered a success and deemed worthy of a risk by the state. Through Salesforce, they were hoping for the same results that Bhaisaheb drove for the company: accelerated work, flexibility, and a seamless architecture that benefits their specific system.
Bhaisaheb reflects on his overall experience in hospitals and NGOs that led to such a citation: “This built my understanding of how legacy constraints affect not just operations but also broader public outcomes. For example, I saw how operational slowdowns caused by paper-based licensing and reporting in hospitals and long-term care facilities were delaying approvals and increasing administrative burdens.”
The scale of his impact encompassed the entire state, leading to progress unprecedented for the time.
Today, Bhaisaheb contributes to the work in the high-stakes company, Salesforce.
As the world’s leading American cloud-based software company, Salesforce's applications focus on customer service, automation, sales, e-commerce, analytics, and artificial intelligence. He is currently the Senior Engagement Manager at Salesforce, a Fortune 500 leader.
Bhaisaheb's leadership is the linchpin of their most complex NGO and Public Sector portfolios, directly impacting programs serving 38 million members and global pediatric research.
He’s also the main point of contact or end-to-end enterprise delivery of cross-cloud Salesforce programs valued from $1M to over $10M in total contract value. He oversees the full lifecycle of every program: discovery, scoping, estimation, and mobilization through execution, cutover, go-live, and hypercare. He also manages risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies.
Bhaisaheb underlines how critical the work is, noting: “My employer is a Fortune 500 enterprise software leader with over $34 billion in revenue. My clients are mainly nonprofits (e.g., a global pediatric research hospital raising $0.9–3 billion annually), state agencies responsible for resident health and safety, a global media conglomerate (advertising/media cloud implementations), and national organizations serving people over 50, with 38 million members.” It’s clear that the work has to be made with as much rigor as possible, which Bhaisaheb delivers.
He admits to the technical complexity involved, saying: “Every project has unique challenges—for example, I once led the merging of 20 different applications into one unified system for a client. Consolidating everything and getting users to adopt a single platform was incredibly complex and rewarding.”
Bhaisaheb also follows up critical work by managing 1,200 leads, resulting in incremental revenue of $430,000 for the company. If one projects revenue for 2024-2025, the projections come to around $50 million.
Through the work, it’s also essential to build teams. C-suite relationships for Bhaisaheb were of the utmost importance. He converts every strategy into an actionable roadmap for every team member, with clear KPIs and value-realization metrics.
In the midst of building relationships, mentorship is crucial as well. Bhaisaheb also took on the role of a Salesforce mentor. He mentored junior PMs, Scrum masters, and engagement managers. He also created templates for estimation, governance frameworks, and teaming agreements. This establishes collaborative ground rules for engagements, enabling regional delivery teams to adopt them.
As he puts it, his job demands a lot: “I primarily work in end-to-end enterprise delivery transformation—from defining scope and vision, through resource assignment, estimation, critical path planning, ROI analysis, go-live, and post-launch maintenance. Basically, setting up or transforming major systems/applications.” These major systems can be difficult to handle, but with an outcome-driven approach, he consistently unlocks potential in every project.
In modernizing complex public systems, a values-based work ethic is needed. Bhaisaheb emphasizes efficiency and determination while working in an agile environment. The latter is necessary to ensure modernizing systems succeed, not to rush or lag in every phase.
For this, Bhaisaheb made sure he was a certified expert. He holds 20+ professional certifications, including rare elite global credentials such as the Program Management Professional (PgMP) and Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), distinctions held by only the top tier of practitioners worldwide.
He also holds multiple agile certifications, including Certified Scrum Master and Scrum Foundations Educator. Beyond agile management, however, healthy leadership is also needed. Bhaisaheb made sure to prioritize remaining composed so clients could trust him in a crisis. As he puts it, he’s “calm under fire”, saying: “In high-stakes situations—tight timelines, system issues, multi-million-dollar go-lives—I stay composed, professional, and solution-focused.”
Bhaisaheb believed leadership is more than just being at the helm: “Leading teams and companies through this transformation, keeping them energized, and all of those things from start to the end, is one of the things I love about my profession, and that's something that I look forward to each day when I come to work.”
Above all, Bhaisaheb is rigorous. His unique technique involved testing and creating a problem, then finding the solution while in trial, so it can be solved when it arises in real time: “Issues always arrive. I proactively try to break systems before going live, catching issues early to ensure smooth operations later. This leads to stellar performance for modernizing complex systems.”
He adds: “Today, the benchmark is higher: we now measure services by their public value. We prioritize transparency, data integrity, auditability, accessibility, and long-term return.
“Historically, what mattered with operations in the public sector is whether or not the deliverables were given on time, and if they were within budget. Now we can fulfil those higher expectations.”
Bhaisaheb’s work contributes directly to this shift, especially with his significant influence in formalizing governance within transformation programs. He makes sure to prioritize both compliance and speed, aligning standards with discipline and project management. This type of hybridization has become known in other states as well.
Bhaisaheb acknowledges this, saying: “Some of the projects I work with are now the benchmarks for the other state agencies; other state agencies even quote the projects or the system that the agency is using. It's called a proven licensing approach for state clients. So I think that's something I'm really proud of. And as I said, the nonprofit work in the nonprofit area; nonprofit clients that I've done that have helped a lot of children who are suffering from cancer and a lot of other patients.”
Examples include Bhaisaheb's transformative data model initiative, which scaled a major nonprofit's reach by nearly 600%, expanding a national organization's constituent data from 14 million to 82 million profiles. This initiative established a new benchmark for how national NGOs leverage Data Cloud to sustain life-saving missions through predictive constituent engagement.
Bhaisaheb serves in a high-level leadership capacity, responsible for interviewing and selecting the cross-functional teams he leads. This involves vetting senior technical architects, developers, and business analysts to ensure the team composition matches the extreme technical demands of Salesforce’s most high-profile clients.
Beyond project execution, Bhaisaheb has established a specialized CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) process using Data Kits for complex cloud environments. This framework has streamlined deployment cycles, reducing system downtime during critical transformations and providing a repeatable technical blueprint for the broader engineering community.
However, even after modernization, fragmentation can happen. Bhaisaheb’s approach ensures this doesn’t undermine the benefits of modernization by planning coordinated oversight at all times.
He outlines his mindset, saying: “Any projects or engagements that I do, I first work on the return on investment and answer why? Why are we doing this project? Who is it going to help?”
Bhaisaheb’s influence on industry standards also involves security and compliance posture. In fact, it’s a critical element. More and more institutions and agencies nowadays face heightened cybersecurity requirements from inception, and modernization programs need to prioritize it as a core element rather than treating it as an afterthought.
He reveals: “One should align system design with audit frameworks and secure cloud implementation standards, reinforcing strengthened regulatory integrity through digital transformation. This positions modernization as a foundational risk-mitigation strategy rather than an optional innovation.”
His peers definitely took notice. Cherri Schmidt, a director of the Substance Abuse Disorder and Professional Licensing Compliance, says: “Ammar's ability to lead his team is reflected in the success of his projects. His ability to lead his team is reflected in the success of his projects. In my years of working with Ammar, I learned much from him. He is dedicated to turning out a quality project while being generous with his co-workers.”
Rita Abdeladim, a Senior Project Manager at Abdeladim and Associates, concurs: “I had the pleasure of working with them over the past few years. His ability to successfully manage large-scale project programs with a multitude of stakeholders is attributed to his strong Project Management expertise, calm disposition, and drive for providing quality and excellence.”
Overall, Bhaisaheb has played a crucial role in strategic program leadership, driving transformative change in complex public systems. His philosophy drove the development of outcome-driven platforms and made them more feasible, especially in an environment that now requires more than just technical expertise. Structured governance, alignment, resilience, and measurable ROI are musts that have been delivered, especially with legacy systems that needed to deliver substantial economic returns.
Bhaisaheb is committed to modernizing as a success, which he attributes to his ongoing fascination with technology: “The reason I am in this profession right now is that I have been into technology since my college years, since we had our first phone. I was into technology and wanted to be part of it, where I could help implement new technology, help clients, help people use technology better, and save time. So that's the whole purpose of me doing this work.”
He orients himself around the passion that enabled him to harness and hone his skills: “I am really proud of making a difference. In any projects or engagements I take on, I first focus on return on investment and ask why. Why are we doing this project? Who is it going to help?”
As a result, Bhaisaheb’s influence extends beyond the current projects. His broader contribution is evident in his redefinition of success in public-sector modernization. Implementation milestones are no longer the sole measure of success; public value, transparency, and efficiency are. His philosophy has helped others see what a governance model in which technology serves as an enabler of accountability and trust looks like.
