What we talked about
Sravanthi Gondi is a PeopleSoft Finance Consultant at Saicon with nearly two decades of ERP experience spanning PeopleSoft Financials, HRMS, and Oracle Cloud. She currently serves as Finance Deputy Lead for the Cardinal Production Support Project at the Commonwealth of Virginia, overseeing the entire finance system while leading a major PeopleSoft upgrade in parallel.
Show notes
Sravanthi Gondi started her IT career in 2007 with no computer science degree and no prior coding knowledge, and she spent a year of sleepless nights teaching herself to code from scratch after landing a job at Oracle India. Nearly two decades later, she is managing the finance systems for an entire US state government while simultaneously leading a major ERP upgrade.
What we covered
- Breaking into IT without a computer science background required Gondi to self-teach everything. After facing what she describes as “several failures,” she secured an offer from Oracle and spent her first year learning to code from zero. Within that year she was building production systems.
- At Accenture, the career-defining moment came when she was named security automation lead for a statewide HCM implementation with over 100,000 users. Manually assigning roles at that scale was impossible, so she led an automation of role assignments through single sign-on, a project she describes as requiring extensive rehearsals, sleepless nights, and close coordination across teams to monitor each automation run.
- She draws a hard line between PeopleSoft and Oracle Cloud consulting: in PeopleSoft, “we were builders” who wrote custom PeopleCode for everything; in Oracle Cloud, “you are a configurator.” The mental shift is not about learning new screens, it is about unlearning the instinct to customize, and instead guiding clients toward industry-standard configurations.
- On integrations, where she says things most often go wrong, Gondi points to data format mismatches as the root cause of most failures. When System A sends data in a format System B does not expect, the entire chain breaks. She experienced this directly during Okta integrations, where misaligned data mapping caused authentication failures and locked users out of the system.
- Her view on AI in ERP consulting is specific and practical: she describes a scenario where AI analyzes a new PeopleSoft image after an upgrade and identifies exactly which of 500 custom test scripts need retrofitting, turning a month-long task into a single day. “AI won’t replace the consultant,” she said, “but the consultant using AI will be 10 times more valuable.”
- She arrived in the US seven months pregnant, without family support for the decision, and her husband gave up his job to accompany her. After two to three years of difficulty, they settled, and she describes the pride she feels in having taken that step, even given how hard it was. Her core advice to anyone navigating a difficult transition: “Never get comfortable.”
About Sravanthi
Sravanthi Gondi is a PeopleSoft Finance Consultant at Saicon with nearly 19 years of ERP experience across PeopleSoft Financials, HRMS, and Oracle Cloud. She currently serves as Finance Deputy Lead for the Cardinal Production Support Project at the Commonwealth of Virginia.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sravanthi-gondi-15865317
- Website: https://www.saicon.com
Episode 151 of the PreVetted Podcast.