About

I've spent ten years being the person who made the spreadsheet.Now I teach the craft underneath it β€” the tools, the frameworks, and the AI workflows on top.

Darshi Ajjamada
Currently
  • πŸ“ Toronto, Canada
  • 🎬 Recording Fridays
  • πŸ’Œ Reading DMs on weekends

The short version: I'm a project manager. I've run programs at TD Bank, TELUS Health, on EdTech contracts, and at IBM β€” built PMOs from scratch, delivered 60+ enterprise implementations, written the stage-gate playbooks, taken SOC 2 from zero to certified. More recently, I've been integrating AI into the way I plan, write, and track work. Not the β€œAI for everything” version β€” the specific, narrow places where it actually helps.

Then people started asking me how I did it. So I started recording.

I'm not a thought leader. I'm not an AI influencer. I'm a working PM, and what I publish is what I actually use on the job: the templates, the playbooks, the goal-setting structures, the frameworks that survive turnover β€” and the AI workflows that extend all of it. AI is a prominent thread. It's not the only thread. If you're the person on your team who suspects there's a better way β€” this is probably for you.

The path here

Ten years, six stops

2009 β€” 2015 Β· Bangalore

01The mainframe years

I started as a mainframe developer, writing COBOL for banks at a services firm in Bangalore. That stretch taught me the technical foundations β€” SDLC, change windows, dependencies, what a stable release actually looks like. I liked shipping software. I didn't love the distance between the people building it and the people using it. I kept ending up in the meetings where that distance got sorted out, and I realised I liked those more.

2015 β€” 2018 Β· IBM Β· Johannesburg

02Becoming a PM, officially

I moved to Johannesburg with IBM to run integrations for a telco. First time carrying a schedule, a budget, and a room of people. First time watching a project miss its date for reasons nobody could predict. Learned to write things down.

2018 β€” 2022 Β· TD Bank Β· Toronto

03Sixty COTS implementations

Four years at TD Bank in Toronto, running 60+ COTS implementations across retail and commercial banking. This is where I learned what enterprise delivery actually means: the 9th migration is where the real problems show up, and the playbook has to survive turnover.

2022 β€” 2023 Β· TELUS Health

04Writing the PMO from scratch

Led the first GCP migration at TELUS Health. There was no PMO framework β€” so I wrote one. Stage gates, risk taxonomy, status cadence. That document is still in use.

2023 β€” 2024 Β· EdTech contract

05SOC 2 in six months

Joined an EdTech company as Head of Delivery on contract. We took SOC 2 Type 1 from zero to certified in six months. Also shipped a cloud migration three months ahead. Startups move differently β€” fewer cycles to get alignment, higher tolerance for 'let's try it'.

2024 β€” now Β· darshi.solutions

06Teaching what I actually do

I started integrating AI into my own workflows for a year before I said anything about it. Then I realised most PMs I talked to were either avoiding it or using it wrong. The YouTube channel started as a way to share the specific prompts that were working. Turns out a lot of people wanted them.

Receipts

A few numbers, told as stories

60+
COTS implementations
TD Bank

Retail and commercial banking. Each one taught me something about what breaks at scale.

βˆ’35%
Status meeting time
EdTech contract

Over eight months. AI summaries, async updates, fewer meetings, better visibility.

6 mo.
SOC 2 Type 1
EdTech contract

From zero to certified. The shortest path isn't documented β€” so I documented it.

3 mo.
Early on cloud migration
EdTech contract

Migration delivered three months ahead. The AI-drafted runbook took three hours.

Certifications
  • PMP β€” Project Management Institute
  • Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) β€” Scrum Alliance
  • Microsoft Azure Fundamentals
Education
Bachelor of Engineering