Pooja Khatri has worked for Colt in India for 20 years

Colt Technology Services teams consist of over 5,000 people located around the world, working together to deliver a best-in-class experience between Europe, Asia and North America over a common platform and technology.

Senior Consultant in India Pooja (Thakur) Khatri has worked with the company for almost 20 years.

Learn more about Pooja's successful career with Colt, and how she has continually harnessed her self-confidence to create a rewarding and enjoyable career with this top employer for women.

A customer focused professional

Pooja is a customer focused and service oriented professional with over 21 years of global experience across telecoms, IT and Information Technology Enabled Services industries. Pooja has worked in pre-sales and consulting, Request for Proposal/bid support, transition management, service delivery and Information Technology Infrastructure Library service processes. She has a high level of experience in network solution designing and product development for global businesses, while delivering tangible business results, as well as product management and marketing support. Alongside this, Pooja has a depth of management experience in direct customer engagement, stakeholder management and consulting.

Importance of trust and self-confidence

Pooja explains that she has so much respect for her mother, and that she is an inspiration.

"My mother always laid immense emphasis on education and independence when we were growing up. She taught me about trust and self-confidence and I completely owe to her the fact that I am in a career that I enjoy," says Pooja. "Because of the special bond that I share with my mother, a part of me always wanted a daughter."

Embarking on a rewarding career while having a family

Pooja met her husband while she was at university. After they got married, she completed the entrance exam for a very prestigious postgraduate program, one of the best in India.

"It was an extremely big achievement for me. However, the issue was that we were considering starting a family and the program would be six to nine pm every weekday evening for the next three years, which didn’t lend itself to having young children. I turned it down," explains Pooja.

"However, the very first moment I held my first son in my arms, I knew I’d made the right decision. I’m so grateful I have such brilliant, beautiful sons. And even though I didn’t do that postgraduate, I’ve still had an incredible career. Indeed, certain decisions are more important at certain phases of life."

An extensive and successful career with Colt

Pooja has enjoyed a wide and varying career with Colt Technology Services. She began her career with the company as a Colt Specialist in the Design Centre in Gurgaon India from 2004 to 2007. Here, Pooja designed non-standard solutions for managed network bids, including requirements gathering from customers and support solution transition and early-life operations.

Following this role, Pooja became a Colt Consultant in the Design Centre, Gurgaon, India, during the course of 2008. This saw Pooja convert exceptions and variations into high level solution designs and collate design costs, assess impact and secure sign-off from delivery and operations teams, and support solution transition, on-boarding into tools and early-life operations. Pooja also supported the setup of a test lab in India for in-house testing of non-standard networking solutions.

Following this, Pooja worked as a Colt Manager, Solutions Design (Networks and Unified Comms), in Gurgaon, India, from 2009 to 2013. Pooja was responsible for end-to-end solution designing of managed networks and Unified Communications solutions across the entire EU region. She ensured that the team designs were state-of-the-art, innovative and cost-effective solutions were subsequently, successfully transitioned and delivered on an on-going basis. She contributed to developing and rolling out Colt Solution Lifecycle within the Solutions Design team, and gained experience of working in matrix reporting structure and with senior management team in India and Europe.

Pooja then became the Colt Lead Consultant, Service Acceptance Manager in Gurgaon India from 2013 to 2014. Pooja worked closely with Solution Owner and Service Designers to ensure that service and operational acceptance criteria were clearly applied. Pooja provided timely and effective reporting and general communication to operational and management stakeholders, summarized all risks and issues being managed and mitigation plan, and shared lessons learned and provided improvement feedback with all other key stakeholders.

Providing a safe and secure working environment

From 2019 to 2022, Pooja had the role of Colt's Presiding Officer, Internal Committee (POSH). This was an additional role that Colt India management had entrusted her with.

Pooja's current role of Colt Senior Consultant, Network Engineering is one that she has held since 2014.

Pooja is a member of the engineering leadership team and is an effective communicator with stakeholder management. She supports revenue generation with simple, cost-effective and high quality customized network solutions, involving the latest technologies focused on high bandwidth, software defined services, capital markets and cloud connectivity.